Gender Enlightenment in "The Cheater's Guide to Love" "Your girl catches you cheating" (Diaz 1) and from the first line readers are thrown into the chauvinistic tendencies and sexist point of view of one Yunior de Las Casas. Readers are guided through Junot Diaz’s “The Cheaters Guide to Love” by the misogynist Yunior who sees women in an exclusively sexual sense, some of whom he does not even give the honor of naming. Feminists might look at Diaz's story and be skeptical of the themes presented, seeing as Yunior sexualizes and demeans all women. So then, how can readers understand the story to be anti-sexist if the only point of view presented in "The Cheater's Guide to Love" is a discriminatory one? The ultimate horizon for anyone with this much bottled up machismo is an empty sexual relationship with a parade of objectified women. Diaz, however, does not give Yunior the what the reader expects as his desired ending. He rather shows the reader that Yunior's behavior results in persistent unhappiness because what he really wants is a true human connection. Therefore, Diaz provides a sexist character …show more content…
Each time he progresses physically an injury hinders him, just as how each time he progresses in a romantic way misogyny hinders him. In year three Yunior picks up running and becomes obsessed to keep his mind off the ex, but he suffers a foot injury that halts his progress physically and emotionally (7). Around the same time, he starts a relationship with Noemi, who excites Yunior, but he breaks up with her seeing as she won't sleep with him in the first three weeks of the relationship (5). His inability to see progress in both his physical training and his relationship cause him to shortsightedly end both and thus his chauvinism ends the first interpersonal relationship since his ex that held any possibility of
Prompt #3: “Most often, literary works have both internal conflict (individual v. self) and external conflict (individual v. individual, society, nature, or technology)”.
"Love in L.A.," written by Dagoberto Gilb, is a story full of irony and multiple themes. The story is set in Hollywood during the summer time. Written in third person objective, "Love in L.A." guides the reader along through the story as opposed to an omniscient point of view.
Imagine a time where every detail about your life (credit score, personality ranking, “hotness” ranking, etc.) was available to anybody around you through something similar to the present-day iPhone. Now imagine this world being reality. In Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, this idea is reality. Everybody in the world has an äppäräti, and everybody knows everything about one another. But is knowing everything about your friends and neighbors really a good thing, especially when the world around you is crumbling because of this knowledge? Perhaps it isn’t. As Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, once said, “In all affairs, love, religion, politics, or business, it’s a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.” The relationship between Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, the main characters of Super Sad True Love Story, could have used a question mark on how culture, media, business, and technology impacted their personal relationships throughout the book.
“The Faithful Wife”, written by Barbara L. Greenberg, uses first-person narration to depict the style, language, and theme of the poem. By using first-person narration, Barbara Greenberg was able to portray events and ideas very persuasively to the reader. In addition, this first-person narrator creates dramatic irony concerning the title in reference to the body of the poem.
Love is unpredictable. Love is sporadic. Love is complete craziness. There really is no rulebook on how to find love or how to be in love. There is also no warning that informs anyone of when love is going to sneak up on them. It is so important to be attentive in all scenarios and encounters because a connection can form under any circumstance and once words are said, there is no taking them back. Imagine a world with a reset button. A world where anytime you say the wrong words, you can go back in time during the middle of a conversation and correct what was wrongly said. In the short one-act play by David Ives, a relationship between two young individuals is built and rebuilt several times on behalf of a bell. Although the play is brief, Sure Thing resembles various pathways and ideas of how human beings individually interpret love and how maybe, just maybe, it is all based entirely on timing. Timing can be the greatest blessing or the worst form of fate. In this specific case, the timing had to be right before the possibility of true love could surface.
The short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver, is about two married couples drinking gin and having a talk about the nature of love. The conversation is a little sloppy, and the characters make some comments which could either be meaningless because of excessive alcohol in the bloodstream, or could be the characters' true feelings because of excessive alcohol in the bloodstream. Overall, the author uses this conversation to show that when a relationship first begins, the people involved may have misconceptions about their love, but this love will eventually die off or develop into something much more meaningful.
In "The Rules of the Game," a short story about a young Chinese-American girl, Waverly Jong, embarks journey to become a chess master. Waverly's mother believes she is a key component during this journey. Even though the mother actually has no true role in Waverly's adventure, she continues to believe it is her as the one who is succeeding. This belief is a necessity for Waverly's mother because she has nothing for herself. Waverly's mother has to live through her daughter because of her own lack of success.
The Rules is quite possibly one of the greatest marketing ploys to have ever been created and has developed into in its own words "a creature unlike any other." By successfully exploiting the classic notion of "happily ever after," Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider have created a mega brand that has sold millions of dollars of nonsensical teachings to unsuspecting women for more than a decade. I call these teachings nonsensical not because they aren't effective, but because of, among other things, Fein and Schneider's lack of authority, a number of glaring contradictions, inappropriate use of cause and effect, and an overall lack of evidence to support their arguments.
“Without Conscience" by Robert D. Hare is one aimed towards making the general public aware of the many psychopaths that inhabit the world we live in. Throughout the book Hare exposes the reader to a number of short stories; all with an emphasis on a characteristic of psychopaths. Hare makes the claim that close monitoring of psychopathy are vital if we ever hope to gain a hold over Psychopathy- A disorder that affects not only the individual but also society itself. He also indicates one of the reasons for this book is order to correctly treat these individuals we have to be able to correctly identify who meets the criteria. His ultimate goal with the text is to alleviate some of the confusion in the increase in criminal activity by determining how my of this is a result of Psychopathy.
Common sense seems to dictate that commercials just advertise products. But in reality, advertising is a multi-headed beast that targets specific genders, races, ages, etc. In “Men’s Men & Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig focuses on one head of the beast: gender. Craig suggests that, “Advertisers . . . portray different images to men and women in order to exploit the different deep seated motivations and anxieties connected to gender identity.” In other words, advertisers manipulate consumers’ fantasies to sell their product. In this essay, I will be analyzing four different commercials that focuses on appealing to specific genders.
In the short story “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” by Junot Diaz, the author pinpoints on the Yunior’s life as a writer and college professor who is also struggling with his romantic relationships. The short story is filled with his experiences of using women for his beneficial needs and how it negatively affects him. It focuses on Yunior’s downfall through life after the destruction of his relationship with his fiance. The diction includes the narrator’s hateful consideration of women and a paradox of his own endeavors which prevent him from pursuing a meaningful relationship, but he grows to realize that he treats women awfully and his ex did the right thing by leaving him due to his untruthfulness.
Yunior struggles with his exposure to male privilege in a Dominican family, as he is very sensitive. Yunior can not fully comprehend why men took actions that women didn’t attempt to do. For example, Papi made all the decisions in the family. “She and tío Miguel got themselves an apartment in the Bronx, off Grand Concourse and everybody decided that we should have a party. Actually, my pops decided...” (306). Papi decided that a party was obligatory to be thrown for their arrival, but not as his expense or home; Tia and Tío hosted it, despite it being Papi’s decision. Male privilege is shown in the way “the women laid out the food and like always nobody but the kids thanked them. It must be some Dominican tradition or something” (312). Instead of having both men and women lay the food, it is only the women’s job. Helping with the preparations is not their responsibility, nor is showing appreciation with a genuine thank you. Junot Diaz gives a personal example on his family in his
In today’s society, the notion and belief of growing old, getting married, having kids, and a maintaining of a happy family, seems to be a common value among most people. In Kevin Brockmeier’s short story, “The Ceiling,” Brockmeier implies that marriage is not necessary in our society. In fact, Brockmeier criticizes the belief of marriage in his literary work. Brockmeier reveals that marriage usually leads to or ends in disaster, specifically, all marriages are doomed to fail from the start. Throughout the story, the male protagonist, the husband, becomes more and more separated from his wife. As the tension increases between the protagonist and his wife, Brockmeier symbolizes a failing marriage between the husband and wife as he depicts the ceiling in the sky closing upon the town in which they live, and eventually crushing the town entirely as a whole.
For my honors assignment, I chose the TED talk “The secret to desire in a long-term relationship” by couple’s therapist Esther Perel. As I read down the list through my options for the assignment write up, this one caught my attention right away. I feel as though this article specifically lured me in because I could relate to it the most, taking that I have been in a long-term relationship for seven years. I felt that choosing to write about this TED talk would be beneficial to me in hearing what Esther Perel had to say on the topic that may affect someone just like me, and to also connect to all that we have learned in FSHD 237 this semester.
Janice A. Radway teaches in the literature program at Duke University. Before moving to Duke, she taught in the American Civilization Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She says that her teaching and research interests include the history of books and literary production in the United States, together with the history of reading and consumer culture, particularly as they bear on the lives of women. Radway also teaches cultural studies and feminist theory. A writer for Chronicle of Higher Education described Radway as "one of the leaders in the booming interdisciplinary field of cultural studies." Her first book, Reading the Romance (1984) has sold more than 30,00 copies in two editions. Her second book, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire appeared in October of 1997. What follows is a topic-outline of the introduction to the English version of her first book.