Analysis#7

Analysis #7

Human as an object!

Said presents the idea by analyzing the relationships between East and West during the nineteenth and twentieth century by giving the example of the way European dominates Easterners.   According to Edward W. Said’s Orientalism noted that, “made Oriental.  There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotion, presence, or history.  He spoke for and represented her” (1870).   Asian or Middle Eastern was very common in the 19th Century in Europe and was a driving force behind many works of European art. 

J.A.D. Ingres, Grande Odalisque.  A woman in the picture is showing her ideal body.  She has a well- proportioned body.  At that time, people thought a woman body should be like the women in the picture.

Jean-Leon Gerome, Slave Market.  European superiority – since Europeans had banned slavery before the USA.  A woman slave is sold as an object in the market.  She needs to show her body in front of male gaze.

What happens when women become an object?  A woman is commodity.  A nude woman displays for the consuming men European.  Those two pictures as I show are Academic style.  The pictures look real, but idealize at nineteen century.  The women are an exotic “Oriental” object display for the consuming male gaze which is idealizes body part to feed superior.  The gaze confers power according to gender.  The presumed viewer is a heterosexual.  At that time, a big issue came to rise; it was over how women are portrayed in the society.  Many people seem to think that women are negatively portrayed in the society, and that leads towards negative effects on how women are treated. 

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

Analysis#6

Analysis #6

Fix and firm

          Feminism is the belief in social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.  They have been held back and their opportunities taken away from them because of the fact that they were women.  Theory portrays women’s liberation through episodes that illustrate the historical record of male domination.   Viewers are asked to consider the aggressive nature of looking, especially the aggressive nature of male gaze and its relation to violence against women.  According to Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight noted that,

“With the advent of movie and television, the rules for femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual images.  As a result, femininity itself has come to be largely a matter of constructing, in the manner described by Erving Goffman, the appropriate surface presentation of the self.  We are no longer given verbal descriptions or exemplars of what a lady is or of what femininity consists.  Rather, we learn the rules directly through bodily discourse: Through images that tell us what clothes, body shape, facial expression, movements, and behavior are required.” (2244)

These pervasive ads influence kids to demand poor food choice, to think drinking is cool, and sex is a recreational activity and that anorexia is fashionable. 

          Sky vodka ad relates to sex

Male dominates fancy high job and female is getting tan at home as social history. 

  

At the same time, the advertiser cannot say in word that being skinnier will make you sexier, but the image deliberately links “Virginia Slims” and women’s body in a visual appeal to unconscious desire.  At that time, this advertisement made women believed that smoking a cigarette would make them skinnier, and make them healthy and powerful.  Although the society has changed, women are still dominated by men.  They are still an object, and men have history as subject.  They are still submitted to men, and they call for male’s attention.

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

Group presentation

Presentation Postmodernism and Post structuralism

          Our group has seven people, but only six people give six parts of presentation because Alex Doronin is a special person who begins a discussion, introduces each new section, and closed the presentation.  My presentation was on Modernism, and my part was Lyotard.  I searched information about Lyotard’s modernism theory on several websites and some pictures.  After that, I made power point and send it to Michaela who collected our PowerPoint and put in the same file. Actually, our group had to present on April 26, but we had short time, so we will continue to present our project next week. 

 I was the first person who gave a presentation.  I really did not like to speak in front of people, so giving presentation was the hardest part for me. On the teddy bear picture give me a sense of signifier and signify.  Food produces have shape of animal, but they are not animal.  I could not speak English very well, and my pronunciation was very bad.  I was not confident.  I think I am a lucky person because members in my group are so kind and friendly.  After I finished giving a presentation, I felt so sorry for my group because I was too nervous.  However, people in my group were not angry at me, but also gave me courage. 

Analysis#5

Analysis #5

Top to Bottom

Post modernism is an artistic and literary movement that quite obviously rejected the previous modernism movement in an attempt to analyse and reorganize the existing modes of art practice.  Post modern caused a great change among popular style and challenged the term modernism.  The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard focused on the statement “The post-, in the term ‘postmodernist’ is in this case to be understood in the sense of a simple succession, of a diachrony of periods, each of them clearly identifiable.  Something like a conversion, a new direction after the previous one” (1466).  People escaped the complexity to simpleness.  In other word, they got bored of modernism and changed their idea to Postmodernisn.  Many art theories are influenced be postmodernism such as minimalist, surrealism, and expressionism. 

            Frank Stella, Untitled.  What do you see in this picture?

On Frank Stella’s minimalist painting is about line shape textual, and color.  The painting does not tell a story, or even feeling.  The painting is based on fact that only what can be seen.  There is there.  It is really an object.  "What you see is what you get."

                        Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  What is that?

This piece of art was designed as a minimal sculpture sit below ground and covered with the names of men and women who died during the war.  It has been very controversial.  This is an emotional piece, but she did not express her mood.  It is contemporary public art work, and it is an abstract geometric form of a single natural material.

            Both pieces of art generated a good deal of controversy and discussion about its ideological and artistic merit.  Moreover, both artists skillful combination of found and created objects make their emotion assemblage visual summation of the deeply embedded social ills that were redressed during the time period.   


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

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.