A Man Of An Interesting Imagination By Evliya Celebi

The small city of Brownsville is small in both population and mind. Even though there are individuals who commute morning and night from country to country, there is no unity. Growing up, I had never experienced a “diverse” city. In the city of Brownsville, Hispanics are the majority. As a result, individuals who saw somebody of a different race or ethnicity would make negative and offensive comments towards them. At times, these offensive comments were accidental. Other times, the offensive comments were on purpose and intended to appear humorous to friends. Apart from discriminatory remarks to outsiders, this happened amongst people of my Hispanic community.

Sympathy between humans stretches a far distance, but for other beings more extraordinary compassion is thrown away at the first sight of difference. Between the two supernatural beings in Gabriel Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, one gets more kindness and awe from the ordinary people because of her human origins; while the other supernatural being, an old man with wings, is mistreated. The differences between the two being’s origins portray human nature and its detriments. That is the human nature Marquez portrays in the villagers treatment of the two paranormal beings. Treatment of supernatural beings by humans depends on an explanation of their origin and how they came about.

Sometimes a single word can describe everything for an individual. In Elie Wiesel’s autobiography Night, Wiesel has been exposed tribulations during The Holocaust; he had been taken captive at the young age of fifteen and spent months at the precipice of death. When several people would have an array of words to illustrate the entirety of the novel, Wiesel had saw fit one to fully do the job. Night is entitled Night because it depicts, symbolizes, and is a personification of Wiesel experiences and thoughts of The Holocaust.

An essay written by Gary J. Kornblith, the main focus is on a purely imaginative subject. The use of this counterfactual approach is widely accepted as a methodology in research of causation. According to Kornblith, counterfactual exercises are necessary to “think more clearly about causation and to distinguish between essential factors and coincidental developments”(79). He uses the counterfactual method to present the idea that if Henry Clay had been elected in 1844, which he goes on to prove as plausible, we would be in a much different country. The thesis as a whole is stated as “… My focus is on a different pair of wars: the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 and the American Civil War of 1861-1865… Rather than project a different military outcome, I posit the absence of the Mexican-American War…The key to peace in my counterfactual scenario is a victory by Henry Clay over James K. Polk in the very close presidential election of 1844… As a result Texas would almost certainly have remained an independent republic in 1845, and the United States would not have gone to war with Mexico the following year. Based as it is on a highly plausible turn of events, this counterfactual scenario promises to advance our understanding of the causes of the Civil War”(77). He then adds the fact that there are two viewpoints that come from this counterfactual exercise; Revisionists, who believe that the Civil War could have been avoided, despite the sectional differences, and

In our Language skills class, we are reading Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. This book is about short stories that take place in future. All of the short stories are based on different themes. For example in the short story, The Veldt theme is technology is controlling our lives. In the story the Veldt the house is fully programmed and high tech. The house takes over everything inside the house, even the roles of mothers and fathers. The three stories I am talking about today is the Marionettes, Inc, The City and Zero Hour.

Ralph Ellison’s Bildungsroman, Invisible Man, was published in 1952 but is a recollection of the narrator’s experiences during the 1930s. The unnamed narrator tells his story retrospectively, speaking in the present tense during the prologue and epilogue but switching to the past when recounting his story. At the present time during the prologue, the narrator is living in a “basement shut off and forgotten,” as he puts it, draining free power from the Monopolated Electric Company, having secluded himself from the rest of society. Having gone through much agony throughout his life, the narrator decides to step back from society, to stay underground, and only then does he discover the truth. As it is often true that appearance does not equal

An allegory is a piece of art or literature, like a poem or story, in which people, things, or events have a hidden or symbolic meaning. Yuri Herrera’s characters and their actions in his short story “The Objects” fall under this category. Herrera uses allegories to portray his theme. He uses his characters to proclaim to his audience about the truths of the world they live in. He portrays his emotions through his characters and the threats they face. Herrera utilizes these events to express the truths of the the world in which the people live.

R.J Palacio said, “I honestly don't believe that empathy is something that can be taught. It can only be inspired.” Palacio’s real name is Raquel Jaramillo. She attended the High School of Art and Design in New York. Before she wrote the book Wonder, she designed book covers for a lot of book writers including Judy Blume.

Trickster Travels delivers an intriguing story of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al- Wazzan later named as Leo Africanus, a diplomat from Morocco, who was a taken prisoner. Pirates had actualized his capture before he was being baptized by Pope Leo X. He then lived for nine years in Italy before becoming a pioneer European geographer within Africa. The book then focuses on various challenges that he faced in a foreign country while experiencing the constant stare of Arabic culture’s shortage in knowledge. Trickster Travels is an informative book that requires constant thematic attention and understanding of culture in previous eras for its clarity.

The Indigenous Australian imagination perceives the way of the world and all that exists as not the result of a singular force or mind, but, rather, the result of powerful totemic ancestral beings who once roamed the land. This ontological tradition, known as “The Dreaming”, serves as an infinite link between past and present, people and place, and both the natural and spiritual world. “The Dreaming,” then, asserts that all of humanity and nature in its entirety is alive and connected. In his ethnographic account titled, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, Fred Myers examines the importance of The Dreaming to Pintupi society and its centrality in the constitution of their lived world. Descriptions of what happened in The Dreaming underlie Pintupi social relationships and constructions of “country.” It is through this mythological construct that the Pintupi Aboriginal people mediate their relationships with the land and negotiate aspects of personhood and identity.

“Master and Man” by Leo Tolstoy is a story that explores the dynamics between a peasant, Nakita and his master,Vasillii Andriech. Andriech foolishly risks both of their lives, when they venture to another town in inclement weather to secure a business deal. Unfortunately, Andreich's impatience and greed ultimately leads to his demise. At the end of the story Nikita dies and is denied the same bliss that Vasillii Andreich experiences in death; in order to solidify the dichotomy between these two men, demonstrate how Andriech cheated Nakita, and he uses Nakita's lackluster death to amplify Andriech's extraordinary passing.

The Sultan soon passes away and the reign is taken over by his brother who is the polar opposite of the former ruler. I feel as though this is hearsay and not a direct observation since a mere traveler wouldn’t have such close encounters.

An absurdist tries to find meaning in a meaningless world without entirely accepting and understanding that every life eventually ends. Without fully accepting this fact, people solely contain themselves among the absurd walls desperately applying any type of meaning to their life. Partaking in these naive decisions ultimately implies that this person will never truly live and will ignore carpe diem despite realizing that every life eventually ends. Defying the philosophy of the absurd inevitably creates the absurd man. In the three works that will be discussed, by Albert camus tend to deal with the philosophy of the absurd and how the absurd man abides to this philosophy. Through three characters each example of the absurd man is evidently present among each work. However, with these three characters not all aspects of the absurd correspond, as they tend to transform with each character. But in order to fully understand the absurd man, people must first understand why these people exist through Absurd reasoning. Furthermore, aspects of the absurd partake in an ongoing transformation throughout Camus’ works, as each character represents their own versions of the absurd man.

“Every time I describe a city I am saying about Venice”; this reply of Marco Polo to Kublai Khan for one of his questions is regarded as the central insight of Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’. Venice, Marco’s home is the first city that remains implicit in everything else. However, this is not true for the whole book. Though there are recurring references to his city implicitly, one may come across many meanings and experiences in the process of reading the text. One can relate themselves to the different cities and discover similarities to those places they have travelled and heard about. ‘Invisible Cities’ seems to be a journey of self exploration, where in the cities we come across, we can wander through them in thought, stop for a while

This illusory book entitled “invisible cities” was published in Italy in 1972, written by a very famous Italian prose writer of the postwar era, Italo Calvino. This book highlights a historical memoir of a well-known Venetian explorer named Marco Polo but focuses around a specific dialogue and a series of stories shared between Kublai Khan, emperor of Mongolia, and his right-hand man Polo in the late 1200’s. This concept of writing emphasizes the aspects of humanity and social consequences in generic city makeup and the way we become trapped in the metaphorical “inferno of living”.