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Influence and Creativity
I have a habit of noticing redundancies in other people. Their personalities and their thoughts just seem so similar: daughters trying to be like mothers, or sons trying to be like fathers, or friends trying to be like each other. In my mind the sense of "self" that we as human beings have is more of a delusion than a reality, where we are nothing but the products of a multitude of influences throughout our lives. Did I ever have an original thought in my life? Or is it always someone else's idea that I am only repeating? What does it mean to be a human being without original thought and creativity? I talk like my friends do. I learned body language from my parents, stories from movies and books, perspectives on life from parents or philosophers or friends or teachers. Despite the myriad of thoughts that make up my personality, I feel as if I only absorbed my surroundings with no real personal creation. My parents keep asking me: "Who have you been hanging out with? Why do you act like this?" as if they already know that the comments I make, or the movies I enjoy or any of my other sudden preferences and mannerisms are not my own. When we are young, the adults tell us that "everyone is `special,' but how could I believe in this idea of personal creativity and uniqueness when there are so many influences that I copy in my life?
Of course, the term "creativity" is almost inherently ambiguous. What do I hope to achieve, or more specifically, what do I feel that I lack because of this supposed lack of personal creativity? When I think of creative minds, I imagine Pablo Picasso or Thomas Edison and the contributions they have made to society or the impact on our emotions. But fame or critical acclaim a...
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...y mine. I don't see creativity as being some sort of individual contest that must be won as an indication of my uniqueness and verification of my or anyone's human value. And although I don't think I fully understand the greater picture regarding the role of influence of creativity in my life and society, maybe the answer is not nearly as complex as it seems. Maybe creativity is a societal, collective process in which everyone has a role. I like to think that the point of creativity and the creative process is not to individually labor over the seminal work of the century, or to painstakingly differentiate one's self from others.
Creativity should be about the pure enjoyment of having been involved, influencing others and being influenced, combining ideas and preserving those that speak to us, discovering and appreciating all that which is greater than ourselves.
Of all my positive attributes, creativity is not one of them. I think of creativity as the ability to come up with new things, using one’s imagination to create beauty, induce laughter, and/or provoke emotion. My jokes are always corny, my drawing skills are comparable to a toddler’s, and I suck at telling stories. “Creative” definitely does not describe me.
Arthur Miller is a famous play writer who also wrote a couple of novels. His works were extremely popular around world war two, and still are famous today. He was born on October 17, 1915 in New York (Gale database). After a long and successful writing career he died on February 10, 2005 in Roxbury, Connecticut (Gale database). Miller went to the University of Michigan in 1934 to achieve a degree in Journalism (Gale database). Miller first started writing when he was at The University of Michigan. In 1947 his first play “All my Sons” opened on Broadway. After his opening on Broadway, Miller’s work began to spread and it started to become famous. Miller’s next work “Death of a salesman” won him the Pulitzer Price. Then Miller started studying the Salem witchcraft trials and decided to write a play on it, and it was the right decision because it brought him major fame. The thoughts that Miller had about the reasons why he wrote the play is what brought him the fame. Miller was a big family man which was why he won father of the year in 1949 (Gale database). He had had two kids with his college sweetheart from Michigan. Her name was Mary Salttery. Miller and Mary divorced, and then he married Marilyn Monroe in 1956, but it was a quick marriage that ended when they divorced in 1961 (Gale database). The three works that Miller wrote that are listed above are not the only plays he wrote, but they were the most popular of his works, and they were the three plays that brought him most of his fame. Miller’s way of writing had a way of moving people, and his plays brought his writing to life which made his work even more real and impacting to his readers. Miller is an outstanding play writer that has many interesting ways of writing that...
Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, New York on October 17, 1915 (“Blooms Notes” 8). Miller and his family lived in upscale Harlem for the first fourteen years of his life (8). Then after a terrible stock market crash that affected the family heavily, they moved to Brooklyn, New York (8). He attended the University of Michigan where he studied playwriting (8). Besides writing plays he wrote radio scripts, and worked as a steamfitter in World War II (Gioia and Kennedy 1763). He began writing plays around 1936, but “It was the next play that secured his
With the Death of a Salesman during the winter of 1949 on Broadway, Arthur Miller began to live as a playwright who has since been called one of this century's three great American dramatists. He has also written other powerful, often mind-altering plays: The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and The Price. And who could forget the film The Misfits and the dramatic special Playing for Time. Death of a Salesman was not Arthur Miller's first success on Broadway. Two years before, when All My Sons opened at the Coronet Theater, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote: "The theater has acquired a genuine new talent." The play also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Donaldson Award (voted upon by Billboard subscribers). Since the debut of All My Sons he has noted: "The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more." He did however push the limits when he released his controversial piece Death of a Salesman. And, he gained even more acclaim. Soon he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. He was qui...
Arthur Miller, in his plays, deals with the injustice of society's moral values and the characters who are vulnerable to its cruelty. A good majority of these plays were very successful and earned numerous awards. According to Brooks Atkinson, a critic for the New York Times, Miller's play Death of a Salesman was successful because the play "is so simple in style and so inevitable in theme that it scarcely seems like a thing that has been written and acted. For Mr. Miller has looked with compassion into the hearts of some ordinary Americans and quietly transferred their hopes and anguish to the theater" (Babusci 1261). This play, in 1949, received the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award (A Brief Chronology of Arthur Miller's Life and Works, http://www.ibiblio.org/...). Miller has said that he could not have written The Crucible at any other time for it is said that a play cannot be successful unless it speaks to its own time; hence McCarthyism was widespread when this play was written. Everyone was afraid of Communists, just like everyone was afraid of witches during The Crucible. This play won the Antoinette Perry Award and the Donaldson Award (Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller's The Crucible 55). His play All My Sons was concerned with a man, Joe Keller, selling defective cylinder heads to the Air Force during World War II, causing the death of twenty-one pilots, one of whom was his elder son. The play focuses around this act and the consequences that arise from it. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. All of Miller's plays focus on one central idea, this idea being ...
Gardner describes the creative individual as follows: “The creative individual is a person who regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting” (Gardner, 1993, p. 35). As I understand this, a creative individual is one who seeks out problems and states or solves them in a way that no one else has previously. Such inno...
Arthur Miller’s success first began with his Broadway play, All My Sons, in 1947. This award winning play “Struck a note that was to become familiar in Miller’s work: the need for moral responsibility in families and society”. (Anderson 1212) Later, his production Death of a Salesman left him the group of America’s top playwrights....
The participants will be introduced to the project and informed of the requirements and the questionnaire/survey to be done. They will then be given information of the Fagerstrom instrument for their agreement and approval to undergo the test. The qualification score is 2 and up (see Appendix A). This will be used to assess if they qualify for the project. The program is slated to last for 4-6 weeks and during this time data will be collected through observation and reports from patients and results of their treatment assessed and intervention initiated if needed (see
Arthur Miller was a good man, and with a good man comes character strengths. He always put forth the effort to judge a man by his rightful position and his fair play. He also attempted to judge a man by his moral sanity and his welfare of the community (Foner and Garraty, 1). Miller never judged someone based upon a first impression. He made great attempts to know people thoroughly before finally judging them. This was one of the greater strengths he posses in life. This helped him build the reputation that stuck with him over the years and that he became known for.
Arthur Miller, the world-renowned playwright widely regarded as a pioneer of American drama, recounted his experiences with the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s and the creation of "The Crucible" in a lecture Monday afternoon.
While some critics contend that The Importance of Being Earnest is completely fanciful and has no relation to the real world, others maintain that Oscar Wilde's "trivial comedy for serious people" does make significant comments about social class and the institution of marriage. These observations include the prevalent utilization of deceit in everyday affairs. Indeed the characters and plot of the play appear to be entirely irreverent, thus lending weight to the comedic, fanciful aspect. However, this same factor also serves to illuminate the major points that Wilde tries to convey about the English society in which he lived.
In defining Creativity, Franken (1993) refers to the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; it is the tendency to generate ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. Creativity and
Since I was very young, art has been a major part of my life. I lived for creating new things, whether it was on paper, made of clay, or created from wood. Due to my dedication, I have advanced in my art and bring many people entertainment. If creativity had not been implied, no one would have enjoyed the drawings or paintings I had made. Especially in todays world where billions of people are corrupted by the internet and find no time to be...
Arthur Miller was a prominent American playwright and essayist in the twentieth century who received quite a number of awards. He wrote some very famous plays like Death of Salesman, Who Has Seen the Wind, How I Spent My Summer Holidays, All My Sons, The Crucible, and Broken Glass. The play Death of a Salesman received exceptional recognition all over the world. This play has attained tremendous popularity because Arthur Miller reflected his life experiences in the play: Miller was represented by Biff; the settings were all familiar to Miller; both Miller and Biff failed math; and both Miller and his main characters are womanizers.
Technology continued to prosper in the computer world into the nineteenth century. A major figure during this time is Charles Babbage, designed the idea of the Difference Engine in the year 1820. It was a calculating machine designed to tabulate the results of mathematical functions (Evans, 38). Babbage, however, never completed this invention because he came up with a newer creation in which he named the Analytical Engine. This computer was expected to solve “any mathematical problem” (Triumph, 2). It relied on the punch card input. The machine was never actually finished by Babbage, and today Herman Hollerith has been credited with the fabrication of the punch card tabulating machine.