Different Historical And Cultural Barriers Affect The Way Literature And Other Forms Of Art Are Depicted

Art is able to transport its viewer through time and connect us as a community. Audiences are able to infer the content and context of the artwork. Art displayed through different mediums and about different topics can share many similarities and draw connections between one another. Exodus, created by Shelby Lechman (2015), uses oil paint on canvas to depict a young boy and father in a train car, leaving their home in Hungary during the time of the Hungarian Revolution (fig.1). Back into the Earth: Creation and the Interpretation of Meaning, created by Tamara Himmelspach (2015) is a series of 11 prints and a physical dress displaying the designer in a jingle dress representing the traditions of the Ojibwa culture

Thomas C. Foster’s book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, tackles the process of uncovering the underlying complexities and symbols that authors incorporate into their literary works. In its most lucid form, Foster’s message is that, when reading a work of literary merit, anything you may postulate has a deeper meaning most likely does, since skilled authors do not include items and occurrences just to include them. The dystopian literature novels 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World follow this trend as they interpolate different motifs with deeper political and symbolic context; however, Foster’s statements do not only apply to written literature. The movie V For Vendetta, released in 2005, connects to How to Read Literature Like

Literature is the window to realizing the negatives of society and how destructive certain norms can be. Readers are brought into a completely different story than their own, but by using similar issues in today’s world, the readers can actually learn from the story and its overall message. All writers write for a purpose, whether it’s for a new meaning to life, to live a different life than our own, or to impact others on an emotional level by teaching them to see the importance of the little things. As a reader, you search for pieces of literature that interest you whether you find the story like your own, or wish you lived the life in the story. By using issues in today’s within their works, authors are able to grab the reader's attention long enough for them to get across what they wanted to get across. Often in many works of literature, writers use societal issues as their basis for the work’s themes and symbols. By doing so, this allows the reader to question the morality behind social norms and how impactful certain ideals can be in people’s lives.

There are some images and events that stick with a person forever and can change their entire outlook on life. Sometimes these events are experienced indirectly, through the media, but that does not mean that it impacts the person any less. Audre Lorde is one of those people who is indirectly affected by a tragedy that she witnesses through the eyes of the media and her society. For Audre Lorde, the brutal murder of a young African American boy sticks with her and inspires her to write an emotional poem entitled “Afterimages.” The image of the boy, Emmett till, is forever engraved in Audre Lorde’s brain (Lorde 48). Her poem clearly expresses how distraught she is, not only with what happens to Emmett Till, but also with the views of society as a whole. The theme for Audre Lorde’s “Afterimages” is traumatic events can reflect the attitudes of members of a society and can also significantly impact the lives of young people.

Accepting environments on the other hand, allow for the creation of imagination and personal connections. Nafisi in her “Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran” speaks about the creation of her reading group, and provides the type of education she desired to provide as an educator but was restricted to provide based on the Iranian regime. The Iranian society oppresses against women, forcing them to conform to societal norms. On the other hand, Nafisi introduces her students to a fantasy like environment during their literature class. This allows for the connection amongst the girls and Nafisi to be personal. The idea of connection can be done while making a comparison between the women in Iran and characters within a novel Nafisi discussed with her students. Nafisi states:

Peter weir’s film “The Truman show” visually communicates his concerns about the power of the media and the impact it has on society and individuals, through the use of many techniques the composer attempts to engage and inform their audience about how through its manipulations the media affects society and individuals. Victor Kelleher uses manipulation of the visual to communicate ideas about his novel “The Ivory Trail” through the book cover.

Filmmakers like Claude Lanzmann (Shoah) negotiate this tension by flatly rejecting the use of "historical images." So, by juxtaposing the visual/critical/rhetorical practices found in these films we can begin to define some of the practical parameters of what a visual-rhetorical critic might investigate.

Through their effectual and extensive use of distinctly visual elements and techniques, John Misto’s play ‘The Shoe-Horn Sonata’ and the song ‘I was only 19’ by Redgum, offer a variety of perceptions of the world. Distinctively visual elements and techniques assist us to develop an awareness of languages in other texts and allows us to understand how our perceptions of and relationships with others and the world are shaped through written, spoken and visual language. The play ‘The Shoe-Horn sonata follows the experience of two former women POW, describing their experiences, and trying to reconcile their differences. This play challenges the reader to look past the pain of these characters, at the wider social and political context, which allowed

Often times, authors of many sorts search for ways to connect their personal writing to ideas that the modern reader can comprehend; they wish to provide a speck of familiarity. Thomas C. Foster explains in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, “We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we’ve read before. At the same time, we look for it to be sufficiently like other things we’ve read so that we can use those to make sense of it” (58). However, sometimes that sense of familiarity is not a good one, as displayed in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Many of her themes have been dramatized to receive the desired reaction out of her readers. However, when these themes are thought upon by one who has dutifully read How to Read Literature Like a Professor, the fictional lines begin to blur into reality. Set in the near future, Oryx and Crake is an expertly created dystopian fiction that contains a plethora of political messages with the ability to be applied to the

On the other hand, Miller successfully argues that fake memoirs are meant to “highlight the problematic nature of authenticity” and capitalism has changed the idea of what we think is real and what is not. By citing Baudrillard, Miller states that our idea of real is only a series of representations that we think are real. In fact, all our ideas of reality are fabrications because memory is not factual. The discovery of these fake memoirs can cause society to realize that all memoirs are, in fact, fabrications. With that in mind, this article contradicts the idea that the public can understand trauma through experiencing art. Overall, “Stylised Configurations of Trauma” contributes to the art, trauma, and memory theme through proving that the study of fraudulent memoirs can help explain “the strange expectation that literature is able to provide access to something

“It Isn’t pretty…But Is It Art?” is an article written by Diana Mack, an affiliate scholar at the New York-based Institute for American Values. Mack talks about some public disputes that revolved around popular works of literary and art such as the Harry Potter and Picardo Venus, as well as her opinions that center around “the question of what makes a good work of art.” Mack explains that art works carrying “a serious tone of death, hate…and…evil” but not carrying “publicly reflect(ed) community standards of taste, decency, and respect for religious faith” are constantly criticized and sometimes banned. Clearly felt throughout the article through her tone and statements, Mack’s main point is that individuals should not reject or criticize an art work that seem “alien and unappealing.”

The world is thriving in a miscellaneous collection of well-known types of media that allow people to indulge in new societies, sophistications, and stories they have never known before. Correspondingly, there is an assortment of ways to analyze this media to further understand the reason behind having meaning in literature in addition to the recipients’ responses to these specific meanings. In particular, one method used to examine media, as well as its ongoing objective in both classic and contemporary society, is Kenneth Burke’s dramatic pentad. In response to evaluating narratives from divergent perspectives, the pentadic analysis is composed of five parts: agent, scene, act, agency, and purpose. For instance, by applying this analyzation technique to the 1991 Howard Zieff film My Girl it can be illustrated through which means these five elements create value in a fictional composition. Specifically, My Girl is primarily an agent-based film focusing on Vada's Sultenfuss' exploration of life through the means of death. However, Vada's circumstances of her mother's passing during childbirth and father's house-run funeral parlour creates a narrative focused on purpose by being the initial reason Vada has an obsession with demise and disease.

In Chester Brown’s “Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography” and in Sarah Ovcjak’s “The Facebook Profile of Louis Riel,” the authors attempt to criticize historical representations by presenting the history of Louis Riel in conflicting lights. Both authors allow Louis Riel to have a voice in their respective works; however, Ovcjak’s Facebook profile allows Riel’s character to speak in the first person perspective narrating his own life, while the story within Brown’s graphic novel unfolds through a third person frame narrative. Ovcjak’s first person narrator uses emotional dialogue and images to clarify Louis Riel’s character. Brown’s frame narrative uses flat dialogue, imagery and extensive notes to present a more impartial understanding of Louis Riel that is rooted in a subjective framing viewpoint. These techniques help shape each author’s arguments about the subject they are describing. Despite these differences, the works reveal the significance of perspective and objectivity, alluding to their importance for historical veracity. Reading Ovcjak's “The Facebook Profile of Louis Riel” against Chester Brown's “Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography” articulates Brown’s argument of presenting Louis Riel in the graphic novel context as a means to demonstrate the importance of looking at history from different perspectives. The implication of reading these creative works as historical documents identifies a need for an authoritative and objective historical lens that is often

Wonderment and Awe - Strong nonfiction writing uses the “beauty and terror” of the world to engage readers.

This genera is used as a sandbox for many authors, allowing them to experiment with narrative structure and diversity that isn’t usually seen in mainstream fiction. The stories told are ones that not only young adults and children can identify with, but older generations as well, and yet, is often times looked down upon as child’s play. No better than a wordy picture book. In this sphere of literature, women on the road have found a home, and violent women rule it.