Once Upon A Time Gordimer

Satire is the use of humor, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize a person’s someone’s shortcomings and vices. In William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, satire is evident through his use of irony and ridicule, which he uses to mock different aspects of traditional fairy tales. Archetypes are not employed, highlighting the absurdness of key components of these stories. Situational irony is also used to satericalize the flaws of several characters, mocking their flaws, and making them laughable. Therefore, William Goldman’s The Princess Bride is a satirical story that mocks fairy tale archetypes and character flaws through the use of ridicule.

Butler first employs the wall on an institutional level. Lauren Olamina lives in a walled neighborhood, largely shielded from the violence and crime of the world outside. At the beginning of the novel, as Lauren begins to set the scene of her cul-de-sac community, she comments on the wall’s presence as she and her stepmother look out at the sky, “The neighborhood wall is a massive, looming presence nearby. I see it as a crouching animal, perhaps about to spring, more threatening than protective.” (Butler, 5) The personification of the wall serves to show that walls are manmade, and therefore incredibly

In the familiar more traditional version, Cinderella is a poor maid girl that, with the help of fairy godmother, gets a chance to meet prince charming. They fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after, and then what? What is a happily ever after? Is this even a realistic thought? In the dark comedic poem Cinderella, Anne Sexton forces the reader to examine this question. Utilizing literary devices such as tone, imagery, and style, Sexton encourages the reader to think about how silly and unlikely a fairy tale ending actually is.

The central focus of this unit is to identify the elements of stories and how their themes may relate to each other in a variety of ways. Students will be guided in a variety of comparison and contrasting activities in order to gain understanding of main ideas, characters, and cultural themes across similar fairy tales from different cultures. This unit focuses on three different versions of Cinderella from different cultures. I chose to focus on the common elements of the fairy tales and the cultural differences because this was something the students were struggling with previously.

Fairy Tales are not just stories that parents tell to their children, but stories with hidden valuable messages which are mostly left on a side. In the article “An Introduction to Fairy Tales,” Maria Tatar clearly explains how people need fairy tales in their lives. Tatar also states how fairy tales have the ability to take the listener, especially children’s, into a journey in which they can play with their imagination so that they can discover their deepest fears and wishes. Personally I agree with the author, because of the fact that in an individual’s lives as they get older, they will try to define themselves, sometimes comparing their own life with a character from their favorite story or Fairy Tale.

Usually walls are put into places to avoid people to cross borders and keep peace but they destroy peace. Recently one could have heard in the News that Trump wants the Mexicans to pay for a wall between Mexico and the United States. This Wall should make it impossible for people to cross the border unofficially. As one could know from history classes, we had a wall in Germany for many years which was built by the winner countries of the second world war for a similar reason. Before the Wall, many people from East Germany tried to escape to West Germany where they had obviously better living conditions. It divided Germany in East and West Germany. Additionally, there was a part of Berlin, what was in the East German part, isolated from a huge wall that belonged to West Germany. This wall made it hard for the citizens of East Germany to visit West Germany. The Government of East Germany had other principles than the government of West Germany and it was not in the interest of the East German government to show their citizens how good their life could be in West Germany. After the falling of the Wall, it was possible for everyone to travel in Germany whenever they want without standing in line at the borders. But there was a big gap in wealth between East and West Germany. Even today the loans in West Germany are lower and the federal states have less money than the ones in West Germany. But in Berlin, one can visit ruins of the Berlin Wall which are colored and painted. As one could know from visiting Berlin, there is only a small part of the Wall left but at other parts, one could find the position of the wall with marked flagging on the ground. Additionally, one could buy a piece of the wall as a souvenir. Standing in front of the ruins of the Berlin wall inspires this realization: Peace is about breaking barriers not building them.

Fairy tales picture a world filled with magic, love and the triumph of the good over the evil. Fairy tales are a window to other worlds where the wildest dreams can come true and the hero always lives happily ever after preferably paired with his loved one. Although some people argue that fairy tales are full of stereotypes, filled with frightening monsters and promote racism and sexism I believe that they are wrong because fairy tales provide valuable moral lessons to children, teach them other countries' cultures promote the imagination and the cognitive development and therefore they should be read to young children.

A lot of irony is shown when Shrek recuses Fiona from her tower. One of the examples is when he shakes her to wake her up instead of kissing her. This scene is an allusion to “Sleeping Beauty” and the audience expects him to kiss her like in the fairytale, but instead her shakes her. This example of irony is used to emphasis Shrek is not Prince Charming. However, Shrek still is able to recuse her even though he is not the typical Prince Charming. This shows anyone can be a hero whether they act like the ideal or not. One of the most memorable moments of irony is Fiona’s actions on their second day of travel. The first day she tries to maintain the classic princess persona, but the next day she acts more herself. She is able to gather eggs in the forest, cook them over an open fire, burp loudly, and eat rats. All of these characteristics are not the proper princess ideal. This irony points out that unlike what fairytales say, a person can still identify as something like a princess or ogre, but not certainly fall into the stereotypes. Another example of irony is Fiona’s curse being filled. In most fairytales, when a character is cursed is lifted they become “normal” again. However, Fiona does not turn back into a human she turns into an ogre. This is because an ogre is “loves true form”. Being an ogre is not just “loves true form”, but also her true form. This irony shows that being “normal” is the curse because hiding who

In the stories “Story of an Hour”, “Everyday Use”, “The Necklace”, and “The Lottery” it is evident that irony was quite a large part of the short story. There is situational irony, which is when the situation turns out differently than expected. Also, dramatic irony is present, which is when you as a reader knows more than the character. The authors seem to base their whole story around irony to surprise their readers.

Although the fence was built to keep rabbits out of the farmland, it became a symbol of repression, as when it was built, it kept Aboriginal people form interacting with the white population. It was a way of dividing and repressing the Aboriginal people. This is true in other parts of the world as well. For example, the government of Belin built a wall that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. The Berlin wall divided families who found themselves unable to visit each other. Many East Berliners were cut off from their jobs. The Aboriginal families find themselves unable to raise or visit their own children.

In so many ways Fences is such an ordinary story that its power comes from the ways in which ordinary people hear and view it. There is no doubt but that the metaphor of the fence prevails, working its way across work, family, friendship and the emotional pain of living a life literally dependent on garbage for survival. This is what Wilson wrote about in his Fences of the 1950s. In retrospect, however, it doesn't take a lot to put some of these pieces together yet again to create a difference story of its own kinds of fences, wooden, social, economic. But then or now, this story is still about the ordinary failing of a person who cannot figure out how to get out of the box that surrounds him and who thus finds himself pulling others inside his own fenced in troubles and pains. Being a black man wasn't easy then and it isn't easy today.

Fairy tales make an important part of cultural prophecy, because they contain wisdom which is passed from parents to their children. They contain basic moral and ethical guidelines for children. Images and symbols used in fairy tales can help to judge about cultural, ethical, social and moral values popular in the contemporary society. Changes and similarities, which can be found in the popular fairy tale Cinderella by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, version of 1812 and the Disney version of Cinderella (2015), can help to realize the changes in cultures and historical epochs.

Looking at the Israeli apartheid wall I see the separation of two different groups. The groups are the Palestinians and Israelis. The Israelis, who appose the view of the wall being an Apartheid wall, tend to see the wall as a barrier to protect them from future acts of terrorism. But it isn’t really meant to separate the two groups. The width of this wall ranges from 80 to 100 meters and its length is 360 Kilometers. This picture makes me feel that there are two opposites on each side. How one looks industrialize and the other one looks poor and like a ghost town.

In the short story “Once Upon a Time”, author Nadine Gordimer approaches the idea of how fear of the unknown can have detrimental effects on a person’s being and state of mind. The introduction of “Once Upon a Time” consisted of a narrative concerning Gordimer herself. Like many other renowned authors, Gordimer received a suggestion to write a children’s story, something she considered to be out of the question. During a night soon after, Gordimer was awaken from her slumber by an unknown sound. Naturally she laid still in bed, fear stricken and pondering what the origin of the noise could possibly be.

Despite gender, living conditions or cultural backgrounds most people grow up reading or hearing stories of heroism and damsel in distress scenarios. Anne Sexton turns stereotypes on their head in her satirical poems of classic fairy tales, including Snow White and The Seven Dwarves and Cinderella. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves tells the tale of a young princess with hair as black as coal and skin as pale as snow, whose life is thrown into turmoil at the hands of her overbearing stepmother. Cinderella tells the story of a young girl who she spends her life is yearning for the prince’s ball, and similar to Snow White, Cinderella’s stepmother is influencing her life, however she is a positive character throughout the story. This sheds light on the stepmother in Snow White’s piece as despite the fact that Snow White’s stepmother clearly does inherently evil things, a re-reading demands a re-examination of why. It is throughout these tales’ where stepmothers are only trying to protect their children from the world around them, however in Snow White an outside motive, the beauty provided by the mirror and the pride manifested by poison, creates a barrier between the queen and her stepdaughter, thus giving her the title “Evil”.