In “Summer Elegies II” from Arkansas Testament, Derek Walcott, in a sort of epiphany mood, recollects the speaker uncovering each facade that makes up Los Angeles, California after visiting Venice Beach. To expose LA as a superficial city capable of deceiving people to assume otherwise, Walcott establishes the speaker’s negative stance regarding the City of Angels through motifs, diction, and allusions as he addresses Cynthia. Thus, Walton discourages holding Los Angeles to a high esteem, thereby freeing those who can never achieve the glamorous lifestyle the city falsely portrays. To begin, Walcott paints the city as deceitful by including a “light” motif throughout the entirety of the speaker’s recollection. Opening the first stanza, the speaker describes “the wincing light of Los Angeles” to suggest that this overwhelming flash blinds those in LA in turn hindering them from recognizing the fallacy thereby resulting in utter deception (2). Finally, the speaker, suggesting that people should refrain from succumbing to the alluring facade, realizes that he should’ve “made light of the light of Los Angeles” (32). More explicitly, Walcott continues to establish the speaker’s animosity for the superficial city through his dismal …show more content…
Finding “more pain in a pop song”, for instance, than “all of Cambodia”, one of the poorest nations in the world, the speaker attacks the city’s privileged residents for being too consumed by their own lifestyles to concern themselves with issues outside of their first-world bubble (27). In fact, their obsession with “love” for the city comes “before any pain” even “Chernobyl, a mass murder”, thus implying that those in Los Angeles turn a blind eye to any negativity that could potentially disrupt their bliss lifestyle, built entirely on forgery
Saunders utilizes different the themes of violence, fate, and dependence to reflect contemporary U.S. life under neoliberalism and capitalism. He emphasizes the ‘absence’ of compassionate and essential humanistic traits in order to highlight the decline of such aspects of humanity because of our selfish desires for materialistic goods.
Los Angeles is a place with a dynamic history. It has grown to be one of the most diverse cities in the world as a whole. Despite the diversity for which it is known for, the city has always had a striving conflict due to racial and class tension. The social stratification of its past continues to take its toll as dividing lines persist in contemporary Los Angeles. Furthermore, these dividing lines redefine place in Los Angeles, whether geographically or personally, to be subject to race and class. Fluidity has become evident recently however it is more common for the identity of people to be fixed in society. Through the novel Southland, by Nina Revoyr, and various means of academic sources, one is further able to explore the subject of race, place, and reinvention in Los Angeles.
Dagoberto Gilb was born in Los Angeles in 1950. A mix of gritty humor, mundane terror, and economic misfortune distinguishes his short stories. His life has been neither easy nor subdued, and these influences are reflected in his writing style and choice of subject matter. The short story entitled “Love in L.A.,” by Dagoberto Gilb, shows how one can see many reasons in seeing irony and even satire by the story’s title and how all is stories combine in someway.
When the public begins to believe and accept that the poor are less than human, horrible atrocities can be committed against them without anyone taking notice; this allows the government complete control over their livelihoods and enables them to silence anyone who might cause a disruption. In the poverty-stricken areas of Los Angeles and La Joya, the people take on an almost untouchable quality. The homeless of Los Angeles are forced from their encampments and displaced; they are treated like pests that need to be removed. The Mayor takes on the Los Angeles government in various lawsuits, but because he is poor and cannot afford a lawyer to match the city’s high profile defense attorneys, he has no real chance of ever triumphing. As the Mayor also notes, the $297 he receives is only enough to maintain his poverty, not to help bring him out of it. The government, scared of political movements beginning with the poor, seeks to keep them disenfranchised and politically inactive so they cannot pose a threat to the capitalistic system. Meanwhile, the people in La Joya live in squalor and are poisoned by their own government’s dumping of garbage up-river from them. Their babies constantly die and no one, save for their parents, care, however, Elena, within a few hours of reading and poking around discovers the cause of the babies’ deaths. Her attempts to alert the government to the poisoning receives no thanks, but are rather seen as a threat to the government. Elena’s attempts at political activism are silenced before she can really make any difference, meaning that the people of the La Joya slums will continue losing babies and getting ill. They cannot fight for their own rights because they are uneducated and those who try to help them are murdered. This callousness toward the
In 2013, Philip Schultz spins “Greed”, an intricate piece of literature allowing readers to superficially experience the struggle of racial injustice; however, as one dives deeper between Schultz’s lines, the oceanside town’s complexity becomes apparent. Through the eyes of a wealthy son of a poor man, Schultz explores the relationship between greed and “happiness,” causing his narrator to question who is deserving of the fleeting feeling that possesses many forms. Although the narrator appears to advocate for equality, his voice is drowned out by the deafening silence greed emits as for he struggles to reject the wealth he allows himself to wallow in; thus, the narrator emphasizes the control “abundance” possesses over happiness (Schultz
In Joan Didion’s essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion recounts her numerous experiences and observations with people of multiple ideals and personalities within San Francisco, California during the 1960’s. During this time period, San Francisco arose as a renowned counterculture center. It attracted specifically young people from all over the United States who were seeking to detract themselves from the conventional society that took place in households throughout America. Didion decides to take part in this counterculture movement as well, however not as a participant but rather as an observer. The result is an essay documenting a rather harsh, disturbing society contrary to the popular image being portrayed by those in support of the movement taking America by storm. Rather than promoting the movement within San Francisco similar to what other media figures were doing, Didion uses syntax and diction to portray a straightforward view of the events occurring in addition to creating detail through her interpretation of people’s thoughts. Didion uniquely frames tension throughout the essay around instances of people exemplifying hypocrisy to further emphasize her contrary observations of the movement taking place within San Francisco, California.
According to Raymond Williams, “In a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes …” (Rice and Waugh 122). His work titled, Marxism and Literature expounded on the conflict between social classes to bridge the political ideals of Marxism with the implicit comments rendered through the text of a novel. “For the practical links,” he states “between ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’ and the ‘production of real life’ are all in this material social process of signification itself” (133). Williams asserts that a Marxist approach to literature introduces a cross-cultural universality, ensuingly adding a timeless value to text by connecting creative and artistic processes with the material products that result. Like Williams, Don DeLillo calls attention to the economic and material relations behind universal abstractions such as aesthetics, love, and death. DeLillo’s White Noise brings modern-day capitalist societies’ incessant lifestyle disparity between active consumerists and those without the means to the forefront of the story’s plot. DeLillo’s setting uses a life altering man-made disaster in the suburban small-town of Blacksmith to shed light on the class conflict between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the working poor (proletariat). After a tank car is punctured, an ominous cloud begins to loom over Jack Gladney and his family. No longer a feathery plume or a black billowing cloud, but the airborne toxic event—an event that even after its conclusion Jack cannot escape the prophecy of his encroaching death. Through a Marxist reading of the characterization of Jack Gladney, a middle-aged suburban college professor, it is clear that the overarching obsession with death operates as an...
...dull, heavy labor,” West writes of the transplanted Midwesterner, “Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynching, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars… They have been cheated and betrayed” (West 177-178). The riot at the gala premier at the end of the novel is their revenge on the false promises of movies.
Just look at the quote I gave you earlier: “Brooklyn, New York, as the undefined, hard-to–remember the shape of a stain.” He sees it as nothing but a stain on the map. He goes on to talk about “…the sludge at the bottom of the canal causes it to bubble.” Giving us something we can see, something we can hear because you can just imagine being near the canal and hearing the sludge bubble make their popping noises as the gas is released. He “The train sounds different – lighter, quieter—in the open air,” when it comes from underground and the sight he sees on the rooftops. Although some are negative, such as the sagging of roofs and graffiti, his tone towards the moment seems to be admiration. In the second section, he talks about the smells of Brooklyn and the taste of food. He’d talk about how his daughter compares the tastes of pizzas with her “…stern judgments of pizza. Low end… New Hampshire pizza. … In the middle… zoo pizza. …very top… two blocks from our house,” and different it was where he’d grown up. He talks about the immense amount of “smells in Brooklyn: Coffee, fingernail polish, eucalyptus…” and how other might hate it, but he enjoys it. In the same section, he describes how he enjoys the Brooklyn accent and the noise and smells that other people make on the streets and at the park across from his house. “Charcoal smoke drifts into the
In Blake's poem he says that as he passes through London he sees a "mark in every face [he] meet[s]/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe." (3-4) He talks about how everywhere he hears cries of fear and suppression. The church seems to be ignoring the cry of the poor chimney-sweep in lines nine and ten. The soldier dies on the palace walls with a sigh. These are examples of the wretchedness of the lives that people lead. The central ide...
The Joad’s family lived in Oklahoma during the 1930s, and this identity of them has brought them many misfortune. Being in Oklahoma caused them to suffer the dust bowl, resulting them to loose their homes and jobs. Another result of them being in Oklahoma is being rejected by California. Because of the dust bowl, many people from Oklahoma migrates to California, it creates a general stereotype of Oklahoman, or Okie, being poor and taking up all the jobs, causing people in California dehumanizing and reject Oklahomans such as Joad’s family. According to Steinbeck, “ [w]ell, Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re dirty son-of-a-bitch, Okie means you’re scum(Steinbeck 215).” This shows how people in California viewed people from Oklahoma with a bad stereotype, dehumanizing them just with their identity of being from Oklahoma. Being in Oklahoma is shaped by the bourgeoisie class, by geographic segregation. The bourgeoisie will want to live with the bourgeoisie, rather than proletarians, so they repels them, resulting bourgeoisies and proletarians to live in different places, such as California and Texas. Citing to Benjamin Forman about geographic segregation , “[t]he clustering of rich and poor into separate neighborhoods may have been a largely unavoidable symptom of the growing income gulf between rich and poor(Forman).” This shows how the bourgeoisies will live away from the
In Don DeLillo's satirical novel White Noise, we become acquainted with what we might call a "postmodern family" - a group of people loosely bound together by birth, marriage, and common residence. But as we observe this family, we notice that the bonds between them are strained at best, and that their lives have been taken over by some insidious new force. This force is popular culture. For better or worse, pop culture has infiltrated the lives of our fictional family just as it has the lives of real human beings. DeLillo's purpose in the book is best illuminated by Heinrich's comment after the airborne toxic event: "The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day." In other words, DeLillo states that popular culture is ruining - or, perhaps, has ruined - us all.
?London? is a poem of serious social satire directed against social institutions. According to Blake author Michael Phillips ?it is a poem whose moral realism is so severe that it is raised to the intensity of apocalyptic vision.? Blake becomes more specific in his descriptions of the prevalent evil and moral decay of society as the poem progresses. Blake?s informative nature is clearly evident in ?London? as he ?points the finger? and exposes powerful institutions.
To begin, the reader may gather that the poem has a very dark and saddened tone. Due to Lowell's vivid imagery, a mental image of a dark urban setting is created. It also seems very cold, with the mentioning of wind and nighttime. Readers may be able to relate to urban places they know, adding to the reality of the poem. Connections can be made. The imagery is left in such a way that the reader can fill in the gaps with their own memories or settings. Also, since the poem uses free verse, the structure is left open to interpretation. This makes the poem more inviting and easier to interpret, rather than reading it as a riddle. However, though simple in imagery, the poem still captures the reader's interest due to the creation it sparks, yet it never strays away from the theme of bei...
Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is a novel of exploration: it explores what it means to be oppressed or to oppress and the importance of virtue in the face of wickedness and iniquity. Dickens also explores the concept of identity and its ability to be transformed. In the novel, these transformations of identity can come from a place of light, or love, or the darkness of hatred. In the case of Dr. Alexandre Manette and Sydney Carton, the reconstruction of their identities results from the love they feel towards Lucie and, in turn, the compassion she feels towards them. For the poor and downtrodden people of France, their individuality is deconstructed and reconstructed into a single identity that reflects the darkness and anger within