Golden Review

-Kate Mahler

In a nutshell (3-4)

Truth (5-8)

Beauty (9-10)

Virtue (11)

Orwell (12-14)

The Evolution of Writing (14)

Linguistic Identity (15-16)

Art (17)

Classical Essays (18-20)

Vocab & Terms (21)

Test Strategies (22)

In a nutshell…

Truth

In a moment of nostalgia, the dusty box of LEGO is taken from the back of your closet, and the blue, red, and yellow bricks are sprinkled on the floor with dormant ease. Back when those pieces did not lie forgotten, you used to be the designer of your world. Building. Destroying. Creating. The sky was the limit, and those brick the starting point. Unfortunately, as you grew up, the enchanting make-believe world of your creations was abandoned. Nevertheless, the basic concepts of inventing a structure from scratch bound themselves to you, and found a new purpose in your life. Much like LEGO, truth relies on those same principles. In life we are all given the same pieces, but we all erect different masterpieces. We possess the power to take these basic facts and construct our perspective of truth in a distinctive manner. The limitless possibilities give way to infinite numbers of perspectives of one event, and although people craft different final works, it doesn’t mean that they are all wrong. It just means that life isn’t black and white, and different people have different perspectives on the quintessence masterpiece.

Beauty

According to Deborah Tannen, “there is no unmarked woman”. The way we dress, the way we talk, the way we look…it all sets us apart from the other gender. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that, according to Sontag, “the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression”, and women have always been put down because of it. If a woman is too pretty, she obviously can’t be intelligent enough to have power; however, if she’s not pretty enough she’s not worth anything, because as Kershaw points out, ugliness is associated with evil and fear. This impossible ideal has been drilled upon us since childhood, and since then the media has promoted unattainable standards that we are all pressured into following; as Jean Kilbourne said, “failure is inevitable”, and yet we continue to strive for something we will never achieve. It is unfortunate that most people believe, as Simone de Beauvoir said, that it “might seem that a natural condition is beyond the possibility of change”. If people don’t start believing that we have the power to change this condition, girls are not going to change their priorities, and like Alice walker they will “not pray for sight, [they] will pray for beauty”.

Virtue

Benjamin Franklin created a list that would guide him into becoming a virtuous man, and D.H Lawrence argues that Franklin’s virtues are too automated, and that you can’t turn off bad habits. He says, “I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine”; this is a more correct way to look at life, because virtue isn’t something you can acquire by checking things off a list, it is different for every person, and every person has a different personality for every situation. What one person believes to be virtues aren’t necessarily what another believes, and it is important that we respect all these different points of views in order for us to live in harmony.

Orwell

Orwell touched on the very essence of human nature in the book 1984. In the totalitarian government he created, he explored what normal human beings would become when their freedoms of thought, speech, and movement were taken away. He painted a picture of the future: “a boot stamping on a human face – forever”. Authors like Zamyatin thought similarly to Orwell, and in one of his pieces Zamyatin philosophized that “only the weak rely on truths”; this concept was taken a step further in 1984, because the Inner Party knew that an apathetic society, a society that believed in everything they were told, would be easily controlled. Therefore this became one of the ways they gained power, because they knew that “whoever [controlled] the past [controlled] the future”. Unfortunately, tactics employed in the book are no longer just fictional, and as H.D.S Greenway points out, in the world nowadays prisoners simply disappear, the state listens to everyone’s conversation, and we have our own form of “newspeak”. On top of that, as William Safire denounces, we now have tortures such as waterboarding, which, like the tortures in 1984, are cruel because they inflict emotional pain, until the person being tortured gives up and breaks in.

Linguistic Identity

Amy Tan talks about “the power of language…the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea…or a simple truth”. This power is a common theme throughout this unit, because most of the authors have come to terms with themselves and their cultures when they discover their linguistic identity. Living in different countries has made people like Gloria Anzaldúa speak “the orphan tongue”, because “racially, culturally, and linguistically” they are different. Language barriers become a problem because “language is both a political instrument, means, and proof of power” (Baldwin), and when immigrants haven’t become fluent in a language, they are looked down upon, like Amy Tan’s Chinese mother. Not only are they thought of as inferior, but inside they are confused on whether they should assimilate to the new culture, or stay true to their own; this however, is not a one-or-the-other kind of decision, because, as Eric Liu points out, “the choice of race is not simply embrace or efface”.

Art

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde explores the meaning of Art, Beauty, and the Genius. He says that “it is through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence”, which explains why he believes that “Beauty is a form of Genius – higher, indeed, as it needs no explanation”. One of his views is also that “all art is quite useless”, which is what aestheticism is all about; aestheticism says that “ars gratia artis” (art for art’s sake) is how the world should perceive art, because art should not be didactic, religious, or tendentious.

Classical Essays

In this unit, we explore classical essays written by some of the most prominent writers of this type of literature. A main point these essays make is about power; be it power over a country, over yourself, or over things you have no control over –like death. In “Shooting an Elephant”, George Orwell does everything he can to hold on to the pseudo power the empire has trust upon him, and in his feeble attempt he realizes that “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”. To Joan Didion, power lies within self-respect, and to her, to be powerful one must be willing to accept responsibility for one’s life. On the other hand, Machiavelli talks about having power over a whole group of people, and in his opinion “to be feared is much safer than to be loved” because “love is a link of obligation, which men, because they are rotten, will break anytime”. Finally, Virginia Woolf talks about the struggle of a moth against death, and how even then, the pa animal was powerful because it died with dignity.

Truth

“One thing I only know, and that is that I know nothing.” -Socrates

Golden Lines:

Author

Golden Line

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Crutches of Certainty.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A mind once stretched by a new idea never gains its original dimension.”

John Keats

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Dostoevsky

“If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.”

Jean Paul Sartre

“There is no reality except in action.”

Zamyatin

“Truth is of the machine. Error is alive.”

SOPHIE’S WORLD

Bishop Berkeley

“Esse es percepi” ( “to be is to be perceived”

Protagoras

“Man is the measure of all things”

Socrates

“One thing I only know, and that is that I know nothing.”

Xenophanes

“Men have created the gods in their own image.”

Heraclitus

“We cannot step twice in the same river.”

Stoic Seneca

“To mankind, mankind is holy” (humanist slogan)

Epicurean Aristippus

“The highest good is pleasure, the greatest evil is pain.”

Goethe

“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”

Francis Bacon

“Knowledge is power.”

Baroque Period

“Carpe Diem” ( “seize the day”

Baroque Period

“Memento Mori” ( “remember you must die”

Descartes

“Cogito, ergo sum.” ( “I think, therefore I am”

Locke

“Tabula Rasa.” ( “Blank state.”

Kant

“Act as if the maxim of your actions were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature.”

National Romantics

“Tell me where you live, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Hegel

“The difference between man and woman is like that between animals and plants.”

Vinje

“There are two kinds of truths. There are the superficial truths, the opposite of which are obviously wrong. But there are also the profound truths, whose opposites are equally right.”

Hegel

“Philosophy is the mirror of the world spirit.”

Middle Ages

“Credo quia absurdum” ( “I believe because it is irrational.”

Marx

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various way; the point is to change it.”

Aristotle

“Nothing exists in consciousness that was not first experienced in the senses.”

Jostein Gaardner

“Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive then 1000 answers.”

Nietzsche

“God is dead.”

Sartre

“Man is condemned to be free.”

Readings:

Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaardner:

Greek Philosophers:

· Socrates (rationalist): the ability to distinguish from right and wrong lies in people’s reason

· No one can be happy if they go against their judgment, and who would choose to be unhappy?

· Plato: believed that right or wrong flowed

· “World of ideas”( contained eternal patters behind phenomena in nature for “world of senses” (where nothing that exists is lasting)

· Can’t have true knowledge of things that always change, only opinions

· Women could govern, because everyone has reason

· Aristotle: explored the “cave” instead of leaving it

· No innate ideas, but innate reasons (empty until we have sensed something)

· There is a purpose behind everything in nature

Hellenism (Greek dominated culture):

· Cynic School: true happiness isn’t dependant on material goods

· Stoic School: man must learn to accept destiny because it can’t be changed

· Epicureans: pleasure is good, just weigh side effects

-People come up with mythological explanation on balance of good and evil and philosophers reject this. People can’t live without such explanations-

Renaissance:

· Individualistic ( humans are unique, praise the genius

· Men didn’t exist for God’s sake, so possibilities to develop were limitless

· Descartes: only certain that he doubted, so then he had to be thinking, and because he was thinking it was certain that he was a thinking being

· We all possess idea of a perfect entity, so God exists (innate idea)

· Spinoza (determinist): philosophy = to see things in the perspective of eternity

· God is the world, and the world is in God.

· We don’t realize we have no free-will because there are so many reasons for us to do what we do

· Locke (empiricist): We have nothing in the mind that we have not experienced through the senses

· Before we sense anything the mind is bare and empty

· Hume (empiricist): you are so used to the “unbreakable laws of nature” that you assumer it will always happen

· Children are not slaves to the expectations of habits

· Berkeley: only things that exist are those we perceive

· We exist only in God’s mind

· Kant: all knowledge from the world comes from sensation, but reason determines how we perceive it

· We perceive everything as cause and effect

· When both experience and reason fall short we have faith

· Hegel: Truth is subjective ( basic of cognition changed from each generation

· A thought can’t be right forever, but it can be right for now

· Reason is progressive ( knowledge is always expanding

· Kierkegaard: you are so used to the “unbreakable laws of nature” that you assumer it will always happen

· Children are not slaves to the expectations of habits

· Marx: History is a matter of whom is to own the means of production

“The Allegory of the Cave” – Plato

Plato, a key member of the trinity that helped lay the foundation of Western philosophy, claims in the “Allegory of the Cave” -found in the Republic (circa 360 BC) – that we live in a dark cave where we only see “shadows” of the true essence of things, and that to gain true knowledge one must break free from the shackles that pin us to ignorance and ascend towards the realization that our world is so much more than what we imagined. The author explains his allegory by structuring it in a way that follows the evolution of the person who breaks free: first Plato talks about the ignorance of the cave slave, then he mentions the “aching” the person feels when looking at the light for the first time. Afterwards he talks about ascending out of the cave where the lost soul can finally look into the sun and find out the reality of the creator of “all beautiful things”. Finally he enlightens the audience on how the newly illuminated person would feel and how disoriented the cave people who are still immobilized would be when he returned. The purpose of this piece is to alert readers of the fabricated realities we’ve been exposed to since birth in order to instigate us to seek the genuine truths that make up our world, thus helping us become “intellectual” souls. This piece was written for an audience of scholars who are open-minded and willing to believe that all their knowledge could possibly be an illusion to the essence of authentic truths.

“TV – the Plug in Drug” – Marie Winn

· Claim: The world has been “dominated” by TVs, and that it has been able to diminish our ability to interact with people

· We choose to be “anesthetized” by the shadows instead of trying to break free and live our own lives

“The Tao of Pooh” – Benjamin Hoff

· “The Vinegar Tasters” ( allegorical painting of Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-Tse tasting vinegars (expressions: sour, bitter, smiling…)

· He is smiling because they can turn negative events into positive, and they know that when lived is understood and utilized for what it is, its sweet

“What the Bleep Do We Know”

· Every age has its assumptions that we take for granted

· If we use history as a guide, what we believe in today is untrue

· We only see what we are conditioned (culturally predisposed) to see

· Every single one of us affects the reality that we see

· The “world is possible timelines of reality”

· We are so hypnotized by the environment/media, that we cant achieve full happiness ( we live in an illusion of it

“Existentialism” – Jean Paul Sartre

· Atheistic existentialism ( no God, but human’s existence precedes essence

· You are what you make yourself (subjectivity)

· Condemned to be free, man feels pitifully sad and abandoned

· Conscience decides what it perceives by selecting what’s important to us

“The Social Animal” – David Brooks

· We have a highly permeable mind, we absorb and imitate to learn

· We are autonomous beings interconnected with one another

Beauty

“Beauty will save the world.” – Dostoevsky

Golden Lines:

Author

Golden Line

Dostoevsky

“Beauty will save the world”

Susan Sontag

“For the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression.”

Alice Walker

“I do not pray for sight. I pray for beauty.”

Kilbourne

“Failure is inevitable.”

John Keats

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Cal Thomas

“Worship based on externals is always bound to disappoint.”

Simone de Beauvoir

“Might seem that a natural condition is beyond the possibility of change.”

Osmell Souza

“This is not a nature contest, it is a beauty contest. And science exists to help perfect beauty.”

Readings:

“A Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?” – Susan Sontag

· Beauty is essential to a woman’s character

· Society imposes how a woman looks (man is what they are/do)

· The desire for beauty is ok, the obligation is not

· We shouldn’t let society define who we are

“Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.” – Alice Walker

· “I do not pray for sight. I pray for beauty.” ( women would rather not see the world, rather than be seen in it without fitting society’s norms of beauty.

· Women who don’t have beauty put their head down, thus losing self confidence ( it seems that pretty people are more popular, but its just a consequence

“The Wound in the Face” – Angela Carter

· “Now the mouth is back as a bloody gash, a visible wound.”

· Some wounds have been exposed for too long, have had too much attention to ever completely cure

· “To do your eyes so that they look like self-inflicted wounds is to wear on your face the evidence of the violence your environment inflicts on you.”

“There is No Unmarked Woman” – Deborah Tannen

“I felt so sad that we women didn’t have the freedom to be unmarked like the man sitting next to us had.”

· “Marked” ( alters the base meaning of a word by adding something with no meaning on its own

· Female words are usually marked with “-ette” or “-ess”

· Man can be marked, but they have the choice not to be

· Biologically we are unmarked ((XX vs. XY)), but society marks us, and we can’t get rid of social bias

“Killing Us Softly” – Jean Kilbourne

· Advertising sells ideas of “who we are, and who we should be.”

· “Failure is inevitable” ( flawless perfection cant be achieved

· When we become teenagers, we get the message not to be too powerful, or to take up too much space

· “You have the right to remain sexy” ( sex objects, passive and quiet

· We need to change the ads and also that attitude that governs them

“Ode to a Grecian Urn” –John Keats

· People in the urn are frozen in time, and yet they never get to experience things fully

· “Beauty is truth, truth beauty ‘ that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

· Eternal truths will always stay with us, and that’s all we will ever be able to grasp

“Aren’t I A Woman?” – Sojourner Truth

· “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, all alone, these together ought to be able to turn it back.”

“The Blind Cult of Princess Diana” – Cal Thomas

· “…Worship based on externals is always bound to disappoint.”

· By focusing so much on beauty we forget that the power to attract isn’t the same as the power to enthrall

· Is the desire for beauty innate? No matter how many warnings we all still aim for it, and its recurrent in history.

· “No one celebrates or elevates plainness.”

“Women as Other” – Simone de Beauvoir

· “Thus humanity is male, an man defines woman not in herself but relative to him.”

· Society sets woman’s standards, and men set society’s

· Why are we submissive if we are not even a minority like blacks

· “Might seem that a natural condition is beyond the possibility of change.”

“Move Over My Pretty, Ugly is Here” ( Sarah Kershaw

· Ugliness is associated with evil and fear

· “Despite growing attention to discrimination based on appearances, the majority of messages in society continue to shout …‘don’t be ugly.’”

Virtue

“I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine.” – D.H. Lawrence

Golden Lines:

Author

Golden Line

D.H. Lawrence

“I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine.”

William Hazlitt

“The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it.”

William Hazlitt

“Hatred alone is immortal”

Readings:

“Arriving at Perfection” – Benjamin Franklin

· Although we know what’s good and bad, habits must be broken and good ones acquired

“On Ben Franklin’s Virtues” – D.H. Lawrence

· “…Is in himself a multitude of conflicting men, which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other” ( you have different personalities for different situations, impossible to be one person

· “I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine.”

· Franklin’s virtues are too automated, you can’t turn off habits

“On the Pleasure of Hating” – William Hazlitt

· “The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it.”

· “Hatred alone is immortal” ( love turns to indifference, pain becomes bittersweet

· The church throws anyone who’s different into hell for the “glory of God”

· Honestly its because they cant control and get them to conform

· The only intimacy that doesn’t fade is an intellectual one

· Because there are no feelings involved, no space for hate and love

· “We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.”

Orwell

“The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men” – George Orwell

Golden Lines:

1984 - George Orwell

"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men."

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“Power is in caring human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."

“Thought crime does not entail death. Thought crime IS death."

War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."

“The future belonged to the proles.”

Related Readings

“Children are the boldest philosophers” – Zamyatin

“Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite.” -Zamyatin

“Errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.” -Zamyatin

“And they lack the strength to wound themselves” -Zamyatin

“Can man forget that he is human?” – Erich Fromm

“The world has changed and we must change with it.” – President Obama

“It became ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” - Orwell

“The mixture of vagueness and pure incompetence is the most marked characteristic of prose.” – George Orwell

Readings:

“On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters” – Zamyatin

In On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters, Zamyatin, a Russian novelist who lived through the Russian Revolution, advocates that “heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought” and that they are necessary for “revolution”. The author begins by asking the rhetorical question “what is revolution?”; he then proceeds to answer it throughout the essay with a variety of rhetorical strategies. By using parallelism, such as when he repeats “this is revolution” while explaining the essence of change, he is able to emphasize that it happens everywhere in nature - be it when “two dead stars [collide]” or when “Lobachevski [cracked] the walls of the millennia-old Euclidean world”. Through the use of symbols, he is able to explain complex ideas that would have been too deep for literal expression (declarative). One example is when he talks about the “highway”, which symbolizes a worn out path most literature takes, a “smooth” path that one must be thrown off of in order to come up with new ideas. Another symbol used throughout the piece is the “coral”; it represents the less distinguished followers who built “their own structures” on top of new revolutionary ideas of heretics who lived not “by today’s clock but by tomorrow’s”, like Galileo and Darwin. The purpose of this piece is to attest to readers the beauty of the explosion of “dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring stone which have been raised upon it” in order to instigate them to “wound themselves, to cease loving what they once loved…to start anew”. Zamyatin wants us to ask childish questions like “why?” and “what next?”, to make errors, to live ahead of our time… These things will make us “alive-alive”, they will lead us away from the “highway”, to a path where we won’t become machines.

Connection to 1984( Zamyatin philosophizes that “only the weak rely on truths” because, in the words of Nietzsche, they need their “crutches of certainty”. Orwell takes this a step further and reverses it, and in his book relying on truth is what makes you weak. The Inner Party knows that an apathetic society – a society that believes everything they are told – will remain weak forever. Thus, a point both authors make is that society needs to continuously look for truths because they are forever changing, since there is no “final number…no final revolution”.

“Politics and the English Language” – George Orwell

Rules of rhetoric to follow:

1.Never use a metaphor or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

2.Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3.If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4.Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5.Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“Freedom and Happiness” – George Orwell

“But that is absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can’t be a last one.”

“Then why do you talk about the last revolution?”

Connection to 1984( In George Orwell’s “Freedom and Happiness”, he mentions a book called We by Zamyatin. In We, the main character eventually betrays is love interest, similarly to the way Winston Smith betrays his in 1984. Both authors bring that up because it seems like it is the one trait human beings will never cease to have. Neither writer has enough faith in human nature to believe that we are completely selfless, willing to face any consequence to prevent something from happening to a loved one.

“A Page From 1984” – H.D.S Greenway

Connection to 1984(

· In the world nowadays, the state listens to conversations, prisoners simply disappear, US + UK constantly at war with Asia

· We have our own “Newspeak” ( “Tirrant” = “Theater Iran Near Term”

“A Gerund To Cause a Shudder” – William Safire

Waterboarding = pouring water down a person’s face, nose, and throat to make them feel like they are drowning

Connection to 1984( The cruelest form of punishment is not physical, but one that inflicts emotional discomfort; this cannot be shut out or dealt with, it breaks down the walls you have made and there’s no way you can protect yourself. Like waterboading (torture done nowadays), in 1984 Winston could endure the increasingly stronger shocks of pain, but it was the constant brainwashing and verbal insults that finally got him to give up and break in.

“Afterword” – Erich Fromm

“1984 is an expression of a mood and it is a warning.”

· Old Testament philosophy = men grow and unfold in history, eventually reaching their full potential

· “The 2000 year old western tradition of hope” was destroyed after WWII and the atrocities committed

· “At the very moment when man is at the point of reaching it, he loses hope” ( historical paradox: we hoped when we couldn’t, stopped believing when we could

· “Can man forget that he is human?” or does human nature have a dynamism that will react by trying to change an inhuman society to a human one

· “Mobile truths” ( man transforms reality into something relative to his own interests and functions (ex: believing your company is the best, than changing jobs and believing your new company is the best)

· “Modern doublethink” ( considering every country against Russia and China the “free world”, when in truth they are not politically free

The Evolution of Writing

“The most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity”

In The Library in the New Age, Robert Durton tries to approach the problem of how to make sense of all the information given by telling us to look at ways information has been communicated before. He begins by mentioning that in 4000 BC “humans learned to write”; this was, as Jack Goody would say, “the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity”, because it have us a way to communicate to future generations the mistakes and successes of the past. Then came the codex in the 1450s, where information was printed in flappable pages, which allowed for “clearly articulated text”. Then with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg, information “spread like wildfire” because it brought books “within the reach of ever-widening circles of readers”. Lastly, at least for now, came the invention of the web in 1974. From its early form as a “means of communications for physicists in 1981” to its usage in our daily lives (Google, Yahoo Search), information presentation is changing so fast, who knows how soon the next era will be?

Linguistic Identity

“Language is both a political instrument, means, and a proof of power.” – Baldwin

Golden Lines:

Baldwin

“Language is both a political instrument, means, and a proof of power.”

Amy Tan

“The power of language…the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea…or a simple truth.”

Frederick Douglass

“They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind and died away for want of utterance.”

Gloria Anzaldúa

“Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.”

Gloria Anzaldúa

“Language is a male discourse.”

Gloria Anzaldúa

“Racially, culturally, and linguistically somos huérfanos – we speak an orphan tongue.”

Gloria Anzaldúa

“I will overcome the tradition of silence.”

Leonard Shlain

“The conduct of conversation is…more illuminating then its content.”

Eric Liu

“I was fixed in whiteness, which is still our metonym for power.”

Eric Liu

“The essence of cool was the ability to conform…no one had prepared me for the great labors of fitting in.”

Eric Liu

“The choice of race is not simply embrace or efface.”

Readings:

“Mother Tongue” – Amy Tan

“Mother Tongue”, by Amy Tan, hits to home to any immigrant child who has ever had to act as a translator to their parents. It talks about the author’s mom’s “broken English” and how this alters people’s view of the person talking. Not having a complete grasp of the language required in certain situations will cause you to lose power, because as Francis Bacon would say “knowledge is power”. Unintentionally, we judge people with “broken English”, because we’ve been taught that a full vocabulary is synonymous to a high intellect; thus, when a person doesn’t possess this quality we view them as inferior. The author of this passage, through her use of anecdotes and observations, is able to show us a different side to a common story, and because of that we are able to become more sympathetic to those types of people. We are able to understand that “language ability tests can never reveal…intent…passion…imagery” and that a mastery of English isn’t a requirement for those qualities.

“You Are What You Say” – Robin Tolmach Lakoff

- “Tag question” ( statement that doesn’t need to be believed by anyone but the speaker, and is said as a way of giving leeway, a way of not forcing the addressee to go along with their views

-Ex: “Jean is here, isn’t she?”

From an early age, women have been introduce to gender roles: what to wear, what toys to play with, and – as Robin Lakoff points out – what to say. She says that “cultural bias [is] built into the language we are allowed to speak” and because of it we are doomed. We are doomed because if we go against the norms we, at best, sound like men; however, if we follow our roles we are damned to be thought incapable of holding a position of power. In her essay, Lakoff uses call to action to encourage women to “speak up”. Her plea has been heard, because from the time this was written in 1974 to now, we have gained significant status in society. We have turned the tables around, and shown men that our way of talking shows not a lack of intelligence, but rather a reserved will to get things done. With women like Hilary Clinton and Ophrah as our role models, we have learned the power of our voice. As Deborah Tannen would say, even our language is “marked”, but that has not stopped us from using that in our advantage and proving male stereotypes wrong.

“Learning To Read and Write” – Frederick Douglass

In Learning To Read and Write, by Frederick Douglass (a slave in the 1800s), one is reminded of the power words have to inspire and cause change. When he got a book called The Columbian Orator – a “bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights” – he gained a moral superiority to his masters. This was because the words in the book “gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind and died away from want of utterance”. According to psychologist Jerome Singer’s theory, in order to feel an emotion, on needs two things: physical arousal and cognitive interpretation of that arousal; on in layman’s term: one needs to not only be in a scenario to feel an emotion, but also have the language and ability to express so said feeling. If you vocabulary isn’t extensive, your feelings will only be basic. This is why education was such an important tool for enslaved African Americans; without it they would only have a gut feeling that they were being treated unfairly, but no way of expressing it. Because of books and articles he read, Frederick Douglass was able to gain knowledge of his wretched condition, and by learning to voice his own feelings, he became the voice of those who weren’t so fortunate.

“How To Tame a Wild Tongue” – Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Anzaldúa goes through a variety of aspects of Chicano’s life that has been affected by their language. “Racially, culturally, and linguistically [sierem] huérfanos”, speaking “an orphan tongue”; by the Spanish they are told that they are mutilating the language, while in American schools they are being taught to speak without an accent. To be lost in a world where your language is not considered a real language will you an identity crisis, and for these reasons it’s hard for them to assimilate to either culture. The same thing happens with women all over the world. Although all women have a language they are fluent in, these languages aren’t fair to their gender; like the Chicanos they are made to feel inferior because speech reserved for them is thought to be simple and superfluous – when in truth it is just as beautiful as any other language that has ever been spoken. Through the use of poems and anecdotes in both English and Spanish, the author is able to show that, yes, there can be a compromise between two languages, and what forms is not an aberration, but rather a work of art.

“Notes of a Native Speaker” – Eric Liu

How big of a role does your race play in your development? Eric Liu evaluated his assimilation to a white world; he describes his life of “amoebic bliss” to one of a “social animal” and how his Chinese heritage played a part in it. Adolescence is an awkward stage no matter who you – or your ancestors – are, but add the pressure to thrive in a white society while keeping you own culture and you’ll have a whole generation in crisis. Because “homogeneity is the highest value” for that period, teenagers tend to blame their failures in things that they can’t change - in this case, their culture. Liu is right to assume that race plays a role in development, but it doesn’t play a vital part. If he got picked on for his race, it was simply because that was his distinguishing factor; had he not been Chinese, he would have been picked on because of another trait. That’s what teenagers do; we find a person’s weak spot and exploit it in order to make them conform. Being a third-culture kid (TCK) has made me see that although you could race define you, you could also choose not to “be so pigeonholed”. You learn that “the choice of race is not simple ‘embrace or efface’”. You don’t have to make your life goal to defy all stereotypes, the best thing you can do is leave that cage and never look back; because only by not caring about it will you be truly free.

Art

“All art is quite useless.” – Oscar Wilde

Golden Lines:

Oscar Wilde

“All art is quite useless.”

Oscar Wilde

“It is through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence”

Oscar Wilde

“The ugly and the stupid…live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent...”

Oscar Wilde

“To influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.”

Oscar Wilde

“Beauty is a form of Genius – higher, indeed, as it needs no explanation.

Oscar Wilde

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

Aestheticism

“Art assumed a privileged position as a mode of perception unique to human experience.”

Aestheticism

“Ars gratia Artis” (Art for art’s sake)

Readings:

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” – Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, discusses Art and Beauty and poses the question of how superficial and useless it is. The story of Dorian Gray – a boy who in the beginning is innocent and exhibits this through a pure boyish charm – is tainted by his foolish prayer to always have his Beauty, while the corruptness of his soul would be visible in a portrait painted of him when he was seventeen. As his life progresses, the painting bears all the cruelty and age that his body has been spared, and through this Wilde is able to analyze the importance of Beauty and it’s relevance to body and soul in society. With a myriad of allusions to French and British authors and artists, Wilde is able to give credit to the highly controversial values of his characters have, and through this he is able to establish himself as a highly educated member of society. To present all the viewpoints, Wilde created contrasting characters that through their dialogue and action, symbolized different aspects of his view of Art. For example, Lord Henry Wotton represented the amoral values of one that values Beauty and its superficiality above all else, and that saw pleasure and youth as the epitome of good life. The writing of all these characters is one of the most effective devices Wilde uses, because it allows him to refute some of his points, then dive right back in and argue the opposition’s views. In “Move Over My Pretty, Ugly is Here”, Sarah Kershaw points out that our society associates ugliness with evil and fear, and one of the main things Wilde discusses with Gray’s portrait is how ones looks can influence how people see you: although Gray has an evil soul, because of his innocent-looking exterior, people don’t see his true self.

“Aestheticism”

-Aestheticism: all art must be autonomous. I should not be didactic, religious, or tendentious-Many times the creation of the artist and reception by the viewer leads to some perception of an “authentic reality”

Classical Essays

“When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” – George Orwell

Golden Lines:

George Orwell

“When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

George Orwell

“A sahib has got to act like a sahib.”

George Orwell

“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

George Orwell

“I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

Joan Didion

“People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes.”

Joan Didion

“The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life – is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Machiavelli

“To be feared is much safer than to be loved.”

Machiavelli

“…Love is a link of obligation, which men, because they are rotten, will break anytime.”

Machiavelli

“He should be ready to enter evil if he has to.”

Readings:

“On Self-Respect” – Joan Didion

“The tricks that work on other count for nothing in that very well lit back alley where one keep assignations with one self...”

In the essay On Self-Respect, Joan Didion – one of the “most admired voices of her generation”- explores the meaning of (as the title suggests) self-respect; she claims that “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life” is the source of this virtue, and that “people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes”. She begins by an anecdote on her loss of innocence, a turning point in her life that showed how “amulets had [her] self-respect pinned”. Didion then proceeds to contrast “misplaced self-respect” with what she feels is the real deal, which was “once called character”.

With rhetorical strategies such as “negative definitions”, allusions, and anecdotes, she is able to explain her point of view, while creating a thought-provoking atmosphere in which she shares that “to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect”. By saying what self-respect is not (“the approval of others” and “reputation”), Didion is able to push people away from their common views of a cliché topic and gear them towards her point of view. In addition to her use of negative definition, she uses allusions to different pieces of literature such as the Great Gatsby and the Bible; through the use of this device she is not only able to establish her credentials as an educated woman, but she is also able to use characters commonly known to her audience of scholars to exemplify her thoughts. Finally, the use of pathos through her anecdotes is effective because when trying to persuade readers on a point of view, it’s always best to connect your opinion to their life. We’ve all had the “conviction that lights would always turn green for [us], the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which has won e approval as a child automatically guaranteed [us]…happiness, honor, and the love of a good-man” and when she points these things out, it makes the reader focus on the writing, for they too have lost their “innocence” at some point.

Didion says that self-respect is the “sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side”. Basically, one knows that there is something bigger than yourself; one is willing to “accept the risk”, “invest something of [one’s self]”, all the while “knowing the odds” of what they are doing. People with self-respect are, as citizens of the Baroque period would say, willing to “Carpe diem” (seize the day). They “exhibit a kind of moral nerve”, and they are willing to do things that most people wouldn’t have the courage to do. They are people like the frontier man who settled America. These people knew the risks they were taking, and yet they lived their lives in hope for a better tomorrow, and by displaying this “discipline” they were able to gain self-respect.

“Shooting an Elephant” – George Orwell

In the essay Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell – a “sub-divisional police officer…in Lower Burma” – reflects that when one becomes a “tyrant, its his own freedom that he destroys” because anything must be done to “avoid looking like a fool”. The author begins by explaining his job and his bitter hate towards it; he then proceeds to tell a story of a crucial day in his life, a day in which a “tiny incident in itself” - shooting an elephant – “gave [him] a better glimpse…on the real nature of imperialism”.

Through the use of rhetorical strategies, Orwell is able to vividly convey his feelings of ambivalence towards the Burmese and the British Empire; strong negatively connotative words, similes, and the usage of Latin aphorisms all emphasize his confusion and bitterness at the whole situation, and later at his life style. With phrases like “evil-spirited little beasts” and “the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny…upon the will of prostrate people” he asserts his negative feelings towards the situation in general; he, in fact, doesn’t believe in the “despotic” British Empire and their actions, but he is also angry with the Burmese for making his job so hard. In conjunction with vivid imagery, he uses rhetorical devices such as similes to accurately describe the course of that day. With the simile, “The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skin’s a rabbit”, the reader cringes at the thought of the mauled body of the Indian coolie whom the elephant had trampled to death. On top of all that, he also uses Latin aphorisms such as “saecula saeculorum” (forever and ever) and “in terrorem” (appeal to fear) to show that he is a proficient writer, and therefore connect with an audience of scholars.

Throughout this piece, Orwell constantly repeats the idea that although he knew that shooting the elephant was unnecessary, he had to do it to hold face in front of the “natives”, and in order to remain being seen as a leader. Bishop George Berkeley believed that “esse es percepi” (to be is to be perceived), and so did the narrator of this essay. He had many doubts, but he was certain that “a white man mustn’t be frightened in front of ‘natives’; and so, in general, he [wasn’t] frightened” because the British were supposed to be resolute rulers who were never laughed at. He believed that to be perceived as a steadfast leader was enough to make him one, so even if he had to make tough choices, he did whatever he could to “avoid looking like a fool”. Another writing by George Orwell, 1984, states the same theory about defining yourself as what you are perceived. In the book, the Inner Party controls all form of writings (such as newspapers, textbooks, and magazines) so that they have access to what the past and future should be perceived as by the citizens. They think that “who controls the present controls the past”, and by controlling citizen’s perceptions of the truth, they are able to establish their personas as who they want to be, because the only way one really exists is by the way one is perceived by everyone else.

“The Morals of a Prince” – Niccolò Machiavelli

In the essay The Morals of the Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli – one of the “major thinkers of the Italian Renaissance”- creates a guidebook with directions on how to mold “an ideal prince”; he claims that a prince “should not depart from the good if he can hold to it, but he should be ready to enter on evil if he has to”. He begins by listing qualities most would consider good and their opposites (such as cruel vs. merciful, generous vs. stingy…), and then he begins to “differ in his discussion from what others have said” by claiming things like “to be feared is much safer than to be loved” and “it’s much wiser to put up with the reputation of being a miser” – statements that would be widely disagreed with.

With rhetorical strategies such as antithesis, allusions, and the use of logos, Machiavelli is able to create a thought-provoking atmosphere in which he challenges most of our beliefs in the characteristics that a prince should have. By listing antithesis in his text, he is able to contrast the opposite characteristics a ruler can have, and thus give examples on how “it is impossible to have them all”. He urges princes to “be shrewd enough to avoid the public disgrace of those vices that would lose him the state”, and he does this by saying how the “qualities that are considered good” have usually lost a prince his throne. The use of allusions to famous rulers such as Pope Julius II, Caesar, and Alexander not only give the author authority over his topic, but it also serves as concrete examples on how the vices he is urging princes to have, if they feel like their power will be lost otherwise, are necessary. These allusions help create logos, which helps sway even the cynical readers who do not believe on his take on the “ideal prince”; the use of logos also enhances Machiavelli’s ethos, because it makes him look knowledgeable and prepared to his audience This is key for this essay, because a ruler needs to trust the advice he is receiving. He needs to know exactly what has happened in the past, in order to learn from the mistakes of the weak and the successes of the ones that exhibit the qualities (and vices) that Machiavelli talks about.

Machiavelli states that a “deceitful men will always find plenty who are willing to be deceived”. This is unfortunately true, for it is part of human nature for the masses to blindly follow the crowd and to be easily deceived. An epitome of this was Hitler during World War II. He got millions of people to commit atrocities against the Jews, because although he wasn’t a good person, he possessed a lot of the qualities Machiavelli claimed a good ruler should have: he was “a great liar”, and he went not only “against humanity” but also against “all those virtues for which men are called ‘good’”.

Another example of this is found in George Orwell’s 1984. Big Brother and the Inner Party have total control over the population, and they keep their power through the their conviction that it is better to be feared then loved. To exercise this, they keep their members enslaved by having the Thought Police punish everything that can be considered illegal, and having the constant threat of sending someone to the Ministry of Love if they commit anything that displeases the Party. Although Big Brother is a fictional character, he is the quintessence of what Machiavelli would consider the “ideal prince”.

“The Morals of a Prince” – Niccolò Machiavelli

In the essay The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf – a self-educated Londoner in the early 20th century – starts by writing about a moth flying “vigorously to one corner of his comportment, and, after waiting there a second, [flying] across to the other”; she then observes its inevitable defeat with death. Although in the beginning she pities the fly, for the “possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous…that to have only...a day’s moth’s part in life appeared a hard fate”, she later appreciates the marvel that it is, a “tiny bead of pure life”. She realizes that “one’s sympathies were all on the side of life”, but one is incapable to fight off the magnitude of death and its predestined approach, no matter how hard one struggles to “right himself”.

With speculation, symbolism and vivid diction, Woolf is able to meditate on the obscurity of not only life, but also death. After her detailed description of the “hybrid creature, neither gay like butterflies nor somber like their own species”, the author begins to speculate on the “simple form of energy” that was constrained in her world by the boundaries of the wood holding the glass. She is able to do this because her symbolic use of the moth to represent “the true nature of life” gives her a creative license to create an allegory between not only the moth and the dignity of life, but also the moth and the “oncoming doom” of death. Finally, through vivid diction, she is able to clearly get her speculations of the power of death across, through the scene of the struggle of the moth against its fate. With the ambiguous quote “against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city…[and] masses of human beings”, she expresses the difficult concept of the enormity of death; a concept that is easier understood because it is linked to an image that we can recognize.

Both Woolf and Orwell became enthralled by the agony of a living thing as it succumbs to death and their feeble attempt to face it with as much dignity as they can muster. In Shooting and Elephant, George Orwell describes how the elephant “climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright”; similarly Woolf describes how “after a pause of exhaustion the [moths] legs fluttered again” as a last protest and through a frantic attempt it “succeeded at last in righting itself”. There’s no way around fighting death, it is an inevitable doom we all have to face. But the knowledge of our fate does not condemn our last struggle to be one of surrender; it is our nobility as we face death that sums up who we are. Do we just give up and wait for death to find us, or do we fight every step of the way and try to get back on our feet?

Had the moth been born human, it would have been the embodiment of the Baroque period saying of “carpe diem” (seize the day). Despite it pathetic existence, “what it could do it did”. Despite the fact that it was just “fluttering from side to side of his square of the windowpane”, it did this as energetically as his body allowed. Despite that it was only “a day moth”, it still have a “gigantic effort” when fighting death. We need to learn a lesson from this small, insignificant moth; it knows that life is a gift, and it knows not to spend it fearing the inevitable, for if it does life will just go to waste.

Vocab

&

Literary Terms

Vocab

Meaning

Meme

Any thought or behavior that is passed from one person (or generation) to another by means of imitation

Paradigm Shift

Perfect example changing (ex: Obama becoming president instead of a WASP)

Pantheism

God is infinite, therefore present in everything

Apollonian

Classical beauty

Egregious

Outstandingly bad

Locution

Word or phrase, person’s style of speech

Lexicon

Vocabulary of a person or language

Manichean

Of or characterized by dualistic contrast or conflict between opposites

Tricolon

Series of threes (“veni, vidi, vici”)

Ersatz

Not real or genuine

Misogyny

The hatred of women by men

Dichotomy

Division or contrast between two things that are opposed or entirely different

Epithet

Descriptive title

Impute

Represent something undesirable as being done, caused, or possessed by someone

Gossamer

Something very light, thin, and insubstantial or delicate

Inchoate

Just begun and not fully formed

Iconoclast

A person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions

Tendentious

Argues for/against political or social condition

Caveat

Warning

Panegyric

Published speech/text in praise of someone/something

Entropy

Lack of order or predictability

Dogma

A principle laid down by authority as incontrovertibly true

Epigones

Less distinguished followers or imitators of someone

Atavistic

From another time period

Carthoticism

Baptism through art

Bildungsroman

Type of novel concerned with education and development of a young protagonist

Sophrosyne

Painful journey a hero takes to reach self-actualization

Hubris

Greek tragedies in which one becomes over confident with excessive pride and arrogance

Ostensibly

Outwardly appearing as such; apparently

Salutary

Promoting health

Emulate

To try to equal or excel; imitate

Warrant

Justification; positive assurance

Despotism

Tyranny; absolute power or control

Test Strategies

· 5 Cannons of writing: invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery

· Triangle of Rhetoric:

· When reading a passage:

1. Identify author’s thesis, purposes, and audience

2. How did structure and organization help develop passage?

3. What’s the relationship between the different sections of the text

4. What’s his style? (Word choice, syntax, rhetorical strategies)

5. WHAT’S THE TONE?

· Arguing:

a. What: claim/assertion

b. How: literary tools

c. Why: exigencies/ purpose

d. Effective: evaluation

e. Relevancy: connection to R.O.E (Reading, Observation, Experience)

· Writing the essay:

· Your stance should be clear to the reader by the end of your introduction

· Blend golden lines (and quotes from the passage), but don’t over blend

· Try getting 5 paragraphs

· CITY EVERYTHING

· 3 ways: “quote” (Source A); paraphrase (Source A); give credit to source in initial position

· Multiple Choice Strategies:

· Look for things that are the same throughout the test

· EX: If they mention sarcasm in a question and that’s the answer, when they are asking for the tone it won’t be something like “somber”

· First answer the tone question, that will help with the other ones

· Then answer specific questions, that refer to line numbers

· Know all the AP Lang Vocab, so that questions that ask for rhetorical strategies will be easy

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