“Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015” Analysis Essay As civilization advances, most of the people in society are uplifted by the development made. In a thousand years, we went from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and we are rapidly entering the digital age. But inevitably, there are people whom civilization has abandoned and exploited in order to advance this far. In his poem, “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015”, Craig Santos Perez dispels the preconceptions we hold about our society and reveals the horrors that we have either suppressed or neglected. He uses the Halloween scene to reveal how we have taken the atrocities that mankind has afflicted and relinquished. Through figurative language, imagery, and repetition, Perez …show more content…
For instance, in the text, it states “Let us praise the souls of Asian children whom manufacture toys and tech until gravity sharpens their bodies enough to cut through suicide nets.” In other words, Perez is saying that the working conditions are so severe that the employees,including adults and children, try to commit suicide to escape their miserable lives. The purpose of the nets is to prevent death, which can be totally avoided just by changing the type of working environment these people work in. The endless greed of humans yearning for new, improving technology is represented through the torture that these civilians face, mentally and physically, every single day of their miserable lives. We go on with our lives with reckless and negligent behavior without a thought of how our actions are and will affects those all around the world. Another example is “Let us praise El Nino, his growing pains, praise his mother, Ocean, who is dying in a warming bath among dead fish and refugee children. El Nino, a weather phenomenon is getting larger and more concerning while global warming is causing organisms to die due to the temperature changes. As the water level rises, islands are becoming flooded leaving refugees stranded in the ocean. All of these disastrous changes are due to the demand of advancement in civilization which includes the releasing of chemicals in the air …show more content…
For instance, Perez uses diminishing repetition, such as the Halloween rhyme “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.” Each time the rhyme is repeated, it becomes shorter and shorter to represent how our greed and nonstop need for improvement take away our moralities that we had built up throughout our lives bit by bit. As they fade, our lust will thrive with no limitations or boundaries held by the grasp of righteousness. He repeats the phrase “Praise the souls” in order to thank those who have suffered and died for greed and improvements. However, he is using a sarcastic tone because people in society have lost their moralities and take everything for granted. Without a second thought, we have cast aside the misery of others while untroubled by our actions. Another phrase that is repeated is “pray for us”. This is coming from all who have been sacrificed, including the mothers of asthma, cancer, miscarriage, lost habitats, fallout, and extinction. They are begging for someone to make a difference and help them. Nonetheless, they have all gone by unnoticed because society has lost their ethics due to greed and desire for advancement, so it will become infinite unless someone makes a
The author puts into light some of the daily horrors of these people. Some of these passages are horrific. The work conditions were anything but clean and safe. The poem touches on how the people were around chemicals, inhaling poison. He goes on about the dangers of going to the canning factories with no safety or labor restrictions. Even though work conditions were
The global climate changes have brought devastating geographical changes over the last century. With unfunded solutions and internal political conflicts driven by pure ignorance, our species has begun digging its own grave. Roy Scranton, author of “Learning how to Die in the Anthropocene”, has already begun contemplating the inevitable. By incaptivating his readers with his detailed description of his military past; he draws a parallel to the future he describes as inescapable. Using descriptive logic and overwhelming emotion, Scranton successfully convinces that in order to live in the new age us humans have forged, we must learn how to die.
While the poem's situation is simple, its theme is not. Stafford appears to be intimating that life is precious and fragile; however, nothing so clearly discloses these attributes of life as confrontation with death. Furthermore, the very confrontations that engender appreciation of life's delicacies force action-all to frequently callous action.
/ Innovate the trope, the metaphor?” In this stanza, Vallejo is using poetry to talk about poetry, which brings about aspects of a metapoem. In the first line, he brings to attention a hard-working laborer that obviously was working in dangerous conditions since he fell off the roof. By making this observation, Vallejo is making a comment on the dangerous workforce in Latin America and the disconcern people have for it. In the second line, Vallejo is asking the rhetorical question of why we should innovate the trope or the metaphor, when we should be more concerned with innovating the dangerous workforce and our concern for
M.T Anderson’s novel Feed gives readers a representation of a future dystopian world, one in which technology is not simply around us yet embedded inside our heads. Anderson gives a warning for our own society by drawing parallels between our society and the feed. As Anderson describes, "Everything's dead. Everything's dying." (Anderson 180). In this dystopian world, the environment turns into a disaster due to how rapidly technology is advancing, and this concept can relate to our society today. Indeed, society’s life has improved over the decades due to technological advances, however, it brings more damage to the earth.
Kurt Vonnegut's apocalyptic novel, Cat's Cradle, might well be called an intricate network of paradox and irony. It is with such irony and paradox that Vonnegut himself describes his work as "poisoning minds with humanity...to encourage them to make a better world" (The Vonnegut Statement 107). In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut does not tie his co-mingled plots into easy to digest bites as the short chapter structure of his story implies. Rather, he implores his reader to resolve the paradoxes and ironies of Cat's Cradle by simply allowing them to exist. By drawing our attention to the paradoxical nature of life, Vonnegut releases the reader from the necessity of creating meaning into a realm of infinite possibility. It appears that Vonnegut sees the impulse toward making a better world as fundamental to the human spirit; that when the obstacle of meaning is removed the reader, he supposes, will naturally improve the world.
Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction, short story, “Harrison Bergeron” satirizes the defective side of an ideal, utopian American society in 2081, where “everyone was finally equal” (Vonnegut 1). When you first begin to read “Harrison Bergeron”, through an objective, nonchalant voice of the narrator, nothing really overly suggests negativity, yet the conclusion and the narrator's subtle description of the events show how comically tragic it really is. Vonnegut’s use of morbid satire elicits a strong response from the readers as it makes you quickly realize that this scenario does not resemble a utopian society at all, but an oppressive, government and technology-controlled society. “A dystopian society is a
Modern society is different from a Dystopia because knowledge that is being withheld is turning the protagonists’ community into a dystopian approach, while our modern
Lines 8-10 implies that there is no cause just enough to kill a man. He says, “Our conviction is that human life is a very special possession given by God to man and that no one has the right to take it for any reason or for any cause, however just it may be.” In lines 71-72, Chavez uses repetition again stating, “When you lose your sense of life and justice, you lose your strength.” Chavez uses repetition in that sentence to emphasize that if you lose what sense you have of life and justice, then you will have no strength.
Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ rotates around the notion of our vision as humans being limited, and only being exposed to a certain extent of knowledge within our surroundings. The Allegory of the Cave presented a rare case where prisoners were trapped in a cave for all their lives with hands, neck and feet bound to look at a wall with shadows beings casted by a fire that lies behind them. Once a prisoner breaks free of the binds, his curiosity allows him to follow the light that then exposes him to the real world where he is blinded by the sun. Each of the elements in the allegory are symbols that can be related to modern day situations as metaphors. Though society has evolved drastically, many struggles that we face today resemble the allegory.
Trade” are not depicted in equal ways. In this piece, Trade is seen as a monstrous entity. Johnson first describes Trade as an Octopus that has “contaminated” the workers and prevents truthfulness (Lines 16-17). In the final stanza of the poem, Trade “stalks like a giant through the land” and upholds the wealthy while crushing those who are poor (Johnson Lines 29-32). In this poem, the bourgeoisie are not to be admired, but feared. They are depicted as being violent and deadly towards the members of the proletariat, while uplifting the wealthy class. On the other hand, the proletariat is the ones meant to have sympathy in this poem. Art has no source of protection form Trade, and is left dying in his grasp (Johnson Line 19). Art’s horrid treatment is meant to invoke sympathy for the proletariats and how they are treated in a capitalist
In the poem “The City of the End of Things” by Archibald Lampman, he paints an image of a dystopian and mechanical future. The theme of this poem is a prediction of the natural world's destruction and of the current industrialized future. Humans cannot live without nature, thus with the destruction of the natural world comes the downfall of humanity. Lampman wrote “Its roofs and iron towers have grown / None knoweth how high within the night”(9-10), which provokes a picture of a city that is ever growing, seemingly overnight.
...al of putting meaningful items inside the man before the burning. The burning cleanses the mind and lifts the weight from the body. But many believe that the popularity of this meaningful annual gathering is becoming tainted due to all of the mediocracy and global broadcasting of the once sacred utopia. Alicia Ludena states In Search of the Postmodern, “Postmodern theorists, however, claim that in the contemporary high tech media society, emergent processes of change and transformation are producing a new postmodern society”(Ludena).
Our Earth is dated around 4.5 billion years old. Homo Sapiens, 250,000 years ago. In this macrocosmic time frame, our recorded history spans a mere 5,000 years. This knowledge contextualizes the limited nature of present human cognizance. Understanding human folly and wider perspectives becomes necessary in analyzing Ben Singer’s work Melodrama and Modernity, as he attempts to define modernity in contrast to this universal antiquity. Singer portrays modernity as something fluid, saying “Modernity is ostensibly a temporal concept” (Singer 17). The truth is modernity is a pattern that transcends time. Singer fancies modernity as a straight line progressing from caveman to businessman. John Anthony West, an author and Egyptological researcher
On the surface the poem seems to be a meditation on past events and actions, a contemplative reflection about what has gone on before. Research into the poem informs us that the poem is written with a sense of irony