The Journey of Olaudah Equiano Essay Example for Free

The Journey of Olaudah Equiano Essay He wrote his narrative in order to teach his readers about the horrors and atrocities that took place every day to people just like him in the hopes that he could advance the movement against the slave trade. In order to do this, Equiano focused not only on the physical journey he took, but the spiritual journey as well. His expedition, from Africa to enslavement to freedom, closely corresponds to his spiritual journey, from ignorance to conversion to religious completion. This allowed his readers to understand his struggles in a way that was more familiar to them, which tied a closer bond between the reader and the author. Since his readers could relate to the two separate but intertwined journeys, Equiano could now enlighten his readers on the revulsion of the slave trade just as he was enlightened through Christianity. Colonial North America was a brand new world, where the opportunities for wealth were plentiful, ever-present, and over-powering and the slave trade was a direct result of man’s greedy drive for wealth. It took over one hundred years for slavery to be abolished, but Equiano’s journey, both physical and spiritual, presented to the world the true dreadfulness behind the slave trade, a paramount mistake on mankind. Equiano opens his narrative with a description of his native African culture, including the customs of clothing, family, food, war, and religious practices. Equiano describes Africans as â€Å"rude and uncultivated† (43) and that all are â€Å"ignorant of their language, religion, manners and customs. (44) His time in Africa ties into his religious ignorance as he suggests that Africans could be the indirect relatives of Christian Europeans. Although this could be considered accurate from today’s standpoints, in the colonial era, this would be taken as an ignorant, blasphemous statement. The African customs and traditions were foreign to most of the world during this time and Equiano presents his former customs, particularly his pagan religious practice s, as not necessarily a result of sin, but rather a result of ignorance. Although Equiano acknowledges the coarse rituals of the African continent, he also notes the unfairness of this situation. â€Å"Are any pains taken to teach them these? Are they treated as men? †¦ Did nature make them inferior to their sons? † (45) While Equiano concedes the savageness of the African people, he still argues that slavery is as an affront to humanity, â€Å"Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all its fire† (45) Here, slavery is simply shown as an imbalanced product of European greed and the opportunity of wealth the New World provided. Next, Equiano describes his grim voyage through the Middle Passage and his eventual enslavement on a merchant ship for a British captain. After the ship’s arrival in England, Equiano is exposed to Christianity for the first time, â€Å"a great man in the heavens, called God: but here again I was to all intents and purposes at a loss to understand him. † (67) As Equiano becomes more assimilated to European culture, he develops a deeper understanding of Christianity and is eventually educated and baptized. Equiano’s entire enslavement is closely connected to his religious developments; as more time progresses as a slave he becomes a more erudite follower of Christianity. His religious conversion reaches its precipice when Captain Pascal betrays him and turns him over to be enslaved in the West Indies. â€Å"with contrition of heart, acknowledged my transgression to God, and poured out my soul before him with unfeigned repentance. † (95) In that instant, Equiano gave his life to God and became as Christian as any of his readers. Consequently, it is at this moment his life begins to turn around as he is sold to a kindly Quaker merchant who gives him the opportunity to make his own money in order to purchase his freedom. Equiano’s enslavement is filled with hardships and poor treatment, but is emphasized by his religious transformation. He shows his readers that even as an educated Christian, his life as a slave is meager and dangerous and he questions how Christians could treat others so grotesquely, â€Å"How he, as a Christian, could answer for the horrid act before God? (104) Once again, Equiano shows there are no boundaries that man, when blinded by greed, will not cross. After some time, Equiano acquires enough money to purchase his freedom and completes his long excursion to becoming free. Just as his physical journey becomes complete, his spiritual journey reaches an endpoint. Equiano now bases his life around God and â€Å"Now the Bible was my only companion and comfort. † (191) When hi s ship picks up some men stranded at sea, Equiano takes the most impactful step in Christianity as he starts to spread the word of God. and took great delight in him, and used much supplication to God for his conversion. † (203) Equiano links his freedom from slavery to his religious completion in order to help his readers fully grasp his journeys completion. Both are immense accomplishments, but the reader can more adeptly understand the end to a spiritual journey rather than the journey from a slave to freedman. Although Equiano is no longer a slave, he hopes his story enlightens readers of the terrors of the slave trade, just as Christianity had enlightened him to leading a life for God. Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative was one of the first published works of a firsthand account of the American slave trade. Equiano introduced the world to how slaves, such as himself, were treated on a daily basis. However, what makes his narrative so effective is the way he connects his physical and spiritual journeys together. Anyone who was to read his narrative would have a hard time relating to his physical struggles beyond his descriptions, so he effectively connects them with his spiritual voyage and struggles. This allows the reader to connect to Equiano in a more relatable way and helps strengthen his case against the slave trade. Today, we can use his narrative to find out about what colonial North America was like during this time. The New World was, simply enough, a vast farmland with an unlimited crop yield and in order to harvest these crops, sufficient labor was needed. The quest for wealth helped formulate the slave trade, but man’s greed turned it into a business. Colonial North America was a time full of growth and opportunities, all tried to take advantage as much as possible. Equiano was one of the luckier slaves and his life fits into the popular American success story of patience, hard-work, and endurance as important qualities. Equiano was enlightened through Christianity and he hoped the story he shared would enlighten the world about affront to humanity that slavery was. Over two hundred years later, we are still reading his narrative.

In Depth View The Valley Of Unrest English Literature Essay

In Depth View The Valley Of Unrest English Literature Essay The poem gives a sense of the few emotions that one feels first and foremost at delving into the world of Gothic. Fear. Horror. Tragedy. Solitary. Turmoil. But are they really enough to understand it? Gothic as a genre is far from simple interpretation. To that fact none are. The explanation for the word Gothic is simpler though. UC Davis  University Writing Program teaches about Gothic novels by first and foremost establishing the origin of the word Gothic. Although now gothic is popularly associated with literature and architecture, this misconception has to be set right. Its origins lie with the tribals. The Goths were one of the many Germanic tribes who fought numerous battles with the Roman Empire for centuries. According to their own myths, as recounted by Jordanes, a Gothic historian from the mid 6th century, the Goths originated in what is now southern Sweden. They reached the height of their power around 5th century A.D., when they sacked Rome and captured Spain, but their history finally subsumed under that of the countries they conquered. The association with architecture can be owed to the period of Renaissance. During this time Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman culture and began to regard a particular type of architecture, mainly those built during the Middle Ages, as gothic not because of any connection to the Goths, but because the Uomo Universale (translates to universal man) considered these buildings barbaric and definitely not in that Classical style they so admired. The term Gothic, when applied to architecture, has nothing to do with the historical  Goths. In a British context it was even considered to extend to the Reformation in the sixteenth century and the definitive break with the Catholic past. Gothic broke the norms and thus acquired the name. Another strand of thought says that Gothic literature earned the name because all the novels seemed to take place in Gothic-styled architecture mainly castles, mansions, and, abbeys. The w ord is now used to describe an architectural style and, as a derivation of that, a genre of literature based on dark deeds in crumbling gothic mansions and castles is an intriguing mix of the two theories proposed by UC Davis. Defining the genre does not end there. Jerrold E.Hogle calls it an unstable genre. Gothic seduces, overpowers, confuses and blends not just the readers as well as other genres. Gothic as a genre comprises elements of mystery, horror, dark, tragedy things that disturb the normal and its perceptions. Romance is not what the mind grasps for while thinking of gothic. But that is what one needs to be aiming at even after preliminary studying. Be it your simple Wikipedia search that tells you Gothic fiction  is a genre of literature that combines elements of both  horror  and romance or a scholarly article which states Gothic fictions oscillate between the earthly laws of conventional reality and the possibilities of the supernatural emphasizing the difference between horror and romance as genres while reflecting on the common ground that has been christened Gothic. Horror predominantly is associated with Gothic genre eclipsing romance but that is not really the whole picture. Websters Collegiate Dictionary gives the primary definition of horror as a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay. A genre of literature intended to thrill readers by provoking fear or revulsion through the portrayal of grotesque, violent, or supernatural events is Horror. Blood curling yes but it becomes heart wrenching as romance is dashed into the story line. Romance writers of America state that the two basic elements that comprise every romance novel are a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending.  On the other hand, Janice Radway who popularized Romance beyond the usual feels the genre is assisted by the use of clichà ©s, uncomplicated syntax, and signifiers which utilize familiar cultural elements. This further strengthens the different poles of studying horror and romance but gothic brings with itself amalgamation of the peaks a nd lows of the other styles. Gothic can be termed a mixed or hybrid genre. In the contemporary world no genre can be strictly defined. Each genre transcends its boundary to join hands with another to prove more entertaining. Action meets tragedy, comedy with romance and so on and so forth. This is the case with gothic. Kelly Hurley in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction resists calling the genre gothic horror and defines it as a genre comprised of texts that have been deemed popular; that deploy sensationalist and suspenseful plotting; that practice narrative innovation despite the frequent use of certain repetitive plot elements; that depict supernatural or seemingly supernatural phenomena or otherwise demonstrate a more or less antagonistic relation to realist literary practice; that actively seek to arouse a strong affective response (nervousness, fear, revulsion, shock) in their readers; that are concerned with insanity, hysteria, delusion, and alternate mental states in general; and that offer highly charged and often graphically extreme representations of human identities, sexual, bodily and psychic. This definition itself displays the heavy dose of horror in gothic but romance is not far behind. Fred Botting said that gothic is an exploration of mysterious supernatural energies, immense natural forces, and deep, dark human fears and desires that gothic texts apparently found their appeal. The appeal and identity of gothic relies on the dark according to him. This can be construed to be true to some extent. Gothic can be considered investigative literature as well of some puzzling entities. It can be as simple as a haunted house at the end of the road or a monster formed on legend that inhabits the marsh in the town forests. Gothic is often explained as a representation of the unsaid or hidden. Fears and anxieties that one may wonder about can be found in various gothic texts. This is the uniqueness of gothic. In general, the deep fears and longings in western readers that the gothic both symbolizes and disguises in romantic and exaggerated forms have been ones that contradict each other, and in such intermingled ways, that only extreme fictions of this kind can seem to resol ve them or even confront them. This explanation strives to keep a bridge between horror and romance. It forms its basis on the bizarreness of some of the thoughts can simply not be explained by one genre and requires two. The polarity of thought can be made sense by reading the diametrically opposed genres as one i.e. Horror + Romance= Gothic. Professor John Lye proposes that as the immediacy of the Holy threatened to disappear from the culture in the later 18th century the period was marked by literary expressions of the sublime, of the mysterious, and of the strange; by a return to the imagination of the mediaeval that marked pre-romantic period, so that the mediaeval was the place of historical reference and allusion. She says romance took two main forms in the English novel in the early part of the 19th century: Gothic Romance and Historical Romance. Gothic romance specialized in symbolic exploration of the unconscious through the strange, the haunting, and irrational. Like many romances the Gothic tended to be set in distant lands or on barren, threatening countrysides. Gothic romance exposed and dealt with deep anxieties in persons and the culture. Gothic set out to expose and deal with the consciously ignored. Heathcliff in  Wuthering Heights, for instance, is a dark foreigner and hence culturally the Other, that against which we define and defend our humanity and civilized state, he a man with no parentage, a waif from the slums of Europe; and he is a figuring-forth of the force and terror of evil and of the irrational, a force of energy without civility. He is inexplicable but compelling because he sums the fears of his time and, to an extent, ours. Frankensteins monster showed us the terrors that scientific interference in the holiness of the human held for us. Science has and always will be viewed as a necessary evil. Fr ankenstein in its very element embodies this statement with strokes of darkness. Hawthorne of The Scarlet letter fame defined this breed of romance as a place of more mystery, less specific description of concrete reality, a place where, if you will, both elemental and spiritual forces could be put in play in a landscape that was full of symbolic, almost allegorical, potential. Today romance is generally associated with the strange and mysterious, the adventurous, with the lure of foreign lands, with something slightly magical, with a story which refuses to be tied to the realist tradition and explores phenomena which are unusual, allegorical, and symbolic. Increasingly being stated is that Romance and horror form Gothic. They together have changed the perception of gothic from a horrifying sight of that which was most unbearable in a culture to recognition and embrace of the monster as the image, the inner, often denied aspects of us. Gothic follows the first law of genre according to Robert Miles which is to deviate and make it new. Horace Walpole followed the golden rule and identified gothic as a genre through his work. Hogle remarks on the pliability and malleability of this type of fiction making has proven to be stemming as it does from an uneasy conflation of genres, styles, and conflicted cultural concerns from its outset. The Castle of Otranto is looked at as the first gothic novel and its entry initiated a new literary genre namely gothic. It was first published in 1764 and simply changed the meaning of gothic. Before Walpole it was almost always a synonym for rudeness, barbarous, crudity, coarseness and lack of taste but due to Walpole the word assumed two new key meanings: first, vigorous, bold, heroic and ancient, and second, quaint, charming, romantic, sentimental and interesting. First the book was advocated as a blend of the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern, the former all imagination and improbability and the latter governed by the rules of probability connected with common life. He wished to bridge the gap between the romances of old which were according to him all marvel and wonder, and the realist romance of his own day. In this comparison he refers to his own cross between medieval chivalric romances and neoclassic tragedies oriented towards the old aristocracy, on the one hand, and the newly ascendant bourgeois novel directed in its comic elements and probabilities of common existence on the other hand. The second editions preface constitutes a manifesto for a new species of romance. With this edition he came forward as the author of Otranto. The year was 1765. The manifesto was a set of rules which if not for him would have in all probability been dismissed as a piece of eccentric whimsy. Castle of Otranto spearheaded a revolution in the world of medieval literature. It served as the direct model for an enormous quantity of novels written up through the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Once a successful formula was established it was done to death. Robert Miles talks about the terrorist system of novel writing. This system was supposed to bombard the senses of the readers. It was deemed to be different form horror. Ann Radcliffe even said terror expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life. She states further that terror is pleasurable because it is cloaked in obscurity and mystery while horror is graphic and unequivocal. Due to the success of Gothic fiction the literary world witnessed a shocking increase in the imitative works although this only indicated the high level of consumption it also ended up giving birth to the terrorist novel writing. The time was after 1790 and this form of writing was a satirized form of the perceived system for writing Gothic Romances. Terror writing survived but sooner than later became eclipsed and Gothic emerged again. Gothic never limited itself. The eighteenth century gave way to Victorian gothic which in turn opened doors to Modern gothic. Post modern gothic, female gothic, gothic science fiction, postcolonial gothic, urban gothic and queer gothic are just a few examples. The basic elements of gothic were incorporated in various plots and added to the multiplying strands of gothic. Many scholars have identified a few elements that are mandatory in any gothic text claiming or aiming to be gothic. Elements of Gothic Novel by Robert Harris state the obvious rudiments of Gothic: 1. Setting in a castle.  The action takes place in and around an old castle, sometimes seemingly abandoned, sometimes occupied. The castle often contains secret passages, trap doors, secret rooms, dark or hidden staircases, and possibly ruined sections. The castle may be near or connected to caves, which lend their own haunting flavor with their branchings, claustrophobia, and mystery. 2. An atmosphere of mystery and suspense.  The work is pervaded by a threatening feeling, a fear enhanced by the unknown. Often the plot itself is built around a mystery, such as unknown parentage, a disappearance, or some other inexplicable event. 3. An ancient prophecy  is connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present). The prophecy is usually obscure, partial, or confusing. What could it mean? In more watered down modern examples, this may amount to merely a legend: Its said that the ghost of old man Krebs still wanders these halls. 4. Omens, portents, visions.  A character may have a disturbing dream vision, or some phenomenon may be seen as a portent of coming events. For example, if the statue of the lord of the manor falls over, it may portend his death. In modern fiction, a character might see something (a shadowy figure stabbing another shadowy figure) and think that it was a dream. This might be thought of as an imitation vision. 5. Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events.  Dramatic, amazing events occur, such as ghosts or giants walking, or inanimate objects (such as a suit of armor or painting) coming to life. In some works, the events are ultimately given a natural explanation, while in others the events are truly supernatural. 6. High, even overwrought emotion.  The narration may be highly sentimental, and the characters are often overcome by anger, sorrow, surprise, and especially, terror. Characters suffer from raw nerves and a feeling of impending doom. Crying and emotional speeches are frequent. Breathlessness and panic are common. 7. Women in distress.  As an appeal to the pathos and sympathy of the reader, the female characters often face events that leave them fainting, terrified, screaming, and/or sobbing. A lonely, pensive, and oppressed heroine is often the central figure of the novel, so her sufferings are even more pronounced and the focus of attention. The women suffer all the more because they are often abandoned, left alone (either on purpose or by accident), and have no protector at times. Hogle elaborates by pointing out that women are the figures most fearfully trapped between contradictory pressures and impulses. It is Otrantos Isabella who first finds herself in what has become the most classic Gothic circumstance: caught in a labyrinth of darkness full of cloisters underground and anxiously hesitant about what course to take there. 8. Women threatened by a powerful, impulsive, tyrannical male.  One or more male characters has the power, as king, lord of the manor, father, or guardian, to demand that one or more of the female characters do something intolerable. The woman may be commanded to marry someone she does not love (it may even be the powerful male himself), or commit a crime. Isabella in Otranto fears the pursuit of a domineering and lascivious patriarch who wants to use her womb as a repository for seed that may help him preserve his property and wealth, on the one hand, yet worried that, fleeing in an opposite direction, she is still within reach of somebody [male], she knew not whom, on the other. Women were constantly reduced to objects of exchange or as tools of child bearing. 9. The metonymy of gloom and horror.  Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). Note that the following metonymies for doom and gloom all suggest some element of mystery, danger, or the supernatural such as wind howling, rain blowing, eerie sounds, sighs, clanking chains, barking of distant dogs, ruins of buildings and several others. One of the classics is footsteps approaching and characters trapped in a room. These elements are highly common and dramatic. They are played up more in the world of cinema with various effects. 10. The vocabulary of the gothic.  The constant use of the appropriate vocabulary set creates the atmosphere of the gothic. Here as an example are some of the words (in several categories) that help make up the vocabulary of the gothic in  The Castle of Otranto. What is interesting about this table is the guidance it provides to its readers about identifying gothic in a simpler way. It also denotes the words that are frequently used to create the ambiance of a particular word to make it fitting in the plot and effortlessly gothic. Mystery diabolical, enchantment, ghost, goblins, haunted, infernal, magic, magician, miracle, necromancer, omens, ominous, portent, preternatural, prodigy, prophecy, secret, sorcerer, spectre, spirits, strangeness, talisman, vision Fear, Terror, or Sorrow afflicted, affliction, agony, anguish, apprehensions, apprehensive, commiseration, concern, despair, dismal, dismay, dread, dreaded, dreading, fearing, frantic, fright, frightened, grief, hopeless, horrid, horror, lamentable, melancholy, miserable, mournfully, panic, sadly, scared, shrieks, sorrow, sympathy, tears, terrible, terrified, terror, unhappy, wretched Surprise alarm, amazement, astonished, astonishment, shocking, staring, surprise, surprised, thunderstruck, wonder Haste anxious, breathless, flight, frantic, hastened, hastily, impatience, impatient, impatiently, impetuosity, precipitately, running, sudden, suddenly Anger anger, angrily, choler, enraged, furious, fury, incense, incensed, provoked, rage, raving, resentment, temper, wrath, wrathful, wrathfully Harris has also listed the Elements of Romance. In addition to the standard gothic machinery above, many gothic novels contain elements of romance as well. As observations denote romance and gothic have become synonymous to a great extent. A study of these elements shows similarities with elements of gothic and uniqueness of romance. Elements of romance include these: 1. Powerful love.  Heart stirring, often sudden, emotions create a life or death commitment. Many times this love is the first the character has felt with this overwhelming power. 2. Uncertainty of reciprocation.  What is the beloved thinking? Is the lovers love returned or not? 3. Unreturned love.  Someone loves in vain (at least temporarily). Later, the love may be returned. 4. Tension between true love and fathers control, disapproval, or choice. Most often, the father of the woman disapproves of the man she loves. 5. Lovers parted.  Some obstacle arises and separates the lovers, geographically or in some other way. One of the lovers is banished, arrested, forced to flee, locked in a dungeon, or sometimes, disappears without explanation. Or, an explanation may be given (by the person opposing the lovers being together)   that later turns out to be false. 6. Illicit love or lust threatens the virtuous one.  The young woman becomes a target of some evil mans desires and schemes. 7. Rival lovers or multiple suitors.  One of the lovers (or even both) can have more than one person vying for affection. The elements of romance create the required drama that increases the entertainment quotient and connects with a wider span of readers. This results in a wider appeal for gothic. Kelly Hurley states that the period of 1760- 1820 showed some identifiable characteristics. Gothic has been defined in terms of plot which features: Stock characters like the virtuous, imperiled young heroine. Stock events like her imprisonment by and flight from the demonic yet compelling villain. Setting: the gloomy castle and complicated underground spaces are a must. Hogle says that the tale usually takes place in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space such as a vast prison, a graveyard, an aging city or a large old house. Theme: the genres preoccupation with taboo topics such as incest, sexual perversion, insanity and violence; its depictions of extreme emotional states, like rage, terror and vengefulness. Style is defined by its hyperbolic language. The need to exaggerate. Hogle states all gothic novels were satirized for their excesses. He believes that the Gothic exaggerates its own fictionality and does so through long lasting and creatively changing techniques. The language is one of the most important ones. The pattern of hyperbolically verbalizing contradictory fears and desires over a possible base of chaos and death, and in a blatantly fictional style, remains a consistent element in gothic. Atmosphere: Its elaborate attempts to create a brooding, suspenseful atmosphere. The vocabulary table is testament to this point. Those words are employed generously to create a certain aura. Narrative strategies are confusion of the story by means of narrative frames and narrative disjunction. The author aims to make the story jump in time and from character to character. A reading of Dracula will show the jump in narratives from Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker and Van Helsing. Since the narratives are in diary entry or letter formats it ends up keeping the reader engaged as well. Plotting: The use of densely packed and sensationalist, rather than realist plotting. Hogle states that within the antiquated spaces where the tales take place are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically or otherwise at the main time of the story. Impact on readers: Its affective relations to its readership whom it attempts to render anxious, fearful or paranoid. Fred Botting in his summation of Candyman explains standard horror and gothic themes: ghost stories, urban gothic gloom, romance plots and visual and verbal references to staple fictions alongside a persecuted (or insane heroine), the villain is a slasher figure ever ready to disembowel his victims with a hook, a Faustian temper, a vampiric blood letter feeding off social fears. Although the film was made in 1992, the story line was inspired by Clive Barkers book The Forbidden which came approximately two decades before the movie. The similarities can still be spotted though. Botting in his observations mentions the few elements that have proven to be elementary in this genre. Leslie Fielder in Invention of the American Gothic discusses the deep lingering fear for readers of the gothic that Fielder recognizes: the terror or possible horror that the ruination of older powers will haunt us all, not just with our desires for them, but with the fact that what grounds them, and now their usurpers, is really a deathly chaos. As mentioned earlier gothic does disturb the normal. Plaguing its readers with nightmares and deep rooted worries about possible tragedies is actually one of its aims. Gothic became the forum to say the unsaid and to represent the unspoken. A premise which led to wide spread popularity. Gothic has been under scrutiny by various fronts. It has been used as a point of reference in economic statements by the founder of Marxism. Karl Marx used one of the most common Gothic monsters, the vampire to simply drive his statement home. Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. This quote is from Capital, Volume I, and Chapter 10. He has deftly pointed towards capitalism as a blood sucking monster i.e. a vampire. Antonis Balaspoulos an eminent personality used similar references.   Ã‚  -labor value extracted from living bodies and congealed in the parasitically animated body of capital   Ã‚  -the abstraction of value which, in a bloodless movement, vampirizes all of the workers labor and, transforming itself into surplus-value, becomes capital The idea behind mentioning these statements is to catch a glimpse of gothic outside the literary world. An observation also has to be made of the replacement of gothic with vampires and of the stereotypical delegation of roles i.e. capital as the monster and the Labor as the victim. Psychoanalytic Gothic is an intriguing concept devised due to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. In the psychoanalytic gothic, we intensely desire the object that has been lost, or another object, person, or practice that might take its place, but we are aware at some level that this object carries with it the threat of punishment: the anger of the father, the breaking of the law, castration. This strand of gothic has been articulated by Steven Bruhm in the Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. The want of something that does not belong to oneself. In both theory and clinical practice, psychoanalysis is primarily attributed to the work of Sigmund Freud, for whom the gothic was a rich source of imagery and through whom the Gothic continues to be analyzed today. Psychoanalysis provides us with a language for understanding conflicted psyche of the patient whose life story or history is characterized by neurotic disturbances and epistemological blank spots. More often than not , such psychoanalytical accounts are intensely gothic: The Uncanny (1919) and A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1922) along with a number of Freuds case studies, make the figure of the tyrannical father central to the protagonists Gothic experiences as Stokers Dracula (1897). The Gothic provides the best known examples of those strange and ghostly figures that Freud saw as examples of The Uncanny. For him what is quintessentially uncanny is the deeply and internally familiar as it appears to us in seemingly external, repellant, and unfamiliar forms. Most familiar to Freud are strictly psychological or visceral drives from our earliest existence, such as sheer repetition- compulsions. But perhaps what is most central to the Gothic be it classical or contemporary is the very process of psychic life that for Freud defines the human condition. Now, what makes the contemporary Gothic contemporary is that the Freudian machinery is more than a tool for discussing narrative; it is in large part the subject matter of the narrative itself. To the degree that the contemporary Gothic subject is the psychoanalytic subject (and vice versa), she/ he becomes a/the field on which national, racial, and gender anxieties configured like Freudian drives get played out and symbolized over and over again. Gothic becomes particularly contemporary in both its themes and reception; however, is that these unconscious desires center on the problem of a lost subject, the most overriding basis of our need for the gothic and almost everything else. Botting does point out that psychoanalytic criticism one of the most common lenses through which the gothic is viewed, often misperceives its own scientific knowledge of sexual instinct and Oedipal wished exemplified in the tales of terror and horror, all too visible in their characters and on the surface of their narratives. So much for the buried machinations of desire. Botting advocates that gothic has some stock elements but so does its criticism. He thinks the all too deep reading misconstrues certain elements and they get falsely portrayed. Michel Foucaults transgression is applied on gothic as well. Transgression enables limits and values to be reaffirmed, terror and horror eliciting rejection and disgust; on the other hand, it draws eyes and imaginations, in fascination, to peep behind the curtain of limitation in the hope of glimpsing illicit excitements made all the more alluring for bearing the stamp of mystery and prohibition. Transgression means violating boundaries or committing offences. Gothic signifies a writing of excess with its hyperbolic language and drama. Gothic signified an over abundance of imaginative frenzy. Passion, excitement and sensation, transgress social properties and moral laws. Gothic excesses, nonetheless, the fascination with transgression and the anxiety over cultural limits and boundaries continues to produce hesitant emotions and meanings in their tales of darkness, desire and power. Gothic excesses are blamed of transgressing the proper limits of aesthetics as well as social order in the overflow of emotions. Gothic plots are criticized at times of celebrating criminal behaviour and carnal desires. As gothic came to represent the unsaid and the dark, it did transgress the beliefs and norms of the old world but due to the favourable rates of consumption, it remains an associated theory and nothing else. Gothic as a genre has been avidly debated, reformed, criticized and adaptive to the changes around it.

James I: The Life of the Shakespearean Patron Essay -- England

On June 19, 1566 in Edinburgh, Scotland, King James Stuart I was born. At the tender age of only thirteen months, young James was crowned king of Scotland. As a descendant of King Henry VII’s Tudor dynasty, and the offspring of Queen Mary of Scots and her second husband, Lord Darnley of England, James I inherited great power and responsibility. Through an impeccable education, James I attempted to resolve personal both personal and governmental issues, as he became a respected and acknowledged patron of the arts. Although he ended England’s war with Spain, strengthened the Church of Scotland, and rehabilitated relations with England, King James I’s flaws were constantly targeted. His inability to handle finances and his obvious homosexuality were also often found offensive. But the king’s love for theatre sparked the most controversy, as it was believed to be James’s biggest weakness. In fact, James I was a king of many inconsistencies. Despite his history of capable rule, he was constantly haunted by the fear of not being affectionate enough to those close to him. As a vigorous hunter, James showcased courage bordering on stupidity as a horseman, but had an overwhelming fear of knives and other drawn weapons. Other than the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, there had never been a legitimate threat to his life or wellbeing. Never the less, James wore unreasonably heavy clothing to protect himself against potential knife attacks. But James’ paranoia and twenty-nine year reign of Scotland did little to prepare himself for the English monarch. England and Scotland, rivals for years, virtually hated each other. This deep-rooted mistrust, along with clashing religious views, severely limited James’ chance of a successful reign. King James ... ...n honor of King James I. Even after being ridiculed for his sexuality and called an incompetent leader, King James I became a respected patron of the arts as he grew intellectual and wise through his reign. King James I was not entirely unsuccessful, but his Scottish background failed to gain him the respect of the English society. Works Cited Andrews, John F. â€Å"James I.† Shakespeare’s World and Work. Vol. 3. Print. Brown, Henry. â€Å"King James I: Shakespeare’s Patron.† Shakespeare-online. J. M. Dent & Sons, 20 Aug. 2009. Web. 1 Aug. 2012. . Butler, John. â€Å"James I of England.† Luminarium. N.p., 30 Oct. 2006. Web. 3 Apr. 2012. . Dewar, David. â€Å"James I.† Facts on File. N.p., 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2012. . Shostak, Elizabeth. â€Å"James I.† Elizabethan World-Biographies. 129. Print.

Making Best of the Bad - Original Writing :: Papers

Making Best of the Bad - Original Writing What is the meaning of life? That is a question that I ask myself and I'm sure you do as well. Sometimes I just sit there on my own, when things aren't going to great and have a wonder. I always come up with the same answer usually. 'Dunno'. I asked this question a lot to myself when my parents were splitting up. As I didn't know what the point of me being here was. But, now I have come through that rollercoaster of emotions. I think I have come out a bigger and better person. I look back at my life, when I was in my early childhood around seven or eight. They were some fabulous times, the hot scorching sunny days, the sky as blue as the rippled ocean. I remember feeling top of the world, playing footy with mates from sunrise to sunset. Life really couldn't have felt better. And why couldn't it? Because there was nothing wrong. As long as nothing is wrong, you will feel nothing but pure genuine joy. But as soon as something does go wrong, its hits you harder than anything, like being knocked down by a five tonne lorry. It feels like you will never get up again, and that everyone else's life is better. You feel so low, that you do not know what to do with yourself and you cannot trust anyone. This is what happened to me. That feeling is indescribable. All I can say is that it hurts. Although I did get knocked down, I did get back up and fight back. It was a long haul to say the least. But right now I can say that things that pretty much are back to their best. I mean can you give me one reason why it's good to mope around and feeling sorry for yourself? No. I didn't think you could. That's why you have to try and claw back what you once had. When your family is the most important thing to

Weather Forecasting :: essays research papers

Weather Forecasting In researching this project I was amazed to find the many books on this topic. After going through much information and reading an enormous amount of writing on weather forecasting I can only come to one conclusion that when all is considered the best forecasters can only give an educated guess of what is in store for weather. Through the many means at their disposal, such as satellites, ships at the ocean, infrared, radio, and radar transmissions even with all of these techniques no prediction is 100% accurate. One question that I asked myself was "when was the first weather forecasting ever done?", I found out that in 1863 in Britain there was a united forecasting system headed by Captain Robert Fitzroy. Captain Fitzroy would send ships around Britain to warn people of storms and such. However, he was often wrong and criticized and therefor committed suicide. Since then there have been many other services, but the largest one currently is the National Weather Service. The National Weather Service gives predictions for all of the world through satellite imagery for all countries. Also in recent history many local television and radio stations have made private forecasts for small areas. Meteorologists are people who interpret the weather, the reason I don't say predict the weather is because even though all forecasters have the same information and data at their fingertips, the way that they interpret what is in front of them can be different. Meteorologists receive information from various sources, but their interpretation of the data determines the accuracy of their prediction. Someone might ask, "If forecasters have so much information on a particular area; how could they predict a flawed forecast ?" The answer to that question lies in the fact that any one of a number of weather conditions may ruin a forecast. A fast cold or hot front moving in, an unexpected flow from the ocean or a cold wind may change the whole days forecast. There are many different materials and devices used by local and government services to predict the weather. Some of these devices are, Radar which is actually sound waves, which bounce off clouds and give location of storms this way. Another such device is actually a variation of radar called "Doppler Radar" actually can give the exact location of a storm within a kilometer. However, Doppler Radar is not used so much for everyday forecasting, but for tornadoes and very large storms. The way Doppler Radar works is almost the same as regular radar with one advantage, it also can measure the speed of an object or storm, which makes its prime usage tornado watching.

Employees’ Issues in Hcl Axon Malaysia

ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES AND PROBLEMS Peripherally, HCL AXON is an excellence organization with increasing sophistication of its information technologies and offer huge scope of business benefits. HCL’s engaging in information systems projects and timely subjects helps yielding substantial achievement and continue to be robust. However, HCL AXON’s branch in Malaysia, HCL AXON Malaysia is actually having a big trouble in human resource management. HCL AXON Malaysia today fall prey to the same basic problems that were apparent all over the years in the organization.Questions have to ask whether organization is learning. Questions must also be asked about the quality of training given to project managers, developers as well as the IT support engineer. The employees are bewildered in a suffocating quandary which consists of rigidity in the Human Resource department, negligence of employees’ welfare, and the lack of employee development. i. Rigidity in the Human Resource department The HR department shows negligence in updating its information system. For instance, the working contract between a computer technician, Morty with HCL AXON Malaysia is expired in February 2012.Without contract extension, he is still working in the organization and being paid his salary every month until today. In fact, this situation is insecure to Morty because no one guarantees the termination would not descend one day against him. Furthermore, there is another similar example. A former employee, Tom quitted his job from HCL AXON Malaysia in September 2012. However, he was still being paid his salary in the next two consecutive months. After being informed about this case, only the HR department rectified the system.These might caused by the lack of initiation in the HR department towards developing deep awareness for contracting, staffing and recruitment system. They keep running the existing system like doing a daily routine, paying the fixed amount of wages to empl oyees on the list without any updating. Subsequencely, the HR system is not developing in fully aligned system which includes aligning the organization’s policies and human systems i. e. staffing. ii. Negligence of Employees’ Welfare Besides, the HR department in HCL AXON Malaysia never takes employees’ elfare and needs seriously. For instance, the IT engineers or computer technicians are usually work overtime and carrying out work-shift every week. The employees are also ought to work on public holiday. However, there are no allowance and bonus given. Employees crave for the benefits and compensation system would be ameliorated, but their request and allegation are being ignored by HR department. Meaning by that, the HR department shows laziness to get input or feedback from employees to improve the exacting situation.An IT engineer in HCL AXON Malaysia, Terence claims that the employees in the organization are mostly having low job satisfaction. iii. The Lack of Employee Development The changing environment and technologies such as launching of new software and IT systems as well as the unpredictable issues regarding foreign countries’ client system urge HCL AXON to utilize system approach to make continuous-improvements. The HR department of HCL AXON Malaysia promised to conduct training sessions to the employees which is training of using new software. However, the managers and supervisors never work diligently to meet the commitment.

Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói Essay

The Niterà ³i Contemporary Art Museum (Museu de Arte Contemporà ¢nea de Niterà ³i — MAC) is situated in the city of Niterà ³i, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is one of the city’s main landmarks. It was completed in 1996. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer with the assistance of structural engineer Bruno Contarini, who had worked with Niemeyer on earlier projects, the MAC-Niterà ³i is 16 meters high; its cupola has a diameter of 50 metres with three floors. The museum projects itself over Boa Viagem (â€Å"Bon Voyage,† â€Å"Good Journey†), the 817 square metres (8,790 sq ft) reflecting pool that surrounds the cylindrical base â€Å"like a flower,† in the words of Niemeyer. A wide access slope leads to a Hall of Expositions, which has a capacity for sixty people. Two doors lead to the viewing gallery, through which can be seen theGuanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, and Sugarloaf Mountain. The saucer-shaped modernist structure, which has been likened to a UFO, is set on a cliffside, at the bottom of which is a beach. In the film Oscar Niemeyer, an architect committed to his century,[1] Niemeyer is seen flying over Rio de Janeiro in a UFO which then lands on the site, suggesting this to be the origin of the museum. The MAC Scandal was a political scandal that occurred when the mayor Joà £o Sampaio inaugurated the Niterà ³i Contemporary Art Museum. The MAC is located on a hill slope that had locked construction rights set by the city council. Therefore in December 1996, the new mayor, Jorge Roberto Silveira sent a project to the city council to obtain the rights to construction in that area. The project was accepted in only two days, giving permission to build buildings up to 40 metres (130 ft). The city council did not know that days before, Zeca Mocarzel, sub-mayor of the Niterà ³i’s Oceanic Region (of Jorge Roberto Silveira’s government) bought the lands at a very low price, claiming to the old owner that the region was locked and nothing could be done there. So he bought the area and, after the inauguration of the MAC which substantially increased the property values of the nearby areas, later sold the land for more than 5 million reals, approximately 1,250,000 US dollars at the time (2,720,000 dollars today). Because the scandal occurred just before Christmas, the people of Niterà ³i said that it was Jorge Roberto Silveira, Zeca Mocarzel and Joà £o Sampaio’s (long-time Niterà ³i’s politicians) â€Å"Christmas present†.