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Literature Is A Mirror That Reflects Culture
How literature shapes culture
Literature Is A Mirror That Reflects Culture
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The Absolut Advertising Campaign
Texts are political. Political in the sense that they produce messages that carry specific ideas and beliefs targeted toward a certain thinking body of people. A familiar phrase in America is, “art imitates life.” It defines life as essential to art, but can we say the reverse? Could life imitate art? The semantics of the phrase seem too ambiguous for such a statement. What is the definition of art, of life? The phrase suggests that art reinforces cultural and social beliefs by using the verb imitate. If art imitates life, then life imitates art. The verb is reflexive and positioned in the middle of the two words it is reflecting. It is true then, the language speaks for itself, and this political statement can be used as a tool to find the underlying cultural belief within a text.
How is this theory that art imitates life, and life imitates art, applicable? Having this theory in mind while reading a text creates awareness that the art is imitating a larger cultural belief. It is easy to be fooled by many texts because the cultural and social myths they promote are not conveyed on the surface. Media advertising is a good example to use with this theory for two reasons: first, media art caters to a broad diverse audience; and second, it is easily accessible and we see it everywhere: on television, in magazines, posters, and on billboards. When only one concept is produced by a text, usually a surface idea, it provides the reader with what has been termed a “confusion of consciousness.”[1] This is defined as a reader clearly not receiving the entire directive of the text and instead accepting a limited subjective message. Texts are political because they exemplify cultural a...
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... as well as a socially important idea. The theory art imitates life and life imitates art reveals important connections between literary structures and cultural beliefs. Media literature is mirroring important parts of American life and selling the images back with a product attached. However, the cultural and social myths that are being promoted are not always evident on the surface of the text. A new movement to read media literature critically has begun. As the emerging way to view texts is reading them deconstructively, we must promote other critical approaches that allow a more open translation of literature and provide balance to the political act of reading.
Notes:
1. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Micheal. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
2. Hamilton, Carl. Biography of a Bottle. New York, NY: Texere, 2000.
The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and England. Ending in 1815 with the Treaty of Ghent, the war did not accomplish any of the issues it was being fought over. For the US, the War of 1812 seemed to just be one failure after another. Although the military suffered great failure during the war, these were the direct consequence of the failure of the citizens to unite for the causes of the war. Because of these failures, it is quite valid to call the War of 1812 "America's worst-fought war".
The most basic premise of this chapter is that works that are categorized within the adaptation and/or appropriation genre are inherently political, simply by the nature of their production. In other words, it might be simpler to say that original works of literature, in the case of this discussion particularly those from the literary canon, are often products of the culture they are written within. The author cannot help but to exert their own ideological agenda upon the text, though it is a job left to the reader to locate and interpret the clues to the agenda that are left in between the lines. The development of an adaptation is an extension of that process. By reinterpreting a text, for the sake of making significant alteration to the
The purpose of any text is to convey the criticisms of society, with V for Vendetta and Animal Farm being chief examples of this statement. Through their use of allusion, symbolism and representation, they portray many of society's flaws and imperfections. Such an imperfection includes the illustration of how totalitarian governments abuse the power they have acquired for their own gain, harming the people they are sworn to serve and protect. Through this abusive self-gaining government, we all are liable to become victims of consumer culture caused by the blind obedience to advertising and propaganda, being unable to form or voice an opinion of our own. But this lack of opinion can be at fault because of our own apathy, the ignorance and slothfulness that is contributed to the role we play in our society and the importance of that role's ability to motivate and inspire change.
Although America did not win The War of 1812, due to the Battle of Lake Erie, they did not lose it. The war was caused by the impressment of American soldiers, blockades on American trade, and Indian slaughters on the American frontier. James Madison launched The War of 1812 so that the United States would not be taken advantage of, but by doing so, he took on an army fifty times bigger than his own. When it looked like America would lose the war, Oliver Hazard Perry turned the tables and won the deciding battle that allowed James Monroe to sign the Treaty of Ghent and bring peace to the two countries. Although the original conflicts were not solved, they dissipated over time. The War of 1812 may not have solved many problems, but it proved to American’s that they could stand together and prevail over injustice.
Heberle, Mark. "Contemporary Literary Criticism." O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Vol. 74. New York, 2001. 312.
Books are more than simple stories, they have a message to send, whether it be in a direct or indirect way. Books can also tell us about the author’s life, beliefs, inner ambitions and fears; Moreover, they often project the writer’s vision about their environment, reflecting their society in which they lived. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernesto Guevara were capable, not only of portraying the society in which they are immerse, but also to convey them in an exquisite social critique. Such literary pieces of art do not criticize in a direct way, nor to specific people or events. They, however, present the vision of the author’s concern with social issues of injustice, misguided values and loss of direction.
Rice, Philip. and Patricia Waugh, eds. Modern Literary Theory. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP,
Booth, Alison, and Kelly Mays, eds. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2010.
Shortly after the Second World War, the economy of Japan started to revive. Then, Japan had entered a period of high-speed development. However, with the bursting of bubble economy, Japan’s economy had experienced a great recession. This essay intends to make clear the emergence of the bubble economy and why Japan recovers so slowly.
Selden, Raman, and Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide To Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993.
Abrams M. H, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. New York: W. Norton & Company, 2000.
“The United States had been upset with British for several reasons. British failed to withdraw from American territory along the Great Lakes despite United States victory during the Revolutionary war. British military allegedly supported the Indians on American frontier; and their unwillingness to sign commercial agreements favorable to the United States.” American resentment grew during the United Kingdom’s ongoing war with Napoleon’s France. France had domination over the continent of Europe, while Britain had power over the seas. This affected many countries, and it particularly affected America’s trade.
First, fears about employment prospects, future pension plans, and the sharp rise in government deficits are obviously restraining an economic turnaround. These fears are attributable to eroding sustainability in the Japanese-style wage and employment systems and the generous social security system. To cope with the situation, provisions of renewed safety nets are urgently needed. Furthermore, the rising fiscal deficits are restraining economic upturn by making people serious about future tax hikes and raising long-term interest rates. Measures to restore government fiscal balances in the medium and long term are also required.
When analyzing artwork, in any form, there are often times social contexts in which can be interpreted. Not always does the history behind the painting need to be revealed to fully understand the concept of the artwork, yet it is helpful in determining if the artwork is truthful in its representation. Although in analyzing artwork it is likely that there are drawbacks to considering the social context. To illustrate this point, I'm going to use the visual arts as my medium of choice. Understanding the social context can be an important tool. An advantage of knowing the history of the painting or sculpture can really enrich our knowledge, being in the 21st century, about some of the social periods from previous times. It can demonstrate how traditions were carried out, how they had an impact on the different social classes. It's a visual teaching aid of a sort. Even in the time period of which the artwork was created can be used as a tool to show how the life was in different parts of the world. It was also used as a hammer in the realist movement to show the upper classes that life for the poor was horrible. The visual arts is the only medium in which the pictorial image creates a universal language in which anyone, regardless of nationality or social class can interpret. The text which is created by this language often creates a context which is left open to interpretation. Contexts are created by the artist, critics, judges, the public, essentially, any one who views the work and forms an opinion relating to it. The contexts stem from subject or content of an artwork, and are usually facts regarding the content. Yet, the contexts almost always have backgrounds themselves, therefore making the original contexts, texts. This will be more clearly illustrated later. The chain is seeming to be a never ending process. There are always more conditions to the previous ones. All context, therefore, is in itself, textual. This concept of all context in itself textual is a post-structuralist strategy. A man named Derrida is a man who has developed this idea that the post-structuralist concept of every statement made, can be interpreted in infinite ways, with each interpretation triggering a range of subjective associations. Every statement has an association, therefore it's a sort of domino effect.
When we interpret a text, we bring our own hopes, fears, joys and beliefs to the forefront, despite our claims of intellectual objectivity, and what is at stake is not just an evaluation of the work itself, but often an evaluation of our political, social, psychological and emotional identities. What we see or read into a text can become a kind of experiment, a literary depiction of the way we see, or would like to see, and interpret ourselves and our world. Often, in the course of interpreting, we feel compelled to name and label both writer and text in order to talk about them in ways that make sense to us, and in order to pinpoint them in relation to ourselves. When we label anything, we attempt to control or own it; we assign values or a set of rules to that person or object. What is lost in that process...