D-U-N!!!!!

The authors of A Valediction and Conjoined have polar opposite views on the essence of love, but similar ideas on how it is constructed. The figurative language in these poems, such as the imagery, serve to set the conflicting tones each author takes while at the same time giving the reader a similar picture of two people put together as one. On one hand, Donne finds the beauty in love while Minty stresses the unnatural state of marriage, but both describe it as a conjoined entity where two people are inexorably bound.
A Valediction relies on lighter tones and images to present love in a joyful tone while the imagery in Conjoined is dark and unnatural. Words like "joys", "airy", and "sublunary" give Donne's poem a sense of weightlessness, as if love had no burden as if on a different plane of existence. His focus is more in the soul of the lovers than their physical states, stating that "Our two souls, which are one." Instead of having a connection of the tangible kind, lovers have an ethereal connection the each other. By presenting love in this way, it is given a heavenly quality. However, Minty's poem Conjoined paints an entirely different view of love, or at least marriage. Words like "accident", "freaks", and "doomed" describe Minty's outlook on marriage, an unnatural tortured state of being . There is also no choice in the marriage Minty describes, with the two souls just being forced together. While the typical societal view of marriage much more closely resembles the descriptions of Donne, Minty doesn't even address the subject of love in marriage. Instead, Marriage is likened to a "two-headed calf" with "one body fighting to suck at its mother's teats." This twisted image exemplifies marriage as seen by Minty, two identities forced to live together and fight for what little identity there is for to be shared between the two of them. Each of her examples describe a physical connection between the anomalies, not the spiritual ones that are present in A Valediction. there is nothing but an outward appearance of constriction, which doesn't enter the spiritual essence of love. Two souls in one body causes a conflict in the being rather than opening up an opportunity for the souls to become one. Instead of the "airy" love, Minty describes the lovers movements as "heavy" which insinuates that it is a burden for the union to continue to take place, far from easy or simple. The torture of love in Minty's world conflicts almost everything that Donne had described, giving two very different descriptions of the composition of love.
Though these two authors differ in these many aspects, they show a similarity in how love comes to be. Both of the authors describe lovers as two beings becoming one entity. Donne refers to the lovers as a compass that move as the other hand moves, neither being completely free or independent from the other party. Minty refers to "Chang and Eng", a deformed double onion, and a "two-headed calf" as examples of the connectivity of husband and wife. Both of these poems relay love as a loss as a single identity in return for the creation of a new one that envelopes both parties. Neither has the ability to break away from their significant other, and both must live following the whims of the other half.Donne states, "If they be two, they are two so/ as stiff compasses are two;/ thy soul, thy fixt foot, makes no show/ to move, but doth, if th'other do." There is a lack of control if the lovers wanted to go their own way, but that isn't much of a consideration in A Valediction. However, while Donne's lovers must "obliquely run" Minty's are "fighting" instead. The obligations of love are welcomed in Donne's case, but dreaded in Minty's. Also, the object of separation, or at least the object of not being able to separate is addressed in both the poems. In A Valediction, Donne writes that, "when the other far doth roam,/ it [the other person] leans and harkens after it" while in Conjoined, the lovers, "cannot escape each other" even if they wanted to. On one hand, separation is a sad occurrence, and on the other it is an impossibility. Though the way love is viewed by each author is very different, their description of what it actually is similar.
Every simile Minty uses stresses the pain and monstrosity of conjoining two people, while the images in Donne's poem accentuates the beauty in it. Both poems define love as two different people forming into a single identity, an identity that is nearly impossible to split once it is formed. The author's views on this subject, however couldn't be more different. To Donne, Love is a happy connection of two souls, but to Minty the combination of souls is a crime against nature.

Criticism

Okay, I'm going to be honest here guys. I had a hard time following that article from start to finish for some reason, so if I seem off base in my response you know why. The author of this article seems to criticize Tim O'Brien for making his stories too centered while passing up an opportunity to educate people about the wide reaching effects of the Vietnam war. Neilson stated, "O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese." Because of this severe oversight, Neilson says that O'Brien's stories do not give any valid knowledge to the public about the controversy and, "largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." I had very much overlooked this in my first reading of the text, but I can now kind of see where Neilson is coming from. O'Brien sells his book as though it was a way to somehow capture the intangible nature of the war but refusing to try and capture the truth, but The Things They Carried is really a one man show. It is not free of the 'ethnocentric' views of the war making no better than any other war story out there. Though these are all good points that Neilson makes, I tend to disagree that The Things They Carried doesn't achieve O'Brien's purpose. Yes, he mostly ignores the plight of the Vietnamese people there, but he has no experience of that side of the war. O'Brien is writing what he knows of the war, what any typical American soldier would know of that war. To give much more to the Vietnamese would be contradictory to the rest of his novel. The only truth he knew was what he experienced and that is all he wrote. Neilson wants O'Brien's work to be something it's not- a history book that does outline all those "causes and consequences of the war."

The Things They're Talking about

The Things they carried is, for lack of a better designation, is a war story. Not the traditional kind where every brave loyalist is a hero and every cowardly foreigner is a bloodthirsty enemy just waiting to be vanquished by the Patriotic and Just warrior. “On occasion the war is like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.” (pg. 32)No, these soldiers are human. And because they are human and this story is portrayed as a true war story, any story told will have a lack of the warm fuzzy morals that we have come to expect from war stories. "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." Chapter 6, pg. 68. Ultimately we are not supposed to gleam any sort of meaning from Tim O’Brien’s stories, but we are supposed to find the lack of meaning in them. The collections of stories seem more like an episodic, fractured, diary. There is no continuous plots or consistent timeline (like when they talk about who will die later). "It's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true." Chapter 7, pg. 82. The truth is found in the emotions, not in the accuracy of the facts. There is no way for anyone who has not been in a war situation to understand the plain facts, when what truly happens is so far out of our normal reality. So, in order to complete our understanding, the reality needs to be augmented in a way that it is exempt from the influences of all those Heroic war stories and history books to broken down to the pure emotions.

Postmodernism

Here's what Postmodernism reminds me of: Big Daddy Modernism established all the rules, stereotypes, and facts and now sulky teenager Postmodernism refuses to conform to this standard. Everyone is an individual, forming their own perceptions that shape their personal reality. Postmodernism lashes out at the idea that any one ideal, or metanarrative, can define the infinite numbers of realities or truths. Therefore, by labeling people according to any sort of metanarative, you are marginalizing the many intricate narratives that actually compose that person. Basically, it is impossible to define anything by one truth because everyone has a different definition. There can be no absolute truths because there is no possible way to account for the different perceptions. Metanarratives like religion, stereotyping, and science, suffer in the Postmodern world. The only reality we have access to is our own, and we should not in any way try and impose our reality on anyone else. These Metanarratives try to establish a center in society, a uniform ideal to which all can conform, but Postmodernism claims we live in a centerless society where all the different narratives coexist as all the cultures mingle. Trying to find a single center is futile in our current society because everyone is influenced in radically different ways. As one quote I found said, "There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything," (Twyla Tharp). Postmodernism negates the central structure of the modern world, reducing its certralistic ideals into a mere fallacy. There are too many variables to be accounted for, and a society with a center means a society without individuals. As long as there are independant minds, there is no chance for a center to dominate nor is there any need for one to.

Maus

Hmmm... what to write about Maus? There is so much to be considered, even more so than a regular essay. Instead of trying to divine the purpose of comma placement, we all must try to gleam meaning from the art that make up the work. To focus on the word and quotes alone would be impractical since so much of the meaning lies in the comic itself. How am I going to quote a picture, though? a scanning printer may be required for this essay...
I find the pictures to be the most engaging point of this text. I will probably try to discern the true meaning in the symbolic nature of the novel , or whatnot. What part does nationality play in relation to religion, and even to identity? I'm not sure yet but I'm quite certain that it will come to me at 11:00 the eve before the essay is due. I also want to delve into the point of view of the storytelling in Maus. Because he cannot rely on any interpretation but his own, I think the author tried to emphasize that. It is not the be all and end all of Holocaust stories- just a single account retold again. The self aware nature of the novel also intrigued me. Why would you write a comic book about writing a comic book on the subject of the Holocaust? Of course, that round about reasoning seems to be a favorite of Post Modernism. I think that the visual aspect of the novel, like the architecture we looked at brings a new dimension to everything. You can look at one thing, see it the same way as everybody else, and still impose unique meaning on it. Words are a little more abstract- an apple can be imagined to look a thousand different ways- especially if it is left out for a while. When you see a picture, that's all there is to it. I will have to think on this some more.

Freedom of Thought

This society is pumping out more and more information to be consumed by the general population. Search engines make all answers a click away; even the deepest philosophical questions are addressed. Now, whenever any sort of information is needed, people can follow the discoveries of others to get their answers. This is a wonderful advancement for society, but it does have some minor side-effects. It’s amazing that there is so much access to the world around us. Societal bonds are broken down by the streams of internet processing, and people are more connected than ever before. It really is a virtual world within our own, destroying boundaries with the comfort of complete anonymity. However, this ease has the tendency to make people lazy or even lethargic in their thought processes. When all the answers are there waiting for you, why think about it for yourself? Instead of trying to explore and discover, Google it for fast and easy answers. What we have learned from Postmodernism, though, is that all retellings of a story are biased through the person telling it. So, when we rely on other’s accounts we are accepting their personal reality as a substitute for our own intuition. Our own thought process has been undermined by unconditionally accepting the biased truth of another. Perhaps Carr is right, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as ‘knowledge work’.” It may be streamlining the thought process, but it requires the internet surfer to abdicate any and all personal truths in favor of the truths accepted by strangers. In the future our thought process may be limited to only what we can find on Google.

What does it all mean?

So What Does It All Mean? This question was asked by the video we saw in class after it bombarded us with a slew of statistics meant to astonish us with our insignificance in this rapidly growing world. So much of the world is digitalized and the exponential population growth is contributing to the future users of technology. Our world today barely resembles that of any of the past societies, but is that really a bad thing. The technologies that we marvel at today are no more astonishing to us as electricity and paper was to past generations. We marvel at these technological strides because they are so much more advanced, but we forget to put earlier inventions into context. What we are doing is not at all fundamentally different than what our predecessors were achieving. We are just pushing the boundaries of known science in the same way that Thomas Edison was, and we will continue to do so. The mass of knowledge that is being generated by these technological advances are on the same exponential growth curve that they began with. Sure, The New York Times may give us more information in a day than early man every got in a life time- but the information has just become more accessible. The questions and answers were all there before, but not easy to get too or rely on. Besides, it seems half of the information is tabloid dribble anyway. Yes, there are more people, but we aren’t really doing anything new. We are all just living, reproducing, inventing, and dying. This is nothing new to the human race, although we are doing it on a larger scale. We are just doing the usual, even if the society seems to have ‘evolved’. So, what does it all mean? Nothing much.