‘Religious Language is meaningless’ Discuss Religious language is the communication of ideas, words and practices used to describe god. Some deem religious language meaningless as there is simply no way we can verify it whereas others see it from different perspective. This is due to many different forms of language linked with religion; cognitive and non cognitive, synthetic and analytical, univocal, equivocal and analogy. Synthetic, equivocal and non cognitive all would enforce the concept that religious language is subjective and that we are able to gain better knowledge of god from what he is not than what he is. Those supporting these points have been 19th century philosophers A.J Ayer and Antony Flew however their argument is apposed by those who believe it is meaningful as we simply do not know how to falsify the language.
At the end of WW2, both Huxley and Orwell, disillusioned and alarmed by what they saw within their own society, produced dark satires describing a dystopian vision of future possibilities. Although the two books are very different, they address many of the same issues in their contrasting ways: in particular, the suppression of the freedom of society in order to establish and maintain a totalitarian approach. This is achieved through manipulation of all external elements; propaganda and technology Furthermore, the manipulation of elements within each individual, sexually, physically and mentally. It is this manipulation that ultimately emphasizes the dystopian nature of both novels setting them at the forefront of modern literature. Set in a World where totalitarian rule is all encompassing, the significant difference between the two novels is the manner in which the dystopian quality of each corresponding world manifests: in Brave New World society is created and conditioned to be unquestioningly happy despite their lack of freedom, whereas in 1984 fear and censorship ensures voicing- even thinking- any discontent is impossible.
This idea rids humans of what empathy they are capable of and jeopardizes their reign on a stable emotional mind. Huxley uses foil, symbolism, and irony to delve into this problem of escapism and its contributions to a dystopia in disguise. (your thesis needs to be more specific. Authors don’t delve into problems. They take clear stands on issues.
It is usually said to have begun with the French Symbolist movement and it artificially ends with the Second World War. The beginning and ending of the modernist period are of course arbitrary. Poets like Yeats and Rilke started in a post-Romantic, Symbolist vein and modernised their poetic idiom after being affected by political and literary developments. Other poets, like T.S. Eliot,Ezra Pound, or E.E.
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.
Texts in Time Historical, social and cultural context influence values, experiences, pressures and predictions which can be seen within Mary Shelley’s 19th century gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) and Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Blade Runner (1992). Both texts explore the questionable actions of humanity. As a Romanticist, Shelley condemns humanity’s actions to become god influenced by the enlightenment period and industrial revolution. Similarly, Scott responds to Shelley criticism by exploring ambition. However, the film’s 20th century context of capitalist greed and mass industrialisation shifts the criticism to the pursuit of commercial dominance and not god like power.
Robert Harsh, for example, declares in ‘Exposing the Lie: Inherit the Wind’ that "Christians, particularly William Jennings Bryan, are consistently lampooned throughout, while the skeptics and agnostics are consistently portrayed as intelligent, kindly, and even heroic. I simply cannot escape the conclusion that the writers of the screen play never intended to write a historically accurate account of the Scopes trial, nor did they seriously attempt to portray the principal characters and their beliefs in an unbiased and accurate way." Another perspective of critical sentiment is voiced by Carol Inannone in ’First Things’ when she states that "Inherit the Wind reveals a great deal about a mentality that demands open-mindedness and excoriates dogmatism, only to advance its own certainties more insistently... A more historically accurate dramatization of the Scopes Trial might have been far richer and more interesting - and might also have given its audiences a genuine dramatic tragedy to watch. It would not have sent its audience home full of moral superiority and happy thoughts about the march of progress." And so the film has had its share of controversy and
In an absurdist novel, their is no traditional plot structure. Traditionally absurd moments occur threw out the whole novel where a character’s personal views and meaning is destroyed and they are forced to come up with other meanings and to reconstruct their personal views. The plague and Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy are both absurdist fiction novels which attempt to influence reader’s views by depictions of the meaning of life, portraying various attempts and failures by characters to find meaning. Absurdist authors generally have a strong idea of what the meaning of life is. There are two main ideas which are focused around the works of absurdist fiction.
Stoker’s Warning: Be Wary of Modernity Throughout its entirety, the novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, attempts to warn its readers of the dangers of advance. Bram Stoker wrote his famous novel during a time of extraordinary change in England. The Victorian way of life, a way of life that had ruled England for generations upon generations, was finally giving way to the industrial age. With the industrial age came the rise of new ways of thought and life, including a bigger focus on scientific breakthroughs, a revolution in female expression, and a massive influx of foreigners into Britain, bringing along with them unheard of customs and ideas. For Stoker, this new way of life seemed dangerous and scarily new, threatening to usurp everything
Amusing Ourselves to Death In the novel Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman analyzes the undeniable truth that the media, and its mediums, have caused a major cultural revolution. This dynamic shift from an age of the printed word, to that of the television, has created an epistemological transition that has led to the redefinition of the content and meaning of public discourse. The argument proposed by Neil Postman stems from the idea in which the entertainment power of images has caused the truth of these messages to be degraded and misinterpreted. Postman (1985) writes “we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant” (p. 16). Here Postman argues that televisions’ trivial nature