Rules Of The Game English Literature Essay

Rules Of The Game English Literature Essay The main topic in this short story is the communicational barriers between mothers and daughters of different nationalities. All stories that make up the novel are related to this idea of not being able to communicate. First of all, it is hard enough to communicate with ones parents because of the generational gap, but for Waverly it is even more difficult to communicate with her mother because they have been raised in different countries, in different cultures. First of all, at the beginning of the novel there is a little introduction that covers all the themes that the novel deals with. It is the story of a woman who left China accompanied by a swan with dreams and hopes for a better life and when she finally arrived to the United States of America, she was deprived of the swan and was left with a single feather. The woman now whishes she could give her daughter that feather and teach her her meaning. I think that this introduction is the summary of the whole novel, and a good way to understand Rules of the Game. Here we can see that the introduction to the novel raises the issue of the linguistic and cultural barrier that exists between each immigrant mother and her American-born daughter. In this story, the daughter does not realize how lucky she is because she does not know her mothers story. It is impossible for the daughter to understand her mother because she does not know her past. Moreover, the mother actually wants to teach her daughter about her past so that she can learn from it, but her wish is not granted because even though she wants to do it, she is reluctant to do so because she is afraid that her daughter might not understand her or might think that everything she says is nonsense. At the same time that she fears that her daughter will not care about it, she is also fearful that she will not leave a mark in the world. And as we see in the story Rules of the Game, this also happens with the mother in Rules of the Game, Lindo, and her daughter, Waverly. Lindo wishes to teach Waverly everything she knows. Moreover, Lindo wants her daughter to have everything that she didnt have growing up in China. That is the reason why she teaches her daughter the art of invisible strength which is actually self-control. Lindo learns this lesson, and the importance of self-control in a very hard way, as we can see in her tale in The Joy Luck Club, and she gives Waverly all her knowledge even though, by teaching her, she is actually giving her the power to defeat her. Lindo teaches Waverly how to keep things to herself and use them when she needs them. And as we can see, Waverly actually uses this to her advantage throughout the story, to get her mother to let her compete and also to win chess games. The power that Waverly thinks the art of invisible strength has is very well depicted in this quote: I learned why it is essential in the endgame to have a foresight, a mathematical understanding of all possible moves, and patience; all weaknesses and advantages become evident to a strong adversary and are obscured to a tiring opponent I discovered that for the whole game one must gather invisible strengths and see the endgame before the game begins. I also found out why I should never reveal why to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell. However, the main problem is that Waverly thinks that her intelligence is everything that she needs to be good at chess. It will be later on in her life that she learns that invisible strength was a very big part in her winning those games. When Waverly is little she has no concern for Chinese culture and she thinks that everything that comes from China is not useful in America. However, even if she does not realize that she is learning from her mother she actually is, and moreover, her mothers teachings have a big impact in her life. On the other hand, there is also a different theme in this story, which is the need of American-born children to separate themselves from the Chinese culture that their parents represent and to have a more separate American identity. The cultural differences make Waverly misunderstand her mothers pride in her achievements as pride in herself. But most importantly she wants chess to be a part of her own identity, separate from that of her mother and therefore, separate from Chinese culture. This is easily seen in her infuriating when her mother tries to advice her on how to play chess even though she apparently does not know anything about chess: Next time win more, lose less. Ma, its not how many pieces you lose, I said. Sometimes you need to lose pieces to get ahead. Better to lose less, see if you really need. Nevertheless, in the end, Waverly is able to win all those games, not only because of her aptitude but also because of her mothers teaching of invisible strength. As we can see in the following quotation, Waverly uses the wind as a metaphor for this invisible strength: Blow from the South, it murmured. The wind leaves no trail. I saw a clear path, the traps to avoid. The crowd rustled. Shh! Shh! said the corners of the room. The wind blew stronger. Throw sand from the East to distract him. The knight came forward ready for the sacrifice. The wind hissed, louder and louder. Blow, blow, blow. He cannot see. He is blind now. Make him lean lean away from the wind so he is easier to knock down. She, as it has already been said, thinks of the invisible strength as the wind, thus aligning herself with the same element her mother had identified with when facing her arranged marriage in China as we can see in the story Red Candle. So it is actually because of her mothers Chinese culture that she gets to be a chess champion. Furthermore, the way Waverly uses this metaphor is very similar to what we think of as Chinese imagery. Lindo is not the only source of Chiniseness that Waverly is exposed to, but also Lao Pao uses a lot of Chinese imagery when he is teaching Waverly to play chess. Another example of the fact that Waverly sees her mother, who represents Chinese culture, as something to reject and fight is that she depicts her mother as an actual opponent. The struggle for control between Waverly and her mother is symbolized in the dreamlike chess game at the end of Rules of the Game. Waverlys opponent in this game is two angry black slits. When Waverly confronts her mother during their shopping expedition, Lindos eyes turn into dangerous black slits. In the final line of the story, Waverly thinks, I closed my eyes and pondered my next move. Waverly does this in an attempt to break from the Chinese culture and trying to achieve an identity of her own, separate from that of her family, and, especially, her mother. Aside from the issue of linguistic and cultural barriers, and the need for a separate identity for the second generation, another important theme that this story deals with is storytelling. In the introduction of the novel, Tan uses a very short story in which we find the little tale that we mentioned before and which we may even consider it as a fairy tale. This brief introduction to the novel, like the feather that the introductions main character owns, symbolizes the importance of knowing the past to learn from it, and the only way to do it is by telling past experiences so that other people might learn from them. By stating this, all significance is given to storytelling. Additionally, storytelling acquires even more relevance for the children of Chinese immigrants, who are neither fully Chinese nor American and seek their identity in those stories. The oral tradition of the Chinese culture is like Russian matriuska dolls or a spiral case, as there is always a story embedded on another which is told from one person to another and thus there is no end to it. In this case, the introduction is a story in itself about a woman who is immigrating to America; this story has a fairy tale inside: the story of the duck stretching its neck to become a goose and instead became a swan. The mothers in the novel, by telling tales are ensuring that their story, the people in it, and their culture will not die with them, all those things will pass onto following generations, starting with their daughters. They also achieve the goal of making their daughters feel like they belong somewhere. When Lindo tells Waverly stories she is ensuring that she will be remembered by her daughter, and that she will pass on to her all her knowledge. Aside from this we should also make clear that circularity is a main characteristic of storytelling and also of this short story too. At the beginning of the short story, Lindo tells Waverly that strongest wind cannot be seen, and at the end of the short story we get the same sentence strongest wind cannot be seen even though this time it is Waverly who imagines her mother saying this. Therefore we can see how circularity and storytelling shape this short story. It is important to add that various narrators throughout the novel dwell on the idea of not being able to translate ideas, feelings, or cultural concepts from one language to the other. Mothers and daughters do not share the same language and therefore communication becomes only possible with the translation of Chinese into English, or vice versa. Thus the whole meaning that they want to pass onto the other person is lost in translation, their intentions might be misinterpreted. The mothers in this novel choose storytelling as their way of communicating due to the fact that neither the daughters speak much Chinese nor the mothers much English; there is an evident language barrier that they overcome by telling stories that they can all understand and from where they can simply get the moral. For example, Waverly remembers that her mother told her the story of a careless girl who ran into a crowded street and was crushed by a cab. So, as we can see storytelling in this case is being us ed as a cautionary tale. Moreover, Lindo does not explain explicitly the importance of self-control, but she actually uses a metaphor, the wind, to teach Waverly about this. And we can also see that because of the lack of communication, Waverly misinterprets her mother, and thinks she is giving herself credit for her daughters achievements. In conclusion,

Heroic Virtue in Othello Essay -- Othello essays

Heroic Virtue in Othello  Ã‚        Ã‚  Ã‚   William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello puts on exhibit an obvious hero and other not-so-obvious heroes. Let us examine them all in this essay.    The supreme type of hero in this play did not occur overnight to the playwright. Rather he slowly built upon one hero after another in his plays until his work culminated in the Moor. A. C. Bradley, in his book of literary criticism, Shakespearean Tragedy, describes the development of the Shakespearean super-hero in Othello:    And with this change goes another, an enlargement in the stature of the hero. There is in most of the later heroes something colossal, something which reminds us of Michelangelo’s figures. They are not merely exceptional men, they are huge men; as it were, survivors of the heroic age living in a later and smaller world. [. . .] Othello is the first of these men, a being essentially large and grand, towering above his fellows, holding a volume of force which in repose ensures pre-eminence without an effort, and in commotion reminds us rather of the fury of the elements than of the tumult of common human passion. (168)    The character’s attitude toward life is certainly a criterion for heroism. Is he heroic in what he does? H. S. Wilson in his book of literary criticism, On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy, discusses the general’s heroic attitude in the final scene of the play:    In the final scene of Othello, the hero, with that utter lack of self-consciousness of self-criticism which is the height of human vanity, strikes a heroic attitude, makes an eloquent plea for himself, at the height of his eloquence stabs himself – and the innocent spectator feels a lump in his throat or dissolves in te... ... of the play is a pleasant surprise.    Despondent Othello, grief-stricken by remorse for the tragic mistake he has made, acts heroically, following the example of Emilia. He stabs himself and dies on the bed next to the one he has wronged.    WORKS CITED    Bradley, A. C.. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Penguin, 1991.    Gardner, Helen. â€Å"Othello: A Tragedy of Beauty and Fortune.† Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint from â€Å"The Noble Moor.† British Academy Lectures, no. 9, 1955.    Shakespeare, William. Othello. In The Electric Shakespeare. Princeton University. 1996. http://www.eiu.edu/~multilit/studyabroad/othello/othello_all.html No line nos.    Wilson, H. S. On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1957.               

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco, California. He received the best education that his multimillionaire father and his sophisticated schoolteacher mother could buy†private tutors, private schools, grand tours of Europe, and Harvard College. Young Hearst's Journalistic career began in 1887, two years after his Harvard expulsion. â€Å"l want the San Francisco Examiner, † he wrote to his father, who owned the newspaper and granted the request.When William's father died, he left his millions in mining properties, not to his son, but to his wife† ho compensated by giving her son ten thousand dollars a month until her death. The Daily Examiner became young Hearst's laboratory, where he gained a talent for making fake news and faking real news in such a way as to create maximum public shock. From the outset he obtained top talent by paying top prices.To get an all-star cast and an audience of millions, however, Hearst had to move his headquarters to New Y ork City, where he immediately purchased the old and dying New York Morning Journal. Within a year Hearst ran up the circulation from seventy-seven thousand to ver a million by spending enough money to beat the aging Joseph Pulitzer's World at its own sensationalist (scandalous) game. Sometimes Hearst hired away the World ‘s more aggressive executives and reporters; sometimes he outbid all competitors in the open market.One of Hearst's editors was paid twice as much in salary as the sale price of the New York World. Hearst attracted readers by adding heated reporting of sports, crime, sex, scandal, and human-interest stories. â€Å"A Hearst newspaper is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut,† said Hearst writer Arthur James Pegler. Hearst's slam-bang showmanship attracted new readers and nonreaders. During the last five years of the nineteenth century, Hearst set his pattern for the first half of the twentieth century.The Journal supported t he Democratic Party, yet Hearst opposed the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) in 1896. In 1898 Hearst backed the Spanish-American War (1898; a war in which the United States aided Cuba in its fight for freedom from Spanish rule), which Bryan and the Democrats opposed. Further, Hearst's wealth cut him off from the troubled masses to whom his newspapers ppealed. He could not grasp the basic problems the issue of the war with Spain raised.Entering politics Having shaken up San Francisco with the Examiner and New York City with the Journal, Hearst established two newspapers in Chicago, Illinois, the Chicago American in 1900 and the Chicago Examiner in 1902; a newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts, the Boston American; and a newspaper in Los Angeles, California, the Los Angeles Examiner in 1904. These added newspapers marked more than an extension of Hearst's Journalistic empire, they reflected his sweeping decision to seek the U. S. presidency . Perhaps his ambition came from a desire to follow in his father's footsteps.His personality and fortune were not suited to a political career however. In 1902 and 1904 Hearst won election to the House of Representatives as a New York Democrat. Except, his Journalistic activities and his $2 million presidential campaign lett him little time to speak, vote, or answer roll calls in Congress . His nonattendance angered his colleagues and the voters who had elected him. Nevertheless, he found time to run as an independent candidate for mayor of New York City in 1905, and as a Democratic candidate for governor in 1906. His loss in both elections ended Hearst's political career.Personal life In 1903, the day before his fortieth birthday, he married twenty-one-year-old Millicent Willson, a showgirl, thus giving up Tessie Powers, a waitress he had supported since his Harvard days. The Hearsts had five boys, but in 1917 Hearst fell in love with another showgirl, twenty-year-old Marion Davie s of the Ziegfeld Follies. He maintained a relationship with her that ended only at his death. When Hearst's mother died, he came into his inheritance and took up permanent residence on his father's 168,000-acre ranch in southern California.There he spent $37 million on a private castle, put $50 million into New York City real estate, and put another $50 million into his art collection†the largest ever assembled by a single individual. Hearst publications During the 1920s one American in every four read a Hearst newspaper. Hearst owned twenty daily and eleven Sunday papers in thirteen cities, the KingFeatures syndication service (organization that places featured articles or comics in multiple papers at once), the International News Service, the American Weekly (a syndicated Sunday supplement), International Newsreel, and six magazines, includingCosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Harper's Bazaar. Despite Hearst's wealth, expansion, and spending, his popularity with the publi c as well as with the government was low. Originally a progressive Democrat, he had no bargaining power with Republican Theodore Roosevelt (1859-1919). Hearst fought every Democratic reform leader from Bryan to Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), and he opposed American participation in both world wars. In 1927 the Hearst newspapers printed forged (faked) documents, which supported an accusation that the Mexican government had paid several U. S. senators more than $1 million to support a CentralAmerican plot to wage war against the United States. From this scandal the Hearst press suffered not at all. In the next ten years, however, Hearst's funds and the empire suddenly ran out. In 1937 the two corporations that controlled the empire found themselves $126 million in debt. Hearst had to turn them over to a seven- member committee whose purpose was to save what they could. They managed to hold off economic failure only by selling off much of Hearst's private fortune and all of his public powers as a newspaper owner. William Randolph Hearst died on August 14, 1951, in Beverly Hills, California.

The Rate At Walmart s Checkout Points Use Payment Cards...

Use of payment cards at stores. For my ethnography project, I chose to study and compare the rate at which shoppers at Walmart’s checkout points use payment cards to cash. For the purpose of this paper, I will refer to the people as shoppers, and medium of exchange to represent payment cards and cash. The main focus of this ethnography is to compare two media of exchange at checkout points. (Wicksell [1906] 1967, p. 17) defined a means of payment, as â€Å"an object used to pay for purchases and settle debts, and a general means of payment, which is an object that can always be used to pay for any purchase or settle any debt†. How fast is it to check out when payment cards are used compared to when cash is used at checkout points? Although the medium of exchange is the main focus of the ethnography; type of checkout and gender roles also play very important roles when using or choosing a medium of exchange. 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