Ideas and Intellect

 After reading another of Fitzgerald's works, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz , I started thinking about how diamonds are portrayed in literature. It intrigued me because I had a very different perspective of what diamonds were after reading the book compared to when I read or watch other forms of storytelling.  Diamonds are usually considered to be flawless and the most prized valuable by most people, only rivaled in significance by gold. However, diamonds are portrayed differently in different pieces, which makes sense, but is also strange given when we think of diamonds we think perfection. In King Solomon's Mines written by H Rider Haggard, the heroes of the story manage to escape a cave and retreat with diamonds, and live lives of wealth and luxury after the climax of the story ends. Infinite wealth is a standard interpretation of diamonds, but there are ways to make this interpretation bad. In The Diamond of Kali by O. Henry, a general who recounts his epic tale of reco...

In my opinion, The Great Gatsby is anything but great. It is very much a pessimistic look at the state of America in the 1920s, and I personally dislike that. When I learned about the 1920s, it finally seemed like a turnaround for the issues that mattered most in America but were being ignored before: being less segregated, women's rights, and corruption in the government and economy. America was on the path to reforming and becoming more modern. So I failed to understand why a story about degrading this modernism while also disparaging people of the Midwest was considered a classical American literature piece. This book feels less like American literature and more like American satire the more you analyze it. The New Woman is frowned upon, black people are treated as jokes, andthe character that represents the East Coast, Gatsby, is said to be a fake and a fraud. So it is clear that Fitzgerald did not like the changes in the 1920s. However, the Midwest isn't much better given...

While The Great Gatsby is quite a boring read on its own, there are legitimate questions that are inquired by this novel about America in the 1920s, questions that even translate into today's America. One that caught my eye out of the many interesting topics to cover was this question: "Does America, as a meritocracy, exist?" First, it would be helpful to define what a meritocracy even is. A meritocracy is a system where people are given power based on their own personal ability, or what they can contribute to the country or society. Obviously some would say yes because America is capitalistic: people gain money by working, and gain power through their monetary gains. However, some people could claim that America isn't a perfect representation of a meritocracy because of the many factors that affect American workers: your gender, age, and race could all affect your salaries, some people earn money by doing less skill-intensive work than others, and equally-skilled pe...

 The one question that made me a little confused was question 18, which asked about what Art got out of the publishing of Maus, which is really weird because it doesn’t seem like it is a very hard question, and, more importantly, one that matters. However I found that the question runs deeper than what is the surface answer, and is worth having a discussion about for the follow-up questions afterwards. The question verbatim was, “What did Art Spiegelman get out of publishing Maus?” The answer to this question is indeed obvious. Spiegelman gained popularity in the form of a cult following, fame, money, and a popular book that will make his name remembered in history and be taught in classrooms. What he gained from this book is great, but we also have to talk about what he lost, which gets much more interesting. This is because he even alludes to it in his own book. In a section that is meant to be a flash-forward in the novel, Artie, Art’s animal counterpart in the story, is portray...

After making my rhetorical analysis prompt for Maus Volume II, I began to think more on the things that I prompted the essay writers to write about. Page 69 of Maus Volume II had a motif of smoke, and how it related to the ovens in Auschwitz, being a kind of poison for Vladek that reminds him of the past. This is shown by showing the smoke from Artie’s cigarette right above the Auschwitz chimney as to indicate that it is coming from the chimney in which the Germans burned Jews alive. Other visual cues are there as well, but it is safe to say that Spiegelman wanted us to view smoke in a negative way in this page. Now, as I am looking back on it, smoke seems like a negative thing in most contexts, but there are some times when it seems like smoke is held in a positive light, despite what the common feeling is towards it. So I wanted to ask, “In literature, when is smoke a good thing, and when is it a bad thing?” Maus has several examples of painting smoke in a negative light, like the ...

After reading the first volume of Maus by Art Spiegelman, I wanted to ask this question because it was something that was untouched even in our discussions in class. In the graphic novel, which is a retelling of the World War II era from a Jew’s perspective with animals instead of people, Vladek, the Jew living through this time period, does many things that makes you question if he is a good person or not. Of course, he does seem like a good person from his perspective, from which this story is told from. But anyone can make it seem like that. Vladek lies a lot to preserve his wife’s life and his own, and ends up leaving family members behind to eventually be sent to Auschwitz, even if that means that they will die a painful death. He wants to protect the lives of the two people most important to him, but does that mean it’s morally okay to do so? Auschwitz was a place portrayed in the story as Hell, and for good reason. For a Jew, a concentration camp meant “eternal suffering” via ga...