The Villain

The revolution against fascist English is led by an antihero by the name of V. In Book 1, he and Evey are the only citizens resisting against the government. As heroes their methods of being leaders and setting examples for others to following in their paths are unorthodox of the archetypal hero. The author presents the only way to start a revolution is to first exterminate important figures of the government to frighten the leader and establish that they are a force to reckon with. However, there might be an alternate motive behind V’s actions. His actions may be selfish acts of revenge. His intensions though leading to a revolution may only be to overthrow the government because they imprisoned him in Larkhill Concentration Camp. We he talks to Lady Justice, his conversation is personal, which implies that he feels Lady Liberty has betrayed him and only him. He makes no mention of the people nor does he address what England has become with all the oppressed people. He revolts out of anger, stirring up the public to destroy his enemies instead of preaching for freedom.

A graphic novelist can do much more with imagery since a picture is worth a thousand words. Disturbing feelings and the look of insanity on Lewis Prothero’s face after he is rediscovered by the The Nose is extremely heighted pictures. His face and the face of his dolls are so grotesque it is impossible not to look at. Also making the dolls and Prothero’s face look like clowns is similar to how the government sugar coats fear. The pictures of V’s Shadow Gallery also add a lot to V’s character without the author having to fill four pages of description. One picture of his library collection tells us that he is well read and values the arts that the government will purge. Instead of creating a list of words, an artist can just create a picture that zooms in on the titles of books in his library and automatically shows that V is not void of the old culture.

Moretti and Graphs

Franco Moretti proposes a new way of studying literature. Instead analyzing specific books and relating them to their time period through personal interpretation, Moretti compiles together graphs from historical facts and data on novels. By analyzing these graphs he is able to see certain patterns and trends literary periods take and speculate on why they happened. This method of analyzing literature would provide less room for bias since it involves analyzing data rather than giving personal opinions about a novel. Graphs make it easier to see how literature has evolved over the years and how it is strongly related to what is going on in society. However this method of analyzing literature is also very broad and generalized. The graphs are easy to look at but many exceptions are looked over.

If data on the literacy rates from the early 1700s to the late 1800s were compiled into a graph, it could be compared to the rise of the novel graph and help predict whether the amount of books published was affected by how many people could read. This can go a step further by splitting the literacy rates to literacy rates of men and women. We can then compare this graph with the gender breakdown new novels graph and see if the rise of novels written by women corresponds to periods where women literacy was higher. We can place inventions and discoveries in science on a graph to see which time period sparked the rise of the genre science fiction.

We can place SSTLS in this scheme of looking at literature by placing its value on literature as a whole. Instead of analyzing the text we can look at where it stands on the different graphs Moretti has created. We can look at what genre it falls under and with what other genres it erupted with to see what generation of readers might be interested in it, or we can look at what genre came before it and speculate why that genre was replaced by SSTLS’s.

M. Butterfly

M. Butterfly puts a twist on the expected gender roles of our current society. Madame Butterfly made a very critical point on Western glorification of not only a male hero, but a Caucasian male hero in a story. This play puts emphasis on why it is acceptable for Asian women to commit suicide for a Caucasian man who does not deserve her love; however, there is no sympathy for a story with a Caucasian woman committing suicide for her Asian male lover. This is because Westerners view themselves as dominant over Asian countries. An Asian woman who slaves herself for a white man makes a romantic story only because the white man wins, but this time, David Henry Hwang switches the roles and places the white man as Madame Butterfly almost as a way of humiliating Westerners.

Hwang made Madame Butterfly a man as a way to show how far gender roles are created by a dominant male society. Madame Butterfly was able to seduce Gallimard so well because he was a man, and men are the ones who really know how woman should act. Madame Butterfly, as a man, used his knowledge of what men want to get Gallimard to fall in love with him. This shows that men give a specific framework for how woman are expected to act.

When Gallimard kills himself at the end, we are not moved to tears by a tragic love story, rather I felt the tone of humiliation towards the Western people. It felt as if Hwang is saying to the Westerners, it is the flaws of your Western expectations of woman and Asian cultures that this was possible. This hurts the pride of Westerners because this time, the Asian woman was able to slave a white man and use deception to access political information. This leads to Hwang’s main point that Westerners should not underestimate other cultures, nor should woman be subject to being an obedient house wife.

This is a super sad true love story

One of many reasons why many relationships do not work out is because people are ridiculously self-conscious about how other people view them. This is the reason why Gary Shteyngart’s protagonists Leonard Abramov and Eunice Park in his novel Super Sad True Love Story are so insecure. Lenny, Eunice, and their whole dystopian world are so self absorbed and superficial that they have no empathy towards each other resulting in unhealthy relationships.

Shteyngart believes our world will become so shallow, there will be a program called RateMe Plus where everyone with an apparat can FAC each other. Everything is based on first impressions. When Lenny’s friends Noah and Vishnu first teach Lenny how to use this application it gives him numerical readings on how interested he is in her based on his already set profile (90). At first it was hard to see this ever coming true until I thought of all those online dating services that have recently become popular and use logarithms for capability. We are already flipping through profiles and rooting out who could be a possible match for us; it will not be long until we start ranking everyone’s “hotness” in public. This limits us on developing possible relationships because no one looks deeper than what is on the surface of the people around them.

Eunice is extremely insecure about herself even in the presence of Lenny, who according to society is far below her league. She dreads meeting Lenny’s Media friends because she thinks they are too smart for her and that Lenny “thinks [she’s] and idiot behind [her] back” when Lenny loves showing her off because he thinks she’s too good for him (144). One partner always feels that they are not good enough for the other because they are so full of themselves they cannot see how the other really feels. The reason they feel alone all the time is because they are afraid of losing each other and are constantly trying to better themselves in order to stay in a relationship.

Another superficial relationship is Eunice’s friend Precious Pony and her unfaithful boyfriend Gopher. She catches him cheating on her and uses the most immature way of retaliating. She remarks that sending him videos of her also cheating on him is “the only way he’s ever going to respect me” (147). This shows that their relationship is all about sex and there is no longer any warmth between two people who supposedly love each other.

Richard Brautigan on Technology

The struggle between nature and technology has been debated upon for the past half century. Richard Brautigan’s poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” uses sarcasm to express his anti-technology views. The whole poem has a sarcastic tone especially the lines in parenthesis. The actual text sounds like Brautigan likes technology but his juxtapositions of nature and technology like deer walking past computers are almost absurd and unbelievable. He talks about machines having a loving grace but machines have no feelings and are not associated as having the feeling of love. Phrases such as “cybernetic forest” and “cybernetic meadow” also gives us an image of a virtual reality, suggesting that we are leaving the real word and into pixilated world.

Brautigan’s poem can be interpreted as pro-technology if it is read literally. Repetition of what he would like to think suggests that he wishes for harmony with literature. By putting nature and technology it would seem like he wants naturalists and scientists to agree with each other.

However, figurative language triumphs over literal text. He uses irony as a tool to convey his idea that technology is not as good as it seems. The first two lines in parentheses are sarcastic because they attack at the speed of technology. He wants a harmony between technology and nature but that will never come fast and technology cannot speed up a consensus. Living in a programmed harmony sounds like a world where the two exist together is not real and maybe even forced. His last line in the poem is the major line that expresses his views. This line is extremely effective since it is the title and the last line of the poem. Being watched over by machines means that humans will be taken over by technology, where robots will the ones controlling us. Brautigan believes that we will eventually lose control of our technological creations. When he says we will return “to our mammal brother and sisters” it seems like we are going back to an uncivilized way while the technology is controlling us. Therefore, Brautigan wants us to slow down and think about whether we should be progressing with such artificial intelligence.

"The Living Hand"

In “This Living Hand”, John Keats uses his descriptions of a hand as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship with possibly a lover or an enemy. He compares the speaker’s living hand to that of a dead hand symbolizing a positive or negative relationship with the reader. The living hand is described as “warm and capable of earnest grasping.” The word capable suggests that a positive relationship could but not will necessarily form between them. He then contrasts this warm hand with a cold, icy hand belonging to a corpse. The dead hand would haunt the other day and night so badly that they would give up their life by ridding their own heart with blood in order for the dead hand to be alive again and not haunt them.
This poem could be used as a threat toward the reader because he holds out his hand at the end of the poem as if expecting the reader to shake it. A handshake symbolizes unity and agreement. Keats is saying it would be unfortunate for the reader to reject the hand because the speaker will make their life terrible. He could also be threatening the reader with death if the offer was rejected. Since he tells the reader to be calm at the end of the poem, the first part is intended to disturb the reader.
However the poem is ambiguous in that the poem could also be directed to a lover. The living hand could suggest that the speaker is alive, but if he were dead his lover would be haunted by his ghost. She would miss him so much she would kill herself so that he may live. It may be that the speaker is trying to woo the reader by telling her that she would be at a loss if she didn’t take his hand. It could also be that he is telling the reader he will not be there for long, and she should be with him while he is able to hold out his hand to her.

The Name Game

As I stare at my pillow pet trying to think of a name for a new blog, I began to think; recently a new fad has taken over every department store. You can’t walk into Walgreens, Target, or even Disneyland without seeing a pillow pet for sale. Sure, these pillows are cute and appealing, coming in all different types of animals with their ability to transform from a stuffed animal into a pillow, but I think in a couple years it will just become a dying fad. Pretty soon people will wonder what to do with their pillow pets, and eventually it will become one of the nostalgic objects we all look upon to symbolize the 2010s.

This blog is about literature, which I think is made up of fads. As the centuries go by, different genres and authors have come and gone. Literary fads are now categorized into such eras as romanticism, postmodernism, and classicism. Like the many types of animals in the pillow pet fad, there are many authors that go with each literary era. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne was popular during the transcendental era, or fad, in the 1850s, but now is only read out of necessity in school or by avid readers. Current book fads are the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling and the Millennium Trilogy by Steig Larsson. These authors are one of the highest selling authors, quite like Charles Dickens, but who knows how long their raving fame will last. I will probably be writing about literature from many eras, but my opinions will be from this era, the same era as the pillow pet fad.