Of Humanity In The Novel And Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction?

To support this idea, Bordwell illustrates how art cinema motivates its narratives differently, through two principles: realism and authorial expressivity. Firstly he proposes the notion that art films reflect realism in their characters, space, and time. Psychologically complex characters are present in real worlds dealing with true-to-life situations. Art cinema is concerned with the characters ‘reaction’ to these situations, rather than their ‘action’. Thus it bares an element of psychological subjectivity as the characters survey the world they are in, which aids the realisation of the distress of

In Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, and “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the authors, Ray Bradbury and Lois Lowry, portray a dysfunctional world that has dehumanized its people. All three literary works display a world where the minds of people are twisted. They support the theory that technology takes away everything that makes humans unique. In these stories, the society that the main characters live in is too dependent on technology, resulting in people with empty, meaningless lives.

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

When texts are considered together, responders realise that texts are connected through their similar themes and ideas displayed in their textual forms. Texts are allegories of human existence which simultaneously examining contextual ideas. This is seen the two texts, the Wachowski brothers’ film The Matrix (1999) and Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s game (1985), through their

Confronting texts often incite a process of discovery that can challenge worldviews. As such, composers of these texts offer fresh and meaningful insight into commonly-held conceptions, evoking emotional and intellectual discoveries that lead to renewed perceptions of ourselves and our society. Robert Gray’s imagistic poems “The Meatworks” (1982)and “Flames and Dangling Wire” (1977) serve as conduits for the confronting discovery of mankind’s ignorance of the consequences of consumerism. Author J.M. Coetzee’s novella “The Lives of Animals” (1999) violently thrusts the audience into a reaction against consumerism, hence showing how discovery can be far-reaching and transformative.

Forms of literature and storytelling have existed since the beginning of time, allowing people to gain knowledge, share ideas, and further advance society. Reading stimulates the intellectual thought that is necessary for both individual and societal growth, leaving one to question the implications that would occur if literature could not exist. The book Fahrenheit 451 explores a society where literature is banned, thus causing priorities to revolve around materialism and meaningless, superficial interaction. This book is a warning: it shows the reader how empty our lives could be without literature (Bradbury). All forms of literature have the power to advance an individual’s mind, as well as that of the entire society. The exploration of how progress is made is compelling; it can be analyzed through a variety of lenses. Progress begins with an idea, and ideas are often expressed in writing. How can literature, specifically poetry, play a role in progression?

Displayed through the numerous delinquents entrapped in the distractions that the government has provided, Ray Bradbury develops a theme that can precisely relate to our world. This truth is that the many disturbances (such as technology) in a society can have ramifications. In the same token, Kurt Vonnegut from the "Harrison Bergeron" excerpt, forms a theme in which highlights the negative outcome when equality is considered more important than individuality. Despite the varying themes, both authors do a coherent job of incorporating their opinions of society throughout their writings and explaining the dreadful effects on our

Although the core plots of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” and Neil Burger’s Divergent are different, there are similarities between them. One similarity I have found is the way both Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” and Neil Burger’s Divergent use the postmodern quality of feelings of anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty in their respective works.

Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film, Moonlight, is a work that is characterized by its silences, both in what is unsaid, as well as the unresolved nature of many of its central tensions. In the film, silence functions to emphasize the interiority of the film’s subject, and to make the audience aware of itself. Such strategic use of absence recalls John Cage's groundbreaking composition, 4'33; a work that is distinguished by its lack of any audible musical accompaniment. For many, the piece is reflective of Cage's sexual identity as a gay man; the silence functioning as a metaphor for the “closet” (Katz 241). The scholar Jonathan Katz has pushed against such a totalizing reading of Cage's oeuvre, by noting that silence was part of his larger aesthetic and religious practices, and thusly cannot be considered as simply an aural manifestation of the closet (242). Katz argues that, "Silence was much more than conventionally unmusical; it provided a route toward an active challenge of the assumptions and prejudices that gave rise to homophobic oppression in the first place. For Cage, silence was an ideal form of resistance, carefully attuned to the requirements of the cold war consensus, at least in its originary social-historical context." (241).

Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s career, an unorthodox handling of time became one of many signature features in his fictional works (Allen 37). Despite The Sirens of Titan (1959) being only his second novel, this trademark is still prevalent. When delving into science fiction, it is often helpful to incorporate ideas from other works within the genre. This concept is exemplified by the “megatext,” an aspect of science fiction that involves the application of a reader’s own knowledge of the genre to a new encounter (Evans xiii). By working within the megatext, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) provides an insightful avenue in exploring the handling of time and its consequences in Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.

Through critical analysis, historical research, and textual evidence, a study on Kurt Vonnegut’s background will be conducted in order to display the effects that the era in which he lived had on his writing.

Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, tells the story of the devastating effects of war on a man, Billy Pilgrim, who joins the army fight in World War II. The semi-autobiographical novel sheds light on one of history’s most tragic, yet rarely spoken of events, the 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany.

The film Pulp Fiction was an immediate box office success when it was released in 1994 and it was also well received by the critics, and celebrated for the way it appeared to capture exactly a certain pre-millennial angst and dislocation in Western capitalist societies. The term post-modernist, often used to refer to art and architecture, was applied to this film. The pulp fiction refers to popular novels which are bought in large numbers by less well educated people and enjoyed for their entertainment value. The implication is that the film concerns topics of interest to this low culture, but as this essay will show, in fact, the title is ironic and the film is a very intellectual presentation of issues at the heart of contemporary

Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville is a portrayal of a dystopian future that is both dazzling in aesthetic and dangerous in its subtext. Alphaville is a warning of the future, “both a stylized science-fiction adventure and a social myth about the competing claims of human love and new technology” (Nowell-Smith 752). Through the use of intertitles and black-and-white film, Godard hints at a world controlled by the inhuman; a world his hero Lemmy Caution is not fit to exist within.

The prevalent literary movement of our day and age is postmodernism. And the traits that characterize postmodernism really shine through in popular entertainment, where to I turn to make my argument. Looking back at the earlier times, we can see the literary movements that characterized periods of time, and their effect on public consciousness. The literary movements such as modernism, realism, and romanticism, forbearing to mention the others, give us an insight into the public consciousness, and how the peoples world view affected their actions. In this essay I will examine a film for the traits of postmodernism that reflect the collective psyche of our time, and the influence of postmodernism in our present reality. The film that I'm going to dissect for postmodern traits is Mr. Right. This film follows an ex-government agent turned rogue, who is a hitman killing the people who are trying to hire him, and a borderline young lady who falls in love with this sociopath. The three main postmodern traits that I will highlight from Mr. Right are the mixing of genres, lack of centralized concepts, and protagonist shift to antihero.