Golden Review

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:

SOPHIE’S WORLD

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:

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