In Modernist literature, much like painting, there is experimentation with form: narration style, tone and plot line. Instead of having Kurtz tell his story, or Marlow recite the tale of his journey; the actual narrator in the Heart of Darkness is an unknown passenger on the Nellie. Verisimilitude becomes of much importance when characters are not well defined. Unlike the renaissance period, Modernism spawned literature that questioned the existence of absolute truth; perfectly suiting this novella as through language power can be gained, yet most truths and realities can be seen to be lost in the “haze”. Language within the land of the “brutes” acts as an extremely powerful tool to aggrandize civilization above the “pilgrims”, and put Kurtz in possession of great power: “must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity…By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded” In response to this, Marlow admits, “it gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence”.
I feel bad, but I can’t do anything about it. I guess I’m not feeling much of anything. Identify and explain, using concepts from the text, at least one example of an obstacle to communicating emotions in the situation. We may not have total control over what we feel, but usually we can exert some control. Furthermore, we can exercise substantial control over how we do or don’t express our feelings and to whom we express them.
The question arises in any novel whether the narration may be trusted or whether we should rely on our own judgement. In both The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby the narrators could be described as unreliable but does this mean they are unable to be trusted or is unreliability merely a human trait used by Salinger and Fitzgerald to strengthen our empathy for the character? Both Salinger’s, and Fitzgerald’s novels fall prey to unreliable narration due to their structure. In both novels there is a retrospective account of events. Holden Cauldfield, begins the novel with the statement “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas.” Nick Carraway begins with “when I came back from the east last fall”.
Imagery – The use of descriptions to make something deeper creates mental images. Irony: * Dramatic: the reader knows more than the characters. * Verbal: what the person says is different from what he actually means and the tone of voice indicates the contrast. * Situational: what happens is the opposite of what people expect. Logos – A logic argument that persuades the reader by reason; the logic used to support an argument.
The first is the proclivity to ignore the physicality of the voice in order to extract its significance or the meaning of its words. To ignore the physicality of the voice, however, is to miss its entire purpose as a mysterious, inexplicable presence. The second tendency is the tendency to focus on the materiality or body of the voice while ignoring its significance and insistence. Both of these tendencies focus of one side of the duality of the voice and fail to appreciate it as a whole, thereby obscuring it (Dolar). In Memento Mori, it is the object voice and the two tendencies that attempt to understand it that drive the plot forward and eventually move the novel to climax.
The use of first person narration is less accurate because the narrator’s emotions affect the plot. Depending on a person’s previous history, background, and culture, it is natural for two individuals to interpret the same situation differently. Whereas one person may have a positive outlook on the situation, the same person may have a negative perspective. In first person narration, the narrator, or person telling the story, is telling you his perspective of events, with little consideration to others’ interpretations. This leads the reader into understanding the storyline in compliance with the narrator’s beliefs.
The fear of losing agency is not an adequate reason to reject epiphenomenalism. Rather, the fact that so much of how humans behave seems to be attributed to their beliefs or desires, the emergence of psychology in explaining behaviour, and the lack of universal laws of causation, all contribute to undermine the strength of epiphenomenalism as a theory to explain the mind-body relationship. Beliefs and desires seem to be the reason why humans act in a certain way in certain situations. This type of behaviour is regarded as psychological and relates to an individual’s mind and behaviour. Psychologists, try to study an individual’s mind to determine the causes of their behaviour’s.
“In what Context do Emotion and Reason Conflict?” Knowledge can not only be gained by one way of knowing, because not only that answer would be biased, it may as well be not true, this simply is because there exist certain conditions in which one view or perspective of the case is not enough. Such situations are mostly decision making. Now the question is, whether an individual would choose a more reasonable choice that would benefit the most, or choose a more comfortable choice that is a satisfaction to the hearts content. Emotion and Reasoning are both considered as ways of knowing, however like any other ways of knowing they cannot exist alone and therefore they do have flaws. These flaws are usually associated with the fact that they are unable to fulfil the need to gain the answer since they may be biased, however even when these two ways of knowing are put together, they may contradict each other, or do not share the same view on the same exact case, this is what is considered as the conflict.
Different approaches, or theories are used when analyzing any given literary work. Of the many approaches to critique, two stand out on either end of the spectrum: New Criticism and Reader-Response Criticism. On one hand, you have the critic looking solely on the text, having it act as a self-contained piece of work. On the other, the reader’s experience of the text is the sole focus of the criticism. Admittedly, the reference to Stotch’s The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs was purely for shock value, and alas, is not a real piece of literature.
When considering his or her writing, society takes into account the author’s personality, taste, and passions. The author’s failing are also used to justify the failing of their work even though one rarely has anything to do with the other. Barthes argues that the “theological” (the message of the “Author”) meaning cannot be found in a single line of text. He believes that a culmination of cultures and ideas are laced together to form a multi-dimensional space. He goes on to further state that once the Author is identified with the work, a critic needs only to look at the Author to find the “meaning” behind the work.