The Censors, by Luisa Valenzuela

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is not a happy book. The Author, Junot Diaz, does a great job fooling the reader into believing the story is about the De Leon family, specifically Oscar who is an over weight nerd trying to find the love of his life, but due to a family “fuku” or curse Oscar is having a lot of trouble doing so. Instead, the story actually portrays the dark history of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Upon reading the stories of Oscar’s relatives the reader feels a powerful message of fear and oppression due to the actions of the Trujillo regime. Even after the demise of

In this essay, female oppression in La Casa de Bernarda Alba will be discussed and analyzed. However, in order to be able to understand the importance of this theme and the impact it has had on the play, one must first understand the role of female oppression in the Spanish society in the 1930s.

The author creates a mood of being irritating by her “…awful grandmother…” and brothers “…Alfredito and Enrique…” who are occupied playing outside as “… a B-Fifty-two bomber…” [paragraph 5] and her grandmother with a “… long, long list of relatives … names of the dead and the living into one long prayer…” [paragraph 10]. Including, the imagery provided in the short story described the character’s actions by watching her grandmother pray while she counts her grandmother’s mustache hairs. Later, an unknown lady and man start talking to her brother asking if she could take a picture, than judging by their looks, they assume they do not speak English but only

In El Laberinto del Fauno, Guillermo del Toro uses the theme of obedience to illustrate and condemn two repressive components of fascism: patriarchy and the coercion of free will. This essay will look at two examples of obedience in the film which reveal the abhorrent nature of these aspects of fascism and the importance of resisting them. These are, respectively, the relationship between Captain Vidal and Mercedes and Ofelia’s refusal to compromise her own integrity.

Government interferences commonly occur both in Fahrenheit 451 and the real world. The censorship is to keep the population unaware of the truth of what happens throughout the world, and corruption of the government. All the different ways to censor something happen to accomplish one goal, to keep the public away from the negative truths about themselves. Several events in history show that this is a fairly popular habit among different governments and nations. Although these events are real life situations, Ray Bradbury is able to broadcast these thoughts in Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury’s overall statement in the book shows the truth on how the government treats the public.

In the play by Federico Garcia Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba, a recurring theme throughout the play is freedom. Lorca expresses freedom using characters, situations and objects. The characters in the story are Bernarda’s daughters who are under her control and have extremely little freedom and privacy by being forced to abide by her rules. Freedom and Repression are most significant themes conveyed throughout the play, the two opposing themes together are important to understanding both the characters and the story as well.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the reader gets a sense of what the expectations are of Dominican men and women. Junot Díaz uses Oscar in contrast to the other male characters to present the expectations of the Dominican male. On the other hand, Díaz presents the women in the text, especially Belicia, La Inca, Lola, and Jenni, as strong characters in their own rights, but the male characters, with the exception of Oscar, have a desire to display their masculinity to maintain power over these women. It would be unfair to say that the women bring the abuse unto themselves, but rather it is their culture that makes the abuse acceptable and almost to a certain extent—expected.

One of the main themes of the novel Fahrenheit 451 is censorship. Censorship is n: the action of a censor esp. in stopping the transmission or publication of matter considered objectionable. That is, of course, according to the guys over at Merriam-Webster.

Censorship is a concept with several different meanings. To each individual censorship has its own meaning. Is it a violation of our rights or is it a protection for our well being? Censorship in the generic sense refers to the suppression of information, ideas, or opinions. It occurs in all forms of communication from technological media to print media. Each society, culture, or individual's belief is violated by the codes of censorship that our society instills.

    Ray Bradbury criticizes the censorship of the early 1950's by displaying these same themes in a futuristic dystopia novel called Fahrenheit 451. In the early 1950's Ray Bradbury writes this novel as an extended version of "The Fireman", a short story which first appears in Galaxy magazine. He tries to show the readers how terrible censorship and mindless conformity is by writing about this in his novel.

Continuing in the theme of conformity; if the boys are united by their heteronomy, Cuellar’s castration, in contrast, is the source of his ostracism. His unfortunate accident is a wound that ‘time opens instead of closes’, and as the story progresses, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes the boys socially inclusive youthful pastimes of football and studying mentioned earlier in the novel with his comparatively solitary penchant for the ocean and surfing “a puro pecho o con colchón” (94) in chapter five. In this passage, his distance from the others is symbolised by the isolation of the sea; the narrator says the water “se lo tragó” (95) and later, the boys state that “se perdió” (96). Clearly, Cuellar’s failure to partake in the testosterone fuelled rituals of sexual maturity in the city has seen him shunned from the rest of the boys and resigned to hanging out with “rosquetes, cafichos y pichicateros” (96) instead – the modern, metropolitan outcasts. Evidently, Cuellar is incapacitated by this highly heteronormative lifestyle, as the inherent masculinity of the city is a fixed identity that will perpetually exclude him, or anyone else who cannot fulfil Peruvian societies idea of gender appropriate behaviour.

Lope de Vega’s play touches upon several key components and ideas that were brought up in many of the other stories read throughout the semester. This included the role of gender and how men and women are viewed differently in the Spaniard town of Fuenteovejuna. Another topic included the importance of family, love, and relationships and their connection on loyalty, trust, and personal beliefs. The last major influence found in other literature and in Fuenteovejuna, were the political and religious references made throughout the play. Even though Lope de Vega didn’t make these views obvious, the reader could still pick up on their connotation and the references made towards these specific ideas. With all of this in mind, each of these

The use of censorship to examine and eliminate elements in media that are found to be unorthodox or radical has been prevalent in society for centuries. Through censorship, ideas found to be objectionable or offensive are repressed. In his prophetic novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury denotes the common practice of government censorship of books as a suppressive and marginalizing concept for humans because it strips them of the realities, truths, and meaning behind books and deprives them the freedom to deliberate and act on them. The protagonist, Guy Montag lives in a futuristic, American society and is a ‘firemen’; a group of men that deflect the old conventional purpose of stopping fires, to creating

Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a masterpiece in many senses of the word: at the time of its conception, it was hailed as a revolutionary work of literature that defined a genre, in later centuries regarded as an acerbic social commentary, a slightly misshapen romantic tragedy, and even as a synthesis of existentialist and post-modernist features. At the centre of this Spanish satirical chronicle is the perplexing character Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s personality and perspective is rapidly established fromsince the beginning of the novel, revealing unabashedly to readers that he is mad. The source of his madness lies in the extent to which Don Quixote acts on his delusions and projections unto reality as he saunters through Cervantes’ Andalusia. Don Quixote’s delusions have two primary functions in the novel: demonstrating the reality and tragedy of Cervantes’ manifestation of idyllic themes of love and chivalry, and revealing certain characteristics about narration.

In the 1950’s, censorship was a major part of media coming out of World War II, and into the Cold War era , America was scared of communism. Everything was censored from radio and television to books and comics. Comic books had the biggest attack by Dr Frederick Wertham, a German-American psychiatrist in his book “Seduction of The Innocent” published in 1954. He used fear to convince the public that comics increased teen delinquency. He argued so well that congress stepped in and had a subcommittee investigate the effects of comic books on delinquency. His actions lead the industry to becoming nearly extinct. Being pressed in a difficult situation the comic industry evolved, self regulated, regained popularity, and even created social movements for positive reform. His research was fabricated to make it more appealing to the fear of American society, and gain government trust using the terms communism and delinquency in his reports, books, lectures, and testimonies.