Literary Analysis
“Did you hear about that one girl who died from spiders that made a nest of her hair?”
“Yeah, who could be so stupid as to not wash their hair?” As casual as this conversation may seem, it shows the power of urban legends at work. Although “The Beehive Hairdo (the urban legend which our pair of friends here are discussing) is no longer prevalent in culture and society, it still demonstrates an urban legend’s ability to modify, if not create, social ideals. Urban legends can be viewed as a societal tool, filling society’s need to spread morals, social values, and common knowledge. They are so perfectly suited for this role because of their ability to integrate themselves into our lives and discussions. Becoming aware of and studying urban legends can provide valuable insights into the current state of civilization and society as a whole (Brunvand 2).
Before looking at the meanings of urban legends, it may be necessary to first look at urban legends as a whole, divulging their anatomy and structure. Urban legends are a subset of oral folklore. While all forms of folklore share defining characteristics, urban legends are unique in many ways, several of which should be kept fresh in one’s mind throughout the reading of this essay. The first of these are the several elements an urban legend contains to make us more likely to remember and spread them throughout society. These are an interesting story, a moral or message, and a foundation in the beliefs of a target audience (Brunvand 10). Another important part of an urban legend is its ability to localize. This is the way in which urban legends adapt, often doing so based off of their performers. Despite the many variations resulting from this, there are always certai...
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...s life work. Regardless of what we may think an urban legend means, more important than this is the way that they can impact us, potentially re-wiring our brains (in a very literal manner). So, the next time you hear a story that’s from “a friend of a friend,” listen carefully, and you may be able to see the creation of a new society unfolding around you. After hearing them enough, you may start to tell them to friends of your own. Not purposefully, but out of casual connection. Out of instinct. This is the purpose of an urban legend, to become integrated in every part of our society, changing it all the while.
Works Cited
Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: Norton, 1981. Print.
Craughwell, Thomas J. Alligators in the Sewer: And 222 Other Urban Legends. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1999. Print.
For example, the piece starts out explaining the circumstances of an encounter the author had with a woman on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a wealthy neighborhood in an “impoverished” section of Chicago. The author states “As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast a worried glance… After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross street” (1). Through the usage of the anecdote, the author demonstrates the hostile attitude people had toward him, even though he didn’t do anything to make the woman feel uncomfortable, other than walking down the street behind her. In a similar fashion, the author mentions the confusion people have toward whether he will be trouble or not, stating the following as being the most terrifying for him: “One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken as a burglar. The office manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthe halls, nearly to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward the company of someone who knew me” (8). This anecdote describes the attitude the general public had toward the author.
Clive Barker, the author of The Thief of Always, writes a fantasy about Harvey(the main character) taken into into a place full of illusions. Soon he finds out that there was this horrible Hood that had taken his precious time and almost has eaten his soul. So, Harvey then tries to destroy this evil Hood who ends up to be the oh so perfect house. Hood is evil and different ways he is evil. There are many things that makes someone or something truly evil. Hood is ultimately evil. These are the things that make him who or what he is. Evil is significant to most stories because that is the major conflict. The antagonist, Hood, does a really good job of being the bad guy. Usually it’s a person who is has some kind of kindness inside,
“The Hitchhiker,” by Lucille Fletcher, narrates the unusual happenings Ronald Adams, the protagonist, experiences, while driving along the deserted and densely populated roads of the United States. Adams continually observes a hitchhiker, whom he first saw, having almost hit him, on the Brooklyn Bridge, and apprehends traveling on the highways, for fear this phantasmal man shall reappear. Struggling to grasp reality once receiving news of his mother’s breakdown after the death of her son, Ronald Adams, he reverts his attention to the hitchhiker, the realization of never having been who he thought he was, and being alone without protection from the traveler, both wrench his mind in two. Lucille Fletcher uses suspense to build the plot of, “The
The urban legend I chose to write about for this assignment is the story of the Jersey Devil. The Jersey Devil is a creature that was, according to legend, born from a woman in southern New Jersey and it is supposed to have haunted the people of the surrounding area for at least 260 years. The Jersey Devil is known as a creature that mutilates livestock as well as other animals and is said to appear shortly before disasters occur.
Within society, there are certain standards of behavior and expectations that one must be expected to comply by, and failure to do so can result in critical and discouraging prejudice. This unrelenting and derogatory hatred can often cause dire reactions, such as a loss of morale and self-confidence, demonstrated significantly in The Fall of a City, by Alden Nowlan. In the story, Teddy, an eleven year old boy, is mocked at by his uncle for occupying himself with paper dolls, failing to meet society’s standards of maturity that a boy of his age is expected to abide by. As a result of his uncle’s mockery, Teddy’s passion and fondness of his imaginary world disappears, and in a fit of rage and anger, he demolishes his paper world. Teddy’s destruction
Retrieved March 20th, 2014 from http://www.wkyc.com/story/news/investigations/2014/02/12/wild-animals-exotic-illegal-dangerous-snakes-lions-bears-alligators/5432701/.
Urban Legends are stories that are made to be believable, but are “too good to be true.” Many Urban Legends occur locally. The story of The Demon Horse, or “Blucifer,” is a more locally told story. Another urban legend that is told locally is the legend of Boo Radley. Boo Radley was a teen that got caught up in a bad crowd and then grew up to be a shut in. The legend is that he walks around stalking people at night and that if you walk up to his door he will kill you. The story of Blucifer is actually fact filled in the beginning. A man, Luis Jimenez, started sculpting a 9,000-pound horse. Before he could complete the sculpture, it fell on top of him slicing an artery in his leg. The statue had killed him. Jimenez’s family finished the statue.
begin, classifications of rumors and what makes a good rumor. Knapp tells us that a rumor is a
In April of 1992 a young man named Chris McCandless, from a prosperous and loving family, hitchhiked across the country to Alaska. He gave $25,000 of his savings to charity, left his car and nearly all of his possessions. He burned all the cash he had in his wallet, and created a new life. Four months later, his body was found in an abandoned bus. Jon Krakauer constructed a journalistic account of McCandless’s story. Bordering on obsession, Krakauer looks for the clues to the mystery that is Chris McCandless. What he finds is the intense pull of the wilderness on our imagination, the appeal of high-risk activities to young men. When McCandless's mistakes turn out to be fatal he is dismissed for his naiveté. He was said by some to have a death wish, but wanting to die and wanting to see what one is capable of are too very different things. I began to ask myself if Chris really wasn’t as crazy as some people thought. Then I realized it was quite possible that the reason people thought he was crazy was because he had died trying to fulfill his dream. If he had walked away from his adventure like Krakauer, people would have praised him rather than ridicule. So I asked the question, “How does Krakauer’s life parallel Chris McCandlesses?”
Urban legends are the supernatural folklore of our modern society. From one generation to the next, they orally travel throughout the world, constantly changing from one region to the next. Although cultural variations exist, the core of all these urban legends remains the same, to unveil the universally known individual and societal fears. “The Graveyard Wager” is a timeless urban legend told again and again, and the one of which I will explore more in depth.
The storyteller told me the story of the Goatman in a mutual friend’s dorm room at night. I had come to the dorm room to ask my friend if he knew any urban legends of ghost stories from around campus or the state of Maryland. The storyteller, a 21-year-old biology major, shouted excitedly from the couch that she knew one. She is from Beltsville, Maryland. Her mother is a lawyer and her father is a math professor. My friend and I sat down on the couch and listened intently as she told the story: The Goatman from Beltsville.
contemporary life. Paul Weber’s “the Rumour"(figure.3.115) shows a snake wrecking its way through a building. As in Aesop's Fables, Weber also used animals illustrated disturbing human characteristics. The snake signifying falsity has large pointed ears of an eavesdropper. The devastating effects of rumour are shown. The rumour spreads like wildfire was shown in the cartoon ‘Die latrinenparole lauft…’ (figure3.119) from Germany. It shows how a "latrine rumour" passed onto one person at 2 p.m. would rapidly spread, so by 3:30 p.m. thousands of people would have heard the scandalous story. In a similar representation from Britain (figure.3.104) an anti-rumour cartoon shows a rumour emanating from a telephone booth passing on to huge number
It seemed from my story-collection that nearly everyone knows of some urban legend, but I found one story to be especially interesting because it is a relatively famous legend that has roots here in Maryland. The story of “The Goatman” has a number of variations, as with most urban legends. My roommate told me that he first heard the story from his parents when he was about 12 years old. He suspected that it was probably a joking attempt to scare him from playing outside so late at night because the sound of the basketball dribbling in the driveway would keep his parents awake. According to his parents, the Goatman was located in the suburbs of Montgomery County (his home), which was probably a detail that his parents modified to make the story scarier. He told a version that took place in Prince Georges County because he had more recently heard this version from someone whom he was unable to remember.
Personal narratives are subconsciously created and used in everyday thinking often unknowingly by the individual. We, as a society, formulate personal narratives based on personal experience, as a way to excuse the behavior or action that we commit(TIME). Similarly, grand narratives are created and believed by a larger group of individuals. Since personal narratives are almost always based on the personal experience this means society is unable to directly understand the motives and thinking process of a specific individual. Because of this, society is commonly quick to judge the personal narratives of others. This theory is repeatedly proven true in the literary works, Fences by August Wilson, “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner and “Facing
In Kew Gardens, Virginia Woolf takes advantage of the liminal quality of the short story in order to highlight the suspended world that she creates in the garden. For Woolf, the lyrical short story’s subversion of traditional narrative structure allows her to focus on creating a world rather than a plot. Further, the short story creates a liminal space by the very nature of its form. Caught in a space where it is not considered a poem or a novel, the short story exists as undefined. The liminality of the short story, however, is both liberating and restricting. Woolf explores this feature in order to suggest the unsustainable nature of Kew Gardens. While Woolf utilizes the form of the short story to create a liminal, impressionistic space that eradicates the boundaries between human and nature, she also uses the transitory quality of the short story to suggest that such a space can only exist for a short duration due to the restrictions of the imposing outside world.