Compare and contrast the ways Essay Example for Free

Compare and contrast the ways Essay Stanhope and Raleigh are absolutely different characters. Stanhope is experienced and confident and Raleigh is naive and doesn’t have such a long experience in army that Stanhope has. But also you can find something similar in stories of their lives. Their childhood, which they spent together. They went to the same school and their families were friends long time ago. At the beginning of the play Capitan Stanhope is presented as a brilliant commander and at the same way as an alcoholic. This quotation ‘drinking like a fish’, means that Stanhope cannot live without alcohol just, as a fish cannot survive without water. It shows literally that he will die without alcohol. This one â€Å"Without being doped with whiskey I’d go mad with fright† shows that has to be dunk to get through the war without the fear. Also Hardy said that he’s called a ‘drunkard’. That also means that he is ‘in love’ with alcohol. But while Hardy jokes, Osborne defends Stanhope and describes him as ‘the best company commander we’ve ever got’. Moreover, from Osborne we found out that straight after school Stanhope joined the army and became an amazing commander. Also, one of the officers said that he is ‘a splendid chap’. It shows that Stanhope has man’s qualities. We also pick up a few more details about the character of Stanhope from Osborne he has never rested, his nerves ‘have got battered to bits’. This shows us the nature of Stanhope. Second lieutenant Raleigh has a complete opposite character than Stanhope. The difference between them is just in three years, but Raleigh looks much younger than Stanhope. This is because the war ages Stanhope. Raleigh looks like a ‘healthy-looking boy of about eighteen†. He is entering the war for the first time. He has ‘a nervous laugh’ and there are some dashes in his speech that creates broken speech, which highlights how overwhelmed he is  with his emotions, and it is a bad quality for an officer. ‘His uniform is very new’ this quotation shows that he is a new and without any army experience. He imaged the war and trenches very different ‘†I thought there would be an awful row here- all the time. † But Raleigh is very idealistic, viewing the war as a romantic possibility to become a hero. He thinks that the war would make him famous and people will be proud of him as a hero of their country. Raleigh also idolises Stanhope, having looked up to him since he was a child and refers to him as ‘Dennis’. Also ‘their fathers were good friends and  Stanhope used to come and stay with them in the holidays’. He admits that he requested to be sent to Stanhopes company. Osborne hints to him that Stanhope will not be the same person he knew from school as the experiences of war have changed him. But Raleigh does not seem to understand and he is looking forward to see his old ‘friend’ again. So from all my points we can see that Stanhope and Raleigh are completely different characters and do not have any similarities in their lives. But maybe later, in the play Raleigh will have some new war experience and it will be something similar in their characters.

Free Essays - The Imperfect Oedipus of Oedipus the King (Oedipus Rex) :: Oedipus the King Oedipus Rex

The Imperfect Oedipus of Oedipus The King When the play Oedipus The King is mentioned, what do you think of? I think of a very ignorant man that tries to escape his fate-- a man that had so much confidence in himself that he would put false accusations on people and defy his gods just because he thinks he is right. During the play, Oedipus realizes his own flaws while he investigates who the "true killer" of Laius is. The first character flaw that comes out in the play Oedipus is Oedipus' bad temper and irritability. When Oedipus first heard his prophecy from the Delphi oracle, he made an exodus out of Corinth as soon as he could. While on his journey to Thebes, a caravan cut him off. Enraged, Oedipus killed all the men except one. Only later did Oedipus know that one of the men he killed was his father Laius. If Oedipus had thought out his actions first, then maybe the first part of his fate wouldn't have been fulfilled. Other character flaws coming out during the investigation was that he is impulsive and he falsely accuses people. When Oedipus was talking to Teirasias, Teirasias proposed that he was the killer of Laius. But again Oedipus' quick temper occurs and he accuses Tieresius of helping Creon overtake his throne. Another example of Oedipus being impulsive was when he demanded information from the messenger from Corinth. When the messenger told Oedipus that King Polybus was not his real father Oedipus was intrigued and wanted to know the truth. On the other hand, Iocasta wanted him to stop his search because she already knew the horrible truth. Oedipus impetuously wanted to know the truth; and Iocasta, horrified, rushed away and killed herself. The last character trait is one that both of the other flaws fall in, and that is Oedipus having hubris or overconfidence. Because of the absence of Laius, the city of Thebes was under a plague. To stop this plague Oedipus must find the killer of Laios. In this instance Oedipus was very confident that he would find the murderer. Again to the Teirasias scene: Teiresias was trying to tell Oedipus that he was the killer and as he said, "I say that you have been living in un-guessed shame with your nearest kin, and do not to see what woe you have come.

“In Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” by Frederick Jameson Essay

It is true that manipulation theory sometimes finds a special place in its scheme for those rare cultural objects which can be said to have overt political and social content: thus, 60s protest songs, The Salt of the Earth, Clancey Segals novels or Sol Yuricks, chicano murals, and the San Francisco Mime Troop. This is not the place to raise the complicated problem of political art today, except to say that our business as culture critics requires us to raise it, and to rethink what are still essentially 30s categories in some new and more satisfactory contemporary way. (Jameson 139)I initially read this quote as a praise of political art as so worthy an object of study that its complexities could not be fully addressed within the scope of Jamesons work. In other words, Jameson was humbly admitting that political art is deserving of its own lengthy analysis. Why, though, is Jameson incapable of addressing political art (and implicitly counter culture) for more than a page in his ninet een page essay describing modern culture?As I reread the quote, I began to hear a dismissive tone in the words special place and rare. How rare is overt political and social content? How rare are 60s protest songs? While the historicity of the category 60s can be appreciated, and indeed Jamesons use of it appears to be grounded in skepticism towards the authenticity of political art emerging outside of collective life, it seems as if Jameson is using it to contain a threat to his argument. The threat, that is, that overt political art and action have been present and overt since before the 1960s, and continue to persist now. I feel that, to a significant extent, his position as academic shields him from and allows him to theorize away a counterculture that has been very much alive and struggling. Or, as Hakim Bey opens his TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, CHAOS NEVER DIED.The production or assumption of a limited period of the 60s tends to perpetuate a nostalgic distance from a period of political art, counterculture, and resistance that never really ended (or began). In man y ways the 60s have come to resemble a safe countercultural commodity. One can easily find coffee table books on the collective rebellious phase of the baby boomers youth, or one can watch the Wonder Years or Forest Gump and recall a period before choosing to turn off, tune out, drop in. If these experiences are too lonely, one can visit my home town of Cleveland, Ohio with family and peruse the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to study Beatles  artifacts or Jimi Hendrix guitars behind glass for a $10 fee. All of these commodities appear to recuperate political art and counterculture except for that they only do so in retrospect, and in a fashion that uses physical/spatial distance to construct a sense of historical distance that must be willfully believed. Just a few blocks away museum visitors, were they to instead choose to visit the Tower City Mall at public square on a Sunday, would likely encounter middle class kids and homeless people dissolving cultural boundaries at Cleveland Food Not Bombs. I dont propose, in response, a hasty rejection of some mythically totalitarian historical metanarrative, but rather I propose a more complete and honest history that dissolves the nostalgic distance between political art then and recuperated art now. Unfortunately for Jameso n, who has chosen to ignore the reality of such a history for the sake of a commentary on his own constructed meta-society, many post-60s examples easily come to mind. The punk rock movement, certainly with a strong collective component, produced material easily accessible to mass culture. The Sex Pistols Anarchy in the U.K. was released in 1976, and Crass was releasing agitating songs like Do They Owe Us A Living?, Punk is Dead, and Fight War Not Wars in 1978. Rage Against the Machine, arguably one of the more important alternative bands of the 1990s, initiated a radical Axis of Justice with System of a Down and donated all of its proceeds from a tour with U2 to organizations as overtly resistant as EZLN. Any middle class adolescent who frequented Ozzfest or other metal festivals in the 1990s and 2000s is likely aware of System of a Downs Steal This Album, or the lyrics to their politically charged Prison Song. Someone interested in hip hop enough to scratch the surface will likely encounter KRS-1s Sound of da Police released in 1993. And Radiohead, now international superstars, have just released their latest album essentially for free, bypassing the music industry entirely. Jameson might respond to me with a question like, yes, but why havent they worked?, expecting an answer affirming their status as commodities which could be subject to his ideology/utopia dialectic. My answer to such a question would be precisely my historical point: its in the works. Jameson cannot escape his own position within consumer capitalism in that it is his choice to perceive a large body of political art as contained within a diluted dialectic that imposes itself upon consumers. Perhaps a radically engaged and tactical  patience can be counterpoised against the image of the passive consumer. And besides, this is not to mention the countless DIY zines circulating around Infoshops, in radical circles, and across the hipster-radical bridge in trendy coffee shops. A nice account of post-60s anarchist praxis can be found in criminologist Jeff Ferrells Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy, where he discusses his own experiences with collective activities as obverse as pirate radio, graffiti, and biking in critical masses. But are these practices rare? Perhaps only to those who continue to ignore, dismiss, and keep a distance from them. Are they exclusive? Well, this is not the place to raise the complicated problem of countercultural elitism and exclusion. For the rest of the items on Jamesons list, it appears as if he has chosen examples that fit his argument of rarity. When I searched for Clancey Segal on Google, for example, the only matching result I could find was Jamesons article! Perhaps my own ignorance is to blame for my unfamiliarity with the rest of the items on Jamesons list. If this is the case, how is it that I was able to come up with several examples of my own? Are they simply inauthentic, easily recuperated, or not overt enough? Am I a crazy radical detached from the revolutionary potentiality of mass culture? Or are my examples invalidated and recuperated precisely at the moment that Jamesons attitude of disengagement and struggle for theoretical security reposition them inside of some abstract near-omnipresent nightmare?Indeed, it often seems, provided one accepts the omnipresent nightmare situation, that any disbelief or skepticism towards such a macrocosm is analogous to falling back into the Matrix and being reint egrated into the naà ¯ve consumerist masses. But does the myth of the rarity of genuine and overt political art- and resistance in general- honestly acknowledge a totalizing or nearly totalizing condition like Guy Debords spectacle or Lewis Mumfords megamachine, or does it merely reveal its proponents inability or refusal to engage with political art and action of their contemporary milieu? To what extent does a fear of recuperation reproduce precisely the distance required for recuperation? The ideological component of Jamesons writing comes to bear in his own language: to rethink what are still essentially 30s categories in some new and more satisfactory contemporary way. I think Jameson redeems himself when his ideology/utopia dialectic of consumerism is pointed at criticism itself. Just as capital must re-create and recuperate a  utopian component in its commodities, Jameson and his perceived brotherhood of culture critics must re-think a rare and fetishized collection of genuine political art and acts to continue to theorize a hegemonic modern culture. If we directly engage in overt political art or action, however, the University can only have us, as rare historical events, in retrospect. Bey, Hakim. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia. 2003. Brooklyn, New York. Ferrell, Jeff. Tearing Down The Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy. Palgrave. New York, New York. 2001. Song release dates gathered from www.allmusic.com

The Ecology Of Commerce By Environmentalist Paul Hawken

Part I: Introduction The Ecology of Commerce, written by Environmentalist Paul Hawken, is an insightful, although daunting, look into economic and corporate sustainability. â€Å" The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them†. This quote, spoken by Paul Hawken himself, is a perfect demonstration of the major theme he carefully analyzes within the book. Economics and the environment are two words that you often don’t see in the same sentence, despite the fact that the influence economics has contributes to the deterioration of our environment gravely. Part II: Background and Thesis Paul Hawken studies the many faults of the economic practices we adhere to globally. Whether or not we agree with his beliefs is a decision we as readers need to make. While an understanding of the environmental impacts is evident, as well as the biological changes it has put forth on humans, I question if individual change really makes a difference to the environment and the overall way the economy works. Hawken demonstrates a clear explanation to back up his statement of absolute resource destruction, but I believe he underestimates the change that may need to be done. I strongly believe we have reached a point in time where individual change is inadmissible, and in order to save our planet, large corporations and their accountability should be questioned. A world without sustainability, or more importantly a world without economic integrity,