That Crazy Brits, I'm Telling You

Well, since personally I'm annoyed with the majority of feminists, I'm taking the post-colonial take on this here piece of literature. And question! Are these handy-dandy chapters the only outside sources that we can use to support our "lens"?

For my essay, I think that I am going to be focusing on how after a group of people have been colonized, they suffer an identity crisis. Bressler questions "To what culture does this person belong?". With the memory of the culture of their own people, this introduction of a new Western culture which claims that everything that they held dear is incorrect. And since "each...uniquely blends his or her own two cultures", everyone within the community belongs to their own separate "culture", if you will. Thus, the colonized person has “two distinct views of the world” and they feel abandoned by both.

In this lovely novel, Okonkwo suffered from this divided identity. After he ran away to his mother's land, he returned to his people several years later. But what he returned to was not the same land that he had left. After those pesky white men entered the Ibo culture, they completely overthrew their cultural-from their religion to their government and schools-view of the world and forced the Ibo people to conform to these beliefs. Okonkwo was stanchly against the forced reformation of his people and called for others to fight against. But he was alone. These “psychosocial refugees”, as Bressler names them, had accepted the changes, even going as far as Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, who not only changed his name to Issac (the son of the leader of Israel in the Bible) but he accepted Christianity fully and even went so far as to want to be a teacher who would spread and promote the views of the white man. Okonkwo felt so alone and abandoned by his people and so alginated against by the white man that there was no way out other than to take his own life.

Poor John, Stuck in this Technopoly

“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.” As Postman points out in chapter three of his book, a Technopoly makes normal, accepted things taboo. In Brave New World, much the same happens. John, the “savage” among all of the “civilized”, longs for union and relationship; he has a religion, a mother, and most rare, a sense of identity and cannot completely understand why these are bad things. In the new world that Bernard has so led him to, he finds that he is completely alone. His ideas and ideals are seen as laughable, yet intriguing, especially to Hemholtz.

            Hemholtz is trying to find what he is missing. He is rethinking this Technopoly that everyone around him has so fed into, and looking to John to see his views on these taboo subjects- such as family, poetry, and the individual. What makes them so taboo isn’t what they are, but what is behind these ideas. To have a family, there must be value put upon a life; to have poetry, there must be deep thought and a search into the day to day to find something more, something beautiful; and to have an identity would mean that one was valued, special, and unique. None of that is acceptable in the Technopoly, and by “acceptable” I don’t mean that it is not allowed, but it is viewed as unthinkable. What good are feelings, thoughts, and relationships if the all efficient assembly line does not need it? Removing the thinking of humans, only the machine and formulas are needed. The machines knows better than the people and the machine is more efficient than the people, thus the machine is the only thing to be trusted. The new world only needed the machine, and not a thing else. 

All the Singularity Ladies, All the Singularity Ladies

And here we go.

When a large group of extremely intelligent people of the science realm were asked, "What does it mean the be human?" they had various responses.  Jim Gates, a physicist, claims that "We are conscious of more than our selves... We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?" Bernard finds himself asking similar questions; how does he fit into the Brave New World that he so lives in? Looking out onto the ocean (which is horribly lovely to those who buy into their society), Bernard says that "It makes me feel...as though I were more me, if you see what I mean, more on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body" (Huxley 90). And this is when we as readers take a sigh of relief, and enjoy the realization that we are unique; we might feel for poor Bernard, made to be part of a society built around the industrial line, so destined to feel alone. But we continue to rejoice in our world where the human spirit is what drives us...but for how long?
A new science, and I use the term "new" loosely here, is beginning to surface called "Singularity". This word is "borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time-for example, inside a black hole-at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply" (Grossman). So basically, it's combining the computer and the human. Kind of freaky, I'd say. But then again, with the technology of today, "there might conceivably come a moment when [computers] are capable of something comparable to human intelligence" (Grossman).
But what does that mean for the human? Does that make us just a passing life form on this earth? I think not. But then again, did our predcessors ever think that they were just a passing life form? Or that their technology of their day could ever be surpassed? (As can be seen from the wise words of Michael Flanders "If God had intended us to fly, He would have never given us railways!") 
What will happen if-when?-this occurs? Well, as usual, the future is nothing but a bunch of maybes. "Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity." 
Maybe this is just a scare, maybe we will look back on this in 50 years and laugh at how ridiculous it is. But, what we do know is that our technology today is on a fast route, and possibly, it might pass us up.

A Beast of an Article (heh..heh..pun)

The author of the article I so selected compares and contrasts the two Beautys and their responses to their designated Beast in the stories "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Tiger's Wife" and further goes on to discuss the opposing views of gender roles in these stories. While the Beauty of "Beauty and the Beast" is gentle, kind, wholesome, and altogether a passive character, the Beauty of "The Tiger's Wife" is all but the opposite; she is sarcastic, angry, sexual, and active. 

That all being said, let's get to some rhetorical analysis! The writer wrote this article to, as stated before, compare and contrast these vastly different roles of women in these stories. The author is calling the reader to consider what is a more valid portrayal of a woman and how that affects a man. The piece is directed to students and students can use this and apply it to other literary works and how the woman is portrayed there: if she passively follows the orders of a man or actively pursues her own future. The author uses text to support her point, which is that these two stories portray two very different versions of the female role.This thesis does raise some questions of what indeed should be the role of a woman in literature. It's really nothing too new or edgy, but a controversy nonetheless. 

The structure of this, all spare the introduction, follows the "rules" pretty closely. The introduction does not start with a hook, but instead just goes straight into the content of the article. I found this to be both difficult and helpful. It was difficult because frankly, it was difficult to care at all about what she was talking about. But on the other hand, this general theme of "lack-of-fluffy-writing", if you will, made the article much easier to read. Within this "cutting of fluff", the author also cut most of the fancy transitions that students are told to use. We are preached at that without these, our writing will be next to unbearable and choppy!...and that is not the case in this article at all. The article flows just fine without the all-holy transitions. And although written in a formal tone, this article does not cause a reader to pull up dictionary.com or hunt for a dictionary in print (that would be quite the hunt indeed...).  

This article, content wise, was rather repetitive. Although it was interesting to learn about a text I have never read, the comparisons and the contrasts were rather basic. Also, this article  followed the rules rather closely, it skipped out on "fluff" and just put what was needed, the meat, if you will, of the writing, which was much appreciated.