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Social norms and their consequences on society
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Have you ever asked yourself the question, if I died today, would anyone notice or care? People live life just as another part of society, operating in the normal standards of society and being complacent with their overall life. In today’s society people think that they are special, but the truth is that people are at the hands of the next persons ideas. I am saying that we only do what others consider to be normal and we do not do certain things for fear of being judged or/and ridiculed. We make decisions based on other people’s opinions only to be considered in the norm and to be socially accepted. Because of this, society has drowned out some of its dreamers in the world and as time passes it is getting worse. Though “the norm” is considered alright, what are the repercussions of this stigma? Throughout the poem “Not waving but screaming” written by Stevie Smith, a man shows how blind society is to a man who is dying in …show more content…
As the man is in the water, he is thrashing around and slowly drowning, but to society he is conveying a different …show more content…
He begins to thrash and yell but no one recognizes what is actually happening. He is slowly drowning and people are thinking that he is having fun and enjoying himself in the water. As he is dying he looks back and reflects on how his life has basically been a lonely journey. Looking at the setting, I also have noticed that people may also be hiding the truth of what they are actually feeling like. Everyone is seeing a beautiful beach and a man is enjoying its luxuries, but to him the beach is a cruel place where his is slowly losing his life. The tone the poem has affects your senses, almost making you feel what the man felt. The tone of this poem effects the senses making a person feel what the man in the story
The informal language and intimacy of the poem are two techniques the poet uses to convey his message to his audience. He speaks openly and simply, as if he is talking to a close friend. The language is full of slang, two-word sentences, and rambling thoughts; all of which are aspects of conversations between two people who know each other well. The fact that none of the lines ryhme adds to the idea of an ordinary conversation, because most people do not speak in verse. The tone of the poem is rambling and gives the impression that the speaker is thinking and jumping from one thought to the next very quickly. His outside actions of touching the wall and looking at all the names are causing him to react internally. He is remembering the past and is attempting to suppress the emotions that are rising within him.
Having written a multitude of short stories and novels, author, John Cheever, has showcased his incredible writing abilities multiple times throughout his career. Even as a child, Cheever outwardly expressed his desire to write. As proven by his longstanding career, Cheever’s thirst for writing remained with him throughout his entire life. In perhaps his most famous piece of work, “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s impeccable writing ability is showcased brilliantly. Although originally set out to be a novel, “The Swimmer” has grown to become a widely recognized and analyzed short story, one which both readers and literary critics alike admire. By drawing on his personal life and by using a wide range of writing techniques, Cheever depicts and documents the protagonist Neddy’s physical and mental demise and journey towards death, while still relating the plot to many other works. In doing so, Cheever ultimately addresses the negative side of the human condition.
The objective of norm in American, by Michael Schudson, explores how and why the objective norms developed in American journalism. Objective is one of the most important occupational values of American journalism, it can be identified by following measures: express allegiance, ethnographers’ observations and occupational routines, resist with the challenging behaviour, impersonality and non-partisanship in news content. Differencing from some scholars’ opinions that economic and technological change enhances the ethic of objective, Schudson thinks four conditions encourage the articulation of norms. Two of them are Durkheimian, the other two are Weberian. One of the Durkheimian conditions thinks the emergence of norm is to achieve horizontal solidarity, another Durkheimian condition find the norm is used to identify the group from other groups. Both Durkheimian conditions are concluded as social cohesion. The Weberian conditions find norm is not appear abruptly, they are transfer from the old generation, who were benefit from these rules, to the young generation. It is the tool for the superiors to control subordinates in a complex organization. Weberian condition is to satisfy the need of social control. By discussing the history of American journalism development, this essay outlining the emergence of these four conditions in the late 19th and early 20th century. By doing so, the author found the reason why a new moral norm appeared in American journalism. Compared with European journalism, this article discusses why objectivity as a norm first and most fully appears in American instead of Europe.
...tand the theme that life goes on. He also displays examples of irony and imagery, but still manages to keep the reader wondering what was really going on. Was the poem a description of the conversation between a deceased man and his friend whom was still alive, or was it the guilty conscious mind of the friend still alive?
Much of the texts have a deeper meaning about death. Clearly, by the use of personification, the author presents an imaginary mysterious traveler who leaves the shoreline and leaves the life as a past memory. One can sense the sad mood on the note. However, even with the person leaving that life, the shore is still much alive while the soul lives in a spiritual sense in another wild though in a definite natural sense. Therefore, it is ultimately a sad reality of what life awaits us in the end but the envisaged life as a cycle; the poem offers hope to humanity that we can still overcome challenges and we are only required to accept the realities and accept there is time for everything just as the tide rises and tide falls at their own moment.
The tone of this poem is very dark, with is shown with words such as “grim” (Mcfee, 11), and “graves” (Mcfee, 12). These words are used to show the defeat the protagonist faces in his battle with himself. He can no longer stand living his repetitive lifestyle, in which he has lost his ability to love himself. Moreover, this enhances the theme of a midlife crisis through the use of depressing language. Mcfee writes, “belly’s cambium/ expanding to match each birthday” (6-7) to show how the protagonist is comparing his body to a tree. Cambium describes the addition of rings to woody plants. This shows how the protagonist is dehumanizing himself and can only view himself in terms of how he looks. As he grows older, he feels he grows more and more unattractive due to the excess of weight he is carrying. In addition, as the poem progresses, the language become more and more dark, similarly to his life. Mcfee writes, “stars collapsing on themselves” (13) which symbolizes the narrators loss of hope. It can also represent him physically collapsing from the weight he has to carry both physically and
Literature offers insight on different interpretations of how death can be perceived depending on the environment one is raised in. Perceptions of death depend on where and when you grow up, and your social standing in society. This is conveyed in literature by not only by the time period of the piece of literature, but from the point of view of the reader. Literature reveals different types of scenarios in which death is perceived differently, including questions of racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.
It is 9:00 PM on a Sunday night. Televisions all across America tune into MTV. Millions of viewers will now spend the next thirty minutes watching a television program titled 'Jackass'. While watching this program, the viewers will observe everything from people eating hard boiled eggs in an attempt to purposely vomit, to a man testing out various self defense devices on himself. Next week viewers will tune into the same program to see the same kinds of stunts performed. The reason that America watches these kinds of programs, and the participants in them perform these stunts, are because 'norms' are being broken. A norm is something that is generally accepted by a society as the right thing to do, or the way things are supposed to be. For example, a norm would be to enter an elevator and stand facing the front for the duration of the trip. Breaking that norm would be to enter the elevator and face the back for the duration of the trip. It is not what is expected. Different norms exist in different societies, and when these norms are broken within these societies people pay attention, because it is not an occurrence observed on a regular basis.
One must look at this poem and imagine what is like to live thru this experience of becoming so tired of expecting to die everyday on the battlefield, that one starts to welcome it in order to escape the anticipation. The effects of living day in and day out in such a manner creates a person who either has lost the fear of death or has become so frighten of how they once lived the compensate for it later by living a guarded life. The one who loses the fear for death ends up with this way of living in which they only feel alive when faced with death. The person in this poem is one who has lost their fear of death, and now thrives off coming close to it he expresses it when he states “Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture” (LL.6-7). What happens to this persona when he leaves the battlefield? He pushes the limit trying to come close to death to feel alive; until they push
Back in my high school days, a friend of mine asked me a simple question which shut down my thought process completely. The question was, ‘What is stopping us from punching the next person that says something?’ Paused for a while looking around the class for a logical answer. After several blinks off to space I responded values. The answer of values literally came out of the blue. For a well educated guess I was not too far off. Politically speaking norms are the reason we chose whether to do something or not, with a combination of values of course. Norms are defined as shared rules of conduct that specify what people ought or ought not do in specific settings. Everyday people violate many norms both knowingly and unknowingly. For example:
The setting of the poem is a day at the ocean with the family that goes terribly awry. This could be considered an example of irony, in that one would normally view a day at the beach as a happy and carefree time. In “Feared Drowned,” Olds paints a very different scenario, using dark imagery to create the setting: “…suit black as seaweed / Rocks sticks out near shore like heads.” The poem illuminates moments of intense fear, anxiety and the element of a foreseen sense of doom. Written as a direct, free-style verse using the first-person narrative, the poem opens with the narrator suspecting that her husband may have drowned. When Olds writes in her opening line: “Suddenly nobody knows where you are,” this signals to the reader that we are with the narrator as she makes this fearful discovery.
Everyone is judged. It does not matter who they are or what they do with their lives, somebody somewhere makes an assumption about them based on appearances. Peter, the main focus of Mark Doty’s poem “Tiara”, was a cross-dresser. Being outside of the “social norm” made Peter an easy target for bullying and judgment. He was not normal in the slightest, but no one really is. Yet, society expects people to conform to this idea of what people really should be. No one honestly fits that mold, especially not Peter. People could never get over the fact that he was different. He was constantly ridiculed and made fun of. His only escape from all that was death, as sad as that is. His life had to end just so he could be happy. Death brings a place of acceptance, something Peter has never experienced before. The speaker, a spectator at Peter’s funeral, hears snide comments still being thrown toward the deceased. People were saying that Peter deserved to die and that he was asking for it. The voice of the paper then points out that an afterlife of acceptance is better than a life of being an outsider. The theme of “Tiara” by Mark Doty is death is an escape from the judgment of people on Earth.
The norms and values have changed in marriage over time. Also norms and values have changed in gender roles by men and women being able to do the same things. Lastly they have changed in race relations to where all races are allowed to be together. Overall societal values and norms have evolved in marriage, gender roles and race relations.
The most obvious literary device used to lighten the tone is rhyming. When the story is approaching its climax, the man in the ocean hears the sick man say “I suddenly feel quite ill” (Milligan 14), he replies that the sick man should “breathe deeply and lie quiet still” (Milligan 15). Ordinarily a man who feels he is about to pass away from his sickness is no joking matter, however the rhyming takes off a most of the pressure and tension that the reader would normally feel in this situation. Milligan also uses alliteration to soften the emotional impact of the normally downcast lines in his poem. The man who is drowning asks the man on shore to help, however the man says that he has to wait for his doctor to arrive. The person in the sea questions how long until the doctor comes, the sickly man tells him soon, but “till then try staying afloat” (Milligan 10). When reading that specific line of the poem, the reader shifts his focus to the alliteration instead of the deeper meaning of the same line. If there wasn’t an alliteration in the line, then the attention would be to the fact that if the man in the sea cannot calm himself down and stay afloat for a few more minutes, his death is almost guaranteed. Without these poetic devices the poem’s tone and mood would drastically change from lighthearted
In the beginning, there is a peaceful, blissful atmosphere to the poem. Imagery of light amidst the darkness of the night is created by the use of words such as "gleams," "glimmering" and "moon-blanch'd". The speaker seems excited by the sweet night-air and the lively waves that fling the pebbles on the shore as we see by the exclamation marks in the sixth and ninth lines. The waves "begin, and cease, and then again begin," much as life is an ongoing process of cessation and rebirth. The first stanza is quite happy until the last two lines when the "tremulous cadence slow, and bring/ the eternal note of sadness in." This phrase causes the poem's tone to change to a more somber one