Analysis of Works From "Art from the Ashes" edited by Langer
How can a person reach back into the past and retrieve the criminal events of sixty years ago? Read the works provided in “Art from the Ashes,” and wait; wait for words to explode onto an emotionally unprepared mind with enough force to awaken previously dormant areas of one’s psychological capacity. One can then begin to understand. Lawrence L. Langer’s introduction provides keys to open doors of impossibility, to expand sympathy, and to venture into the dark corners of an individual’s capabilities. He reminds us not to mistake true experiences for “an alien world of fantasy” or to look for triumph of love over hate (Langer 4). The stories he has selected for this anthology “gaze[] into the depths without flinching” (Langer 5). They must also “discover and accept the twisted features of the unfamiliar without searching for words, like ‘suffering’” (Langer 6). His main principals of selection, however, include “artistic quality, intellectual rigor, and physical integrity of the texts.” The works chosen by Langer must be academically appealing but still be able “to liberate responses on the deepest levels of psychological, mental, emotional, and aesthetic concerns” (Langer 8). The following stories represent the approaches and difficulties put forward by Langer: “The Key Game” by Ida Fink, “Spring Morning” also by Ida Fink, and “Poem About a Herring” by Abraham Sutzkever. In these works, characters yearning to exist fully are placed in critical situations where they are always faced with the constant anticipation of death. The striking shortness of time is an always present force facing the characters.
Ida Fink’s short story, “The Key Game,” begi...
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...e taking place somewhere else in the dark depths of someone’s imagination. Unfortunately, it must be taken “in literal, not metaphorical, terms” that the child had “a bloody herring in his mouth” (Langer 5, 581). Secondly, it “gazes into the depths without flinching” (Langer 7). Sutzkever, to the best of his ability shows the truth of the situation. His provides images of child dying of fatal gunshots – when most would try to avoid that image.
Reading these works without the help of Langer’s introduction would be enlightening, but his statements should be considered and remembered during the “venture into disorientation” of mind and soul. Since the writers of these works were brave enough to release their experiences using an art, the reader should be brave enough to briefly imagine their experiences without transforming them into a type of fiction.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” utilize character responsibilities to create a sinister plot. For Hawthorne, protagonist Young Goodman Brown must leave his wife at home while he partakes in a night journey. For Poe, ancillary Fortunato covets a pretentious manner towards his wine tasting skills, and after being ‘challenged’ decides to prove his expertise by sampling Amontillado. Hawthorne and Poe showcase a theme of darkness but differ in their approach to the setting, characters, and fate of entrapment.
Historically artist have been rebellious with their work, testing the boundaries of what the viewer can feel and think. Titus Kaphar is one of those rebels. As an artist, Kaphar visually test the boundaries of how history has proven challenges to some and become beneficial to others. In his piece being discussed “The Cost of Removal”, Kaphar challenges the view to feel and think in depth about our leader and the injustices that came with them. Barack Obama once said “Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek”. Change only occurs when find our voice that's why the purpose of this essay is then to prove that learning from the past
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” is a short psychological thriller. The murder of Fortunato haunts Montresor so greatly that he feels the compulsion to tell the story some fifty years after the fact. He appears to be in the late stages of life desperately attempting to remove the stain of murder from his mind. That it is still so fresh and rich in specifics is proof that it has plagued him, “Perhaps the most chilling aspect of reading Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ for the first time is not the gruesome tale that Montresor relates, but the sudden, unpredictable, understated revelation that the murder, recounted in its every lurid detail, occurred not yesterday or last week, but a full fifty years prior to the telling” (DiSanza).
In his novel, Hosseini writes with a deceivingly simple form of prose. Instead of assaulting the audience with his extravagant vocabulary, he entices them with the minds of his characters. Leaving the audience with feelings of empathy and repulsion, the work exhibits Hosseini’s adept abi...
The mind is a very powerful tool when it is exploited to think about situations out of the ordinary. Describing in vivid detail the conditions of one after his, her, or its death associates the mind to a world that is filled with horrific elements of a dark nature.
In the three works, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson’s poems 340 (“I -felt a funeral in my brain”) and 355 (“It was not Death”), each display different aspects of the depths of the human mind through similar modes of rhetorical sensory overload. While Poe reveals the effects of denying one’s insanity, Dickinson displays the struggle and downfall of a depressed mind.
Through this sympathetic faculty, a writer is able to give flesh, authenticity and a genuine perspective to the imagined. It is only in this manner that the goal of creating living beings may be realized. Anything short of this becomes an exercise in image and in Kundera’s words, produces an immoral novel (3). The antithesis of liv... ...
Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting poems and morbid stories will be read by countless generations of people from many different countries, a fact which would have undoubtedly provided some source of comfort for this troubled, talented yet tormented man. His dark past continued to torture him until his own death. These torturous feelings were shown in many of his works. A tragic past, consisting of a lack of true parents and the death of his wife, made Edgar Allan Poe the famous writer he is today, but it also led to his demise and unpopularity.
Ida Fink’s work, “The Table”, is an example of how old or disturbing memories may not contain the factual details required for legal documentation. The purpose of her writing is to show us that people remember traumatic events not through images, sounds, and details, but through feelings and emotions. To break that down into two parts, Fink uses vague characters to speak aloud about their experiences to prove their inconsistencies, while using their actions and manners to show their emotions as they dig through their memories in search of answers in order to show that though their spoken stories may differ, they each feel the same pain and fear.
One of the largest goals of modern literature is to explore the psyche; a collection of the conscious and subconscious actions of humans. Generally, the human mind is explored through the use of a character that is subjected to a series of emotional challenges and tests. This character may often reflect on the author himself or simply what the author’s take on psychology and the human mind is. In the novel Demian, by Hermann Hesse, the author invites the reader to explore the mind of the character Emil Sinclair by including forms of stream of consciousness narration and an open-ended ending to the book.
In the poem “One Art” the thesis statement declared in the first stanza, on the first line as “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” also repeating it again in line 6 and 12. The statement is better interpreted as “The skill of losing is not hard to attain”. Bishop speaks in the poem as if she has successfully mastered the skill of losing. She also goes around in circles admitting that the art of losing is not hard to master as if that is what she is making herself believe is true. She is also helping the reader create a habit as the reader reads and repeats the refrain of “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” not to mention the line 4 where she tells the reader to make it a habit to, “Lose something every day”.
The artwork I chose for the art criticism project was ‘The Survivors’ by Kathe Kollwitz. The piece was created in 1923 in Berlin, Germany, where she resided with her husband. She and her husband resided in a poorer area, and it is believed to have contributed too much of her artwork style. ‘The Survivors’ is currently displayed in two museums, the MoMA and the Kathe Kollwitz Museum. In the piece there is a woman directly in the middle, with sunken in cheek bones is draped in a black cloak. Her arms are around three small children, who look very frightened. On each side of her body there are an additional four small children who convey sadness upon their innocent faces. Also, they are outstretching their arms as if they are begging for her to give them something. In the background, on the top left side, there are two elderly men with their heads down, looking as if they are very sad and
Psychoanalysis is the method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts (“Psychoanalysis”). This transfers to analyzing writing in order to obtain a meaning behind the text. There are two types of people who read stories and articles. The first type attempts to understand the plot or topic while the second type reads to understand the meaning behind the text. Baldick is the second type who analyzes everything. Since his article, “Allure, Authority and Psychoanalysis” discusses the meaning behind everything that happens in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” we can also examine “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in the same manner.
Edgar Allen Poe’s tale of murder and revenge, “The Cask of Amontillado”, offers a unique perspective into the mind of a deranged murderer. The effectiveness of the story is largely due to its first person point of view, which allows the reader a deeper involvement into the thoughts and motivations of the protagonist, Montresor. The first person narration results in an unbalanced viewpoint on the central conflict of the story, man versus man, because the reader knows very little about the thoughts of the antagonist, Fortunato. The setting of “The Cask of Amontillado”, in the dark catacombs of Montresor’s wine cellar, contributes to the story’s theme that some people will go to great lengths to fanatically defend their honor.
In the mid 1800’s America was in full swing of the romanticism movement. During this time readers were entertained by the fresh new writing styles of the latest authors. There were several famous authors in this era such as: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. One innovative author from this movement however, added a new dynamic writing style that still intrigues many readers today. Edgar Allen Poe, through his invention of detective stories, has become a house hold name to many. In his short stories “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” Poe describes two heinous crimes committed by men whose motives can only be traced back to their deranged perception of reality, domestic relationships, and a soul whose thirst can only be quenched through violence.