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Postmodernism and its effects on society
Postmodernism and its impact
Postmodernism and its effects on society
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For almost all of recorded history, man has been fascinated with his future and all of both the wonders and horrors it might hold. From the Aztecs, who created a calendar that dated all the way to a couple of years prior to today, to the famed Nostradamus who was allegedly clairvoyant and whose prophecies have been interpreted to fit modern happenings, to modern-day apocalypse writers, man is held captivated by that which he cannot know for certain: the future. Many literary artists have published works on their idea of the future of both the human race and our planet, with very few of them having much of a positive outlook. It is generally agreed upon that some form of disaster, be it man-made or natural, will occur and the current way of life will be altered dramatically. Populations will be decimated; individuals will begin to resort to anything they have to do to survive. Emotions will be shut off or altogether ignored and people will be overall desensitized, which tells much about their psychological state of being. Emotion is necessary for someone to retain a stereotypically “right” state of mind. According to articles in several issues of Time magazine, governmental trends show that the dystopian governments in works such as Anthem by Ayn Rand are indeed a possibility, and societal trends show that the people would not hesitate to resort to horrible inhuman things to survive. “Black Friday” is a country-wide yearly sale that happens right after Thanksgiving, and during that event people trample each other over the deals they will get, and if someone is trying to get the item that someone else wants, there is no telling what the other person will do to get that item. That is during a time of overabundance! Imagine how those ...
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... can do. We can attempt to leave the world better than when it was when we came into it.
Works Cited
Benét, Stephen Vincent. "By the Waters of Babylon." Literature Texas Treasures. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 1014-26. Print.
Calabresi, Massimo, and Michael Crowley. "Homeland Insecurity." Time 13 May 2013: 22-28. Print.
The Matrix. Dir. The Wachowski Brothers. Perf. Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburn. Warner Bros., 1999. Film.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print.
Rand, Ayn. Anthem. London: Cassell, 1938. Print.
Scherer, Michael. "The Geeks Who Leak." Time 24 June 2013: 22-29. Print.
Teasdale, Sara. “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.
Yolen, Jane. "Gray." After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia. Ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. New York: Hyperion, 2012. 281-82. Print.
Charles Dickens used Great Expectations as a forum for presenting his views of human nature. This essay will explore friendship, generosity, love, cruelty and other aspects of human nature presented by Dickens over 100 years ago.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Babylon Revisited”. Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary. 6th ed. Ed. Charles Bohner and Lyman Grant. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.
Budge, E. A. Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Montana, USA: Kessinger Publishing Co., n.d.
The human mind harbors a very rich imagination when it comes to the envisioning of our demise, demonstrating the individual’s appeal towards this notion, because we love to play with the idea of an impending apocalypse and what comes after it.
Hause, S., & Maltby, W. (2001). The Ancient Near East: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia and Israel. Essentials of Western Civilization (pp.7-15). California: Wadsworth.
The idea of an apocalypse can’t help but seem enticing to us. In fact, we seem to like dystopian stories in general, and admire the characters fighting to survive. You don’t have to look any further than the book The Hunger Games, where the protagonist Katniss lives in poverty and has to hunt her own food, later being forced to kill others to stay alive in a battle to the death. Likewise, the TV show The Walking Dead showcases how far its characters will go to survive in a zombie apocalypse, where the characters are constantly put into “them or us” type situations with other survivors, throwing morals to the wind in order to
Fate and freewill remain two ongoing themes in this movie having major significance throughout. The Matrix directed by the Wachowski brother’s developed in 1999, became world famous due to its unique structure and unusual visual effects known as ‘bullet time’ as well as the ‘green tinge’.
Blade Runner. Dir. James Riddley-Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Joe Turkel, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, Brion James, William Sanderson, M. Emmett Walsh, Edward James Olmos, Morgan Paull, Columbia Tri-Star, 1982
The Web. The Web. 1 May 2014. http://bookriot.com/2014/03/13/apocalypse-later-dystopian- novels-speak-us/>. de la Garza, Alejandro.
I chose the video” Cracking your genetic code” after i watched a bit of the intro. In this video it starts off talking about the future and to imagine what it would be like if we had our genetic codes and the risks our genetic codes may hold for our future. This video makes us think about what it would be like to have the technology to figure out what meds might or might not save our lives along with predicting any illness, disease or just to give us answers as to why things are happening in our bodies. We are then introduced to a little boy named andrew who has an illness nobody can figure out. They then go take a look at Andrews Genetic code by taking a blood sample where they process it and leave behind the genetic material called DNA.
I,Robot. Dir. Alexander Proyas. Screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman. Perf. WIll Smith. Twentieth Century Fox, 2004. DVD.
For years, authors and philosophers have satirized the “perfect” society to incite change. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a so-called utopian society in which everyone is happy. This society is a “controlled environment where technology has essentially [expunged] suffering” (“Brave New World”). A member of this society never needs to be inconvenienced by emotion, “And if anything should go wrong, there's soma” (Huxley 220). Citizens spend their lives sleeping with as many people as they please, taking soma to dull any unpleasant thoughts that arise, and happily working in the jobs they were conditioned to want. They are genetically altered and conditioned to be averse to socially destructive things, like nature and families. They are trained to enjoy things that are socially beneficial: “'That is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny'” (Huxley 16). Citizens operate more like machinery, and less like humans. Humanity is defined as “the quality of being human” (“Humanity”). To some, humanity refers to the aspects that define a human: love, compassion and emotions. Huxley satirizes humanity by dehumanizing the citizens in the Brave New World society.
Damrosch, David, and David Pike. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. The Ancient World. Volume C. Second Edition. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009. Print.
Stewart, Iain. "Echoes of Plato's Atlantis." BBC News. 17 Feb. 2011. BBC. 24 Feb. 2012 .
The Pianist. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Emilia Fox. 2001. DVD. Universal Studios, 2003.