Literature: The Count of Monte Cristo

I would say the value of literature is highly subjective and depends on the person. Some people will read a novel and interpret the piece completely different from another person. That piece of literature’s value can be completely different and shed different trains of thought. In my opinion the value of literature is unlimited. Literature increases your knowledge, brings light to different perspectives, brings illustration to certain thoughts, further broadens your horizon, teaches lessons based on its content and many more. Some of the world’s most successful and smartest people are constant readers. I consider mostly books, novels, poetry, non-fiction, musical lyrics, and some types of films to be “literature”. The sort of films I consider to be literature are the ones based off of books such as The Lord of the Rings, The Great Gatsby, and many others. Some of the greatest movies are based off of books and in turn I consider those types of movies to be literature. 

According to dictionary.com, literature is defined as follows "writings in which expression and form, in connections with ideas of permanent and universal interest, are characteristic or essential features, as poetry, novels, history, biography, and essays.” I am mainly going to stem my definition from this one but I do incorporate some movies so not all literature is “writing”. At least the transcript of songs and movies are in writing.  This definition however is not the definition of literature.  The definition itself is very abstract but I do think this definition has some important concepts of literature that all pieces of literature have such as “expression and form” and “ideas of permanent and universal interest”.

The best piece of literature I have encountered is the movie “The Count of Monte Cristo”. This movie is based off of the book written by Alexandre Dumas. What makes this literature is the expression and universal interests accompanied in the movie. The movie is about an innocent man who is wrongly imprisoned and then brilliantly creates a strategy of revenge against those who betrayed him. These ideas of “innocence”, “the comeback”, “suffering”, and “justice” are ideas of universal and permanent interest. This movie greatly expresses these motifs and themes of the movie throughout with its actors, camera scenes, and the vivid detail of the story. What makes this meaningful to me is this whole idea of “coming back” and “proving yourself” even when others have wronged you. In this case, this man is imprisoned and almost killed but his will power to not let up encourages me and again promotes a universal interest. This movie is a great film and I encourage everyone reading this to watch it.

Quick Video for Class Presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG7FDivQLac

Responses to Class Questionnaire:

What did you learn this year?

• I learned a lot from this year, but the thing I think I mostly learned was becoming a better writer and being able to evaluate and analyze other author's meanings and how they achieved their meaning. I really have improved my overall structure of paper writing (inverted triangle, blending quotations, topic sentences, thesis) and am better able to digress author's purposes of their writing.

What do you think you'll take from this class as you move on to your senior year and beyond?

• I think I will definitely take on the many important things you taught us in paper writing and how to "Show" writing rather than "Tell". I also will take away the knowledge of rhetoric I now have thanks to this class.

What did you struggle with?

• I initially struggled with writing to show. I wasn't very good at trying to show my ideas rather than tell. I finally got it in the end but I did struggle with it.

What do you wish we had done more of?

• I wish we had done more of "synthesis" and "argument" essay practice. I really enjoyed the research paper and wish we could have done more of the other similar types of research paper. Also it would have helped more with the AP test, but I still think we were well prepared.

Rhetorical Situation Report: Pros and Cons of Hydraulic Fracturing

I have put some considerable thought in what I should discuss and write about for my research essay. After changing my original topic, I have decided to write about the issue of hydraulic fracturing (commonly referred to as fracking). The “puzzle to be solved” is whether the benefits of hydraulic fracturing outweigh the negative potential consequences to the environment.  With President Obama’s recent regulations on fracking on federal lands, there is a lot of exigency with this issue. In order to limit the exigency and make this issue more manageable, I will just be focusing on whether the benefits outweigh the environmental dangers and not on President Obama’s recent legislation. In the “Rhetorical Situation” by Lloyd Bitzer, the exigence is defined as “an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be”. The issue of fracking is huge right now, and you could go as so far as to say that it is more important or debated than it ever was before. This is mainly due to the fact that fracking wells are being built everyday and this could potentially help or harm our country (“something waiting to be done”). In Susan L. Brantley ‘s article in The New York Times, she explains hydraulic fracking and many facts such as pros and cons about fracking. She also states “approximately one million American wells have been fracked since the 1940s” (Brantley). This important statistic explains the exigency and circumstances for this rhetorical discourse.

Fracking will have an effect on many different audiences on different levels. Such audiences that have a stake in this issue are all types of corporations in the energy industry such as exploration and production, energy services, and midstream companies. Other audiences that have a stake in this issue besides energy companies are US citizens who live near and around these fracking sites, consumers who use energy products, and mainly the government officials who deal with the energy industry. According to a Forbes article, “at least 15.3 million Americans lived within a mile of a well that has been drilled since 2000” (Gold). The issue of fracking affects a diverse audience from large corporations to small communities around frac sites. I currently am tossed between the two sides of fracking. I have researched numerous amounts of benefits (energy independence, job creation, cheaper energy) and negative consequences (mini earthquakes, global warming, polluted water) and I am still on the fence whether or not the fracking benefits outweigh the negative consequences. In order to make this issue manageable, the target audience I will be writing to will be the people who are undecided about the overall pros and cons about fracking. I am deciding to mainly consider these people because as Bitzer put “rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change”. In order to fully inform the audience, I need to further research the legitimacy of the consequences of fracking and whether they are positive or negative.

Sources used in Blog Update:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/opinion/global/the-facts-on-fracking.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/03/24/how-many-people-are-affected-by-fracking/

Amusing Ourselves to Death

I would say Postman’s concluding claim in this chapter is that “forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms” (6). In other words, the way we communicate with each other limits the type of content that can communicated.

I strongly agree with this brilliant point mainly because of the points he backs it up with. Postman goes on to explain this by providing examples of the Indians who communicate with smoke signals. The smoke signals were their way of long distance communication and they could not have philosophical arguments simply because the “form excludes the content” (7). The limitations of that form affected what could be communicated through it. Another example Postman shows is of a President Taft and how his “grossness” would cause him to not get elected in the present day even though his political arguments and policies are sound. “For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words […] television demands a different kind of content from other media[…] Its form works against the content” (7). Postman explains that President Taft would not be elected because of his visual appearance but in a world without television he was elected because his political arguments were more important than appearance at the time. Postman shows that the form of discourse can limit or dictate the content.

 I would say his argument still stays true to this day. “Television gives us a conversation in images, not words” (7) is still true, but also applies to the Internet. I would say the Internet has surpassed television as the new medium and now has the primary influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations. Images are all over the Internet and they have become (in my opinion) the new medium in which we enforce our understanding of reality. We use images everyday to contribute to our perception of reality. We perceive things visually we have never seen through looking at images. You can only visually perceive things by both going to a place and experiencing it yourself or by just looking an image of the thing. The photo is a metaphor of the actual thing. Therefore “the medium is the metaphor”.

Postman also stresses a big deal about the theme of entertainment.  Postman says “all public discourse increasingly take the form of entertainment” (3) and “the result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death” (4). He suggests American Culture is best symbolized by Las Vegas “a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment” (3). I think he is right because nowadays what sells is what’s entertaining or dramatic. He also shows that this new form of discourse is affecting us in ways that we do not even realize. Postman is getting at the idea that everyone is concerned with appearance and entertainment above all else because of this new medium of images.  The medium is dictating the content of the culture and is causing adverse effects that people aren't even noticing.

First Amendment Protection and Censorship of Media

I found that I had conflicting opinions once reading “On Racist Speech” and “Protecting Freedom of Expression on Campus”. These two articles were connected in that they both deal with harm, offense, freedom of expression, and censorship. In “On Racist Speech” by Charles Lawrence, I found a good quote that really stood out to me. Lawrence writes “Racial insults are particularly undeserving of First Amendment protection because the perpetrator’s intention is not to discover truth or initiate dialogue but to injure the victim” (Lawrence 66). If the counter-argument to protecting this speech is about the “freedom of expression” and “market place of ideas” that this American democracy was built on, I do not see why speech that injures a victim (usually minority groups) should be protected. Speech under the “fighting words” doctrine that tends to inflict injury is not protected. Racist speech causes offense and harm that is mental and should not be protected just how physical harm and offense due to fighting speech isn’t protected.

 Switching over to “Protecting Freedom of Expression on Campus”, Derek Bok brings up an interesting idea about censorship and its impact on communication. Bok writes “One reason why the power of censorship is so dangerous is that it is extremely difficult to decide when a particular communication is offensive enough to warrant prohibition or to weigh the degree of offensiveness against the potential value of the communication” (Bok 70). A question arises from this and that is- If we begin to prohibit a type of communication, won’t it just lead to prohibiting another thing and what about the potential? Another issue raised by Bok is how we decide when something is “offensive” and what will the boundaries be to that. This ties into Lawrence’s claim on racist speech. How will we know when something is offensive and when it is not? My final opinion on this free speech debate is that there is a lot of grey area if we were to censor certain types of speech. Another thing to note is “To disapprove of a particular form of communication […] is not enough to justify prohibiting it” (Bok 70). Also a huge grey area for this subject is the difference between “offense” and “harm”. We see this in how the police protect people when they are harmed, but people aren't protected if they are offended. Should speech be prohibited just because it offends people, I would say no but how do you distinguish if someone has been mentally harmed or offended by a certain type of speech. Mental harm is not as clear cut as physical harm. My opinion after rereading each article is that I’m tossed between these two sides.  Censorship is a big deal and you have to be willing to look at all the sides of the arguments and the potential effects it could have.