reflection#10

Reflection #10

The Mental Labor Problem

Artists are people who are the most difficult to understand their mind, and their works are also hard to understand.  General people often cannot think in the same way as artists can.  The artists have an extensive imagination that people cannot approach.  Thus, artists are a small group of people in the society.  They use their brain and imagination in their career to unseal the world with their ability on their way in art.  I would like to include literature.  The readers cannot assume the writer’s work by reading only one time and without reading introduction because people have had different experiences.  They will base on their first feeling, when they read a story.  The artists do not get big money as a business man does because in the past, people did not have a company to support them.  On the other hand, the company allots work into department.  Artists are helped by marketing.  They only have to create a wonderful job.  My friend is the one who as artistic feeling.  She can see everything around her has a meaningful.  When I went to restaurant to have dinner with her, the waiter served us a big piece of steak on a hot tray.  She said that, “Look at smoke.  It is wonderful.  Smoke is floating in the air; give me a feeling of emptiness.  The smoke can go every way.  It is free”.  I could not get into her feeling many times, and it is so hard to understand her.  On the other hand, this kind of people more understands the world than general people. 

Analysis#4

Analysis #4

Waiting for Lefty: Waiting for hope

          How do people assess a human’s worth? Do they measure human value on the base of intelligence, richness, beauty, an authority figure, or power?  In Clifford Odet’s time, social class is economic arrangements of groups in society.  People are separated into two classes which are capitalist and working class.  Waiting for Lefty is about cab drivers who want to strike for better lives.  The major solution to the problem is unionization which is where the workers in specific traders would bond together and receive, among other benefits, standardized wages, and greater job security.  The writer deals with American tragedy which is rooted in American history and social movements.  He focuses on social class, especially on working class.  He elaborately explains the differences between capitalist who run the company on worker’s suffering, and working class people who endure pain to work for their duty and survival. 

          The writer imitates a real world situation to a small community of the cab driver.  Throughout Waiting for Lefty, Odet shows effects of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel in The communist Manifesto.  It is noted that, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild- master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (P.657).  Unions are the only way for cab drivers to balance the power against big companies.  Besides unions, the big companies can continually drive down wage and create bitter competition among its employee.  The capitalists take advantage of their own people.  Edna, a character from the story, said “Your boss is marking sucker outta you boys every minute.  Yes, and suckers out of all the wives and the poor innocent kids who’ll grow up with crooked spines and sick bones” (P2096).  The working class people must sell their power in order to survive and the ruling class is dependent on them for production.  The cab drivers earn their livelihood be selling their power. 

          The main idea of the writer is society’s inequality between capitalist and working class.  The gap between two classes would just keep bigger and bigger.  The capitalist would be running the country, so they just keep “getting richer and richer while the working class people keep getting poorer.”  The lower class people have no way of getting richer because they are working for the rich capitalists.  The capitalists would rise or low their worker’s salary, and if they run the nation, they would make sure that the working class people got as little salary as possible.  Thus, the working class people would have to rebel against the capitalists in order to get their way or at least to be heard and to try to get more payment. 

Works cited

Lauter, Paul, and Richard Yarborough. The Heath Anthology of American Literature: concise Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Print.

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

Analysis#3

Analysis #3

Cultures and Experiences are Different.

How do people know a really feeling of an author without reading an introduction or biography?  Readers cannot really get into the writer’s feeling or attitude of his or her writing.  When the readers read a novel, the readers will escape from the real world and will be entertained by a story that the writer brings it from a part of their reality.  I sometimes see a word “From true story” written in front cover of the book.  I wondered that a story was really true.  A reason that made I chose Literature major because I love to read Thai novel for entertaining myself.  I think I could enjoy my major, but I was wrong.  I could not only read a novel for entertaining, but I also needed to know such as subject matter and work of history.  I have few basic knowledge of literature because I graduated from high school in Thailand, and my school’s teaching system and American’s teaching system are totally different, but I had an opportunity to take general education at College.  The problem I met when I read a novel is differences between  my culture and a writer culture, and I have less experience in the wide world.

First of all, culture difference is the main problem.  Before I took an English class, I like reading a novel the most.  I feel like I was in the fancy world, escaped a problem for a while, and stayed with my imagination, but that was a kind of reading for joy.  After I started taking English class, my thought was changed.  A novel is more than a joy, but there is a story hide behind the story such as knowledge, a feeling, and culture, and I also can travel a place by place by reading thru a novel.  At the same time, when I deeply read a novel, I learned a theme, symbol, and meaning in a novel.  I barely understood the meaning of them.  For example, Thai people believe that orange means development or gold, but American people believe orange means Energy, balance, and enthusiasm.  Thai writer’s target is also different from American writer.  Thai writers head for the audients; they write what the readers want to read.  Although the story talks about history, the writer must include hero and heroine, and the most important thing is at the end of the story ends with happy ending.  On the other hand, American writers write on their own target or their own need.  The reader can stand with the hero death, but Thai people cannot.  The reader will ban the writer.

 Second, I have less experience in the wide world.  I cannot really understand what the writers try to tell me.  For example, when I was fourteen years old, I addicted reading a drama.  At that time, I did not understand why the writer set all characters met many problems in the same time.  Did that situation really happen to the people?  Only one cue I thought was the writer made it up.  Regarding to Wolfgang Iser’s Interaction between Text and reader noted that, “An obvious and major difference between reading and all forms of social interaction is the fact that with reading there is no face to face situation.  A text cannot adapt itself to each reader it comes into contact with.  The part near dyadic interaction can ask each other question in order to ascertain how far their images have bridged the gap of the inexperiencebility of one another experience. (1527)” When I was nineteen years old, I had an opportunity to study in the USA.  I brought that book with me, but I just opened to read it three years later after I spent my life alone in the USA.  The first time I reread a book, I though the story was really true.  It was a life and reality.

People come from a different place and a different society may have a different experience.  Although people are in the same society, they may not have the same situation.  People read a text to enlarge their knowledge to the situation that they never meet.  I believe that nothing is impossible to happen in the world, but it is depended on myself that I will overlook or I cannot get into.
Work cite
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

reflection#9

Reflection #9

Marxist: Capitalist and worker

What make people in the society different?  I think the thing that makes people different is money which is the most important variable.  The society is inequality between the capitalists and working class.  Social classes are economic arrangement of groups in society.  Marx and Engels noted that, “On the ‘material conditions of life’ and the economic structure of society,’ Marx and Engels are sharp and compelling; on the subject of the creative and critical consciousness of persons and cultures, they falter” (650).  People are separate into two classes which are capitalists and working class.  They are placed in one of these class based on their wealth.  The gap between the capitalists and working class would just keep getting bigger and bigger.  The capitalists would be running the country, so they just getting richer and richer while the working class people keep getting poorer.  The working class people have no opportunity of getting richer because they all work for the rich capitalists.  Work is scary, wage is low, and the worker is resented, resisted, and repressed by the capitalists.  Marxist represents ideology of class society.  People each class relates to each other by reproduction.  Labor is the source of value.  The working class people must sell their labor in order to survive with exchanging of money.  Moreover, the capitalists are dependent on working class for production.  For the capitalists, it they are wealthy, they will more than likely have more power, and if you are very wealthy, you will have even more power. 

reflection#8

Reflection #8

“Why write”

I always wonder why we write.  I am not a person who good in writing, so I usually think about a person who can write a foot thick of book. How long they are taking to write?  What they are writing about?  Should I say they write about themselves or the situation they meet? 

First of all, how do we know about history?  People wanted to keep an important situations or places by writing and sent a message to the next generation.  People in the present world learn history via the letter from the people who were closed to the king or the people who were in the situations, and they recorded all the situations to be collateral evidence.  I am taking Middle age Literature which most of exquisite poems talk about long history of a king or a country.  At the same time, novelists write a story to entertain readers or announce satiric story or situation thru all the representative characters in their works of art.  I think all the situations in a novel, a play, and a drama makes from real life, but it is depend on which part of people life and which society they are.  On the other hand, the story can be made from an author’s imagination, but slightly based on real world.  According to Jean-Paul Sartre’s why write noted that, “But if ourselves produce the rules of production, the measures, the criteria, and if our creative drive comes from the very depths of our heart, then we never find anything but ourselves in our work” (P. 1200).  I always some readers slip off words “That’s possible”.  I think nothing can be impossible.  Everything can happen to other, but it may not happen to us.

Analysis#2

The Mulberry tree by Vincent Van Gogh : Formalism and Structuralism Painting

It is painted on canvas with an oil color. This painting was so important to van Gogh that he wrote about it three times in letters to his brother and sister, commenting that he believed it was the best of his mulberry tree paintings.  I have ever seen this art of work at Norton Simon Museum.  This painting caught my eyes becasue it attracted me very much.  The tree stands alond at the middle of a field with coil and curl relieves.  It gave me a feeling of chaos in the midst of confusion because the color of the painting was melancholy.  When I stepped back and shallow watched the picture, I felt relaxed, and I felt like I was watching the tree in the field.  However, when I saw the picture closely, I frowned, and it made me feel dazzled.

Van Gogh’s painting is formalism and structuralism because he used the principles of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork Vincent's best of this series showed his expressive style and bold color choices, which were always imaginative but equally inspired.  The elements included color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content.  This painting is at once more somber and spiritual in mood.  Elements in the picture were so harmonious very well.  There were several differences of relieves.  A relief on the tree was coil and curl.  He wanted to express his feeling.  At the same time, he may also used of structuralism because the artist used his pieces of art to communicate, to fight against, or to express their feeling thru the hidden meaning in the picture itself.  The picture’s meaning may effect to political in his society at that time.  I think he tried to tell the audient that he was violently upset in mind, but he had to be in the world of tremendous changes.   

Marcel Duchamp's fountain; Ready made : porcelain urinal
 Is it fountain?

I found the good example of Structuralism which is Marcel Duchamp’s fountain.  He used of object to inform the idea behind the art.  I think Structuralism is more difficult to understand than Formalism.  A sculpture which is a man toilet and a name which is a stream of water that is forced up to the air do not associate with each other. 

reflection#7

Reflection #7

The Interpretation of dreams:  The Oedipus Complex

According to Sigmund Freud’s the Oedipus complex noted that “If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified” (816).  Oedipus Hamlet, who is the son, wants to kill his own father to get his own.  The relationship between a son and a mother is deeply connected by blood lineage.  They both deeply tie of feeling since the mother knows that she has a baby.  I have had an experience when I was young.  I did not like the feeling when my father or my brother hugged my mother at all.  I thought my mother was only mine.  When I was offended by my father, I would cry.  I think it is about truly deeply feeling relationship between a mother and a child.  The child does not follow a custom because he or she cannot decide the situation and lack of experience.  The child wants to be the only one of his or her mother.  The idea of Freud is in the lines with the signification of the Phallus by Lacan.  The child wants to be the phallus for the mother.  In my opinion, I try not to be impolite, but a human has only one phallus.  Thus, the child wants to be only one or number one for the mother. 

Reflection#6

What is the meaning of a sign?

I drove a car on a main road at night in Thailand.  I saw a car at the corner was going to U turn.   Then I gave a winking sign because I would not stop for him.  He stopped for me.  On the other hand, when I got an opportunity to learn a new world, I drove a car on a main road at night in the USA two years later.  In the same situation, the car at a winding course fast made a U turn.  I stepped on a break without delay.  I learned that people in different country have a different understanding of sign.  The meaning of the sign depends on the period of time and part of the world, but it is in the same category.  In my understanding, sign is something in common that gives the meaning to people in the society have the same sense of understanding.  According to Bakhtin’s theory that language is never unity, sign is similar to the language.  It is flexible and depended on people’s idea in that society.  Some signs have the history background to be told by generation to generation such as religion sign.  Moreover, sign can be created by a small group of people to use in a specific point of view.  I have ever joined in the world scout.  Before I went there, I learn a sign of roaming about a forest.  I think if I had not participated in this camp, I would have had this kind of knowledge.