LITERATURE ANALYSIS #5

I chose to do my literature analysis on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

1) The exposition of this novel starts with developing the World State, a society in the future where there is no families or love, and humans are mass-produced and assigned to different ranks. The novel starts with a group of students touring the Hatchery, where the humans are produced. We are introduced to Lenina, who having relations with a man named Henry Foster. Wanting to explore other men, Lenina accepts a man named Benard's invitation to go to a Savage Reserve. When Benard goes to ask the Director for permission to visit the reserve, the Director tells him a story about a woman that he lost while he took a trip there. On the reservation, Lenina and Bernard encounter Savages, whose life-styles vary widely from theirs. They meet Linda, the woman the Director had relations with, and her son John who they bring back to the World State in an attempt to embarrass the Director. The society finds Linda a disgust, but John mildly amusing, though he grows to hate the society's morals and ideals. Lenina begins to develop feelings for John and attempts to seduce him, but John is so digested by her actions and her willingness to engage in premarital sex that he chases her away. He runs to the hospital, where he watches Linda die from her continued overdosage of soma. He becomes furious, especially because no one seems to care that Linda has passed, and holds a free-soma riot along with Bernard's friend Helmholtz, which lands them all, including Bernard, in the Controller's office, enemies of the State. John and the Controller debate the state of the society and John chooses to not follow Bernard and Helmholtz to the island they are sent to. He instead takes refuge in an abandoned light house, where he is free to take part in the rituals of his old life. This fascinated the World State members, who come to watch him and eventually push him towards suicide, ending the novel.

2) The major theme is "The Incompatibility of Happiness and Truth." This theme majorly becomes evident through the Controller and Johns debate about the problems of the World State's ideals. In creating humans, the top leaders program the children so that they do not fully experience emotions, both the positive and negative sides of them. They are not taught how to love, but instead taught to pleasure themselves through as many sexual partners as they please, saying "Everyone belongs to everyone." The Controllers do this because they have realized that when people are aware of suffering and aware that they could be "something more," they will never truly be happy. By developing people to want nothing more then the social class they are assigned to, people don't know that there is more to life than what they know, and therefore are content.

3) The tone of the novel is Dramatic/ Parodic. Certain scenes of the novel are very dark and intense, but at the same time in a sense mocking our society. Many of the ideas/ concepts of the novel are so ridiculous you almost can't help but laugh, though in the novel there is no humor in their context. In part 2 of Ch 5 (Page 85) Bernard takes part in a "Orgy-porgy," which is so ridiculous you have to laugh. " 'Orgy-porgy,' the dancers caught up in the liturgical refrain, 'Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, kiss the girls...' " Another example in Ch 13 is when Lenina makes a mistake when developing the embryos and the text reads "Twenty-two years, eight months, and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis." A last example is Ch 2 when the Director talks to the new students about mothers. " 'Humans used to be...' he hesitated; the blood rushed to his cheeks. 'Well they used to be quite viviparous.' "

4) 
1. Allusion:  
There are a few examples of allusion in the novel.  Many of the slogans implanted on the citizens minds are corrupted versions of things said in society today.  Examples would be “A gramme in time saves nine,” or, “A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away.”  

2. Satire:  
Satire is doubtlessly the most prominent literary element in the novel.  The entire premise for the plot is a criticism of values that Huxley observed society of his time was heading towards.  Huxley sarcastically addresses the consumer-driven world of today, saying “Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption.  It’s madness.  Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.”  

3. Setting:“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” Through the harsh description of the setting of Brave New World comes to characterize the surrounding World State society as well as its values of: COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

4. Rhyming scheme/Free Rhyme verse: “Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted! Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted? Skies are blue inside of you, The weather's always fine; For There ain't no Bottle in all the world Like that dear little Bottle of mine.” Not long enough to qualify as a sonnet, the rhyming scheme however cleverly creates a catchy means by which readers can get the sense that even their “folk-songs” are merely propagandist spirituals.

5. Figurative Language:
Throughout the novel Huxley uses animal names to refer to the members of the World State, which you can take to mean negatively. He uses the names of birds and insects to get across the idea that, like animals, the people have no feelings or compassion that drive them, only instincts.

6. Connotation:
The connotation of the morals and ideals that we see in different charters in the World State helps readers to understand which of these characters would be found socially acceptable or not. We agree more with John's ideals, but in the World State the connotations of his beliefs lead him to be an outcast.

7. Foil:
In many ways John acts as a foil to Bernard. Though they both question the social norm, Bernard is all talk and thoughts while John is all action. Bernard is intelligent and can change himself to fit into the World State, while John is all emotion and passion and can not seem to change his ideals so that he is not an outcast.

8. Point of View:
Depending on your point of view, you also can see the main characters like John and Bernard in several different lights. John can easily be seen as a heroic fighter for morality and compassion, as well as an emotional idiot who has the right ideas but the wrong ways of making an impact with those ideas.

9. Personification:
“The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.” Huxley at times engages in beautiful bouts of imagery laden figurative language to juxtapose the otherwise cruel and grey atmosphere of the novel. The personification in this passage with the soliquizing flowers and drowsy air, creates a mood contrasting with the overall foreboding feeling of oppression prevalent in the book.

10. Tone:
 “The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Cold, clinical the tone of Brave New World is sterile in it’s diction, even the similes/figurative language set an overall mood of a dead humanity. 

CHARACTERIZATION:


1) Direct Characterization for Bernard: "The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects." Direct Characterization of Helmholtz "...Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him." 
Both Bernard and Helmholtz are directly states as outsiders, which gives readers the lasting impression that they are different from the other members of the society.
Indirect Characterization of John the Savage takes place when he rejects Lenina's invitation of sex, which shows he is truly against the morals of the society, even the things that appeal to him on even a physical level. Indirect Characterization of Henry takes place when he flies extremely close to the ocean,  which shows that he is deep down against the World State ideals as well, but does t have the right outlet for his feelings and is afraid to truly show his ideas and be punished.

2. "Anywhere. I don't care. So long as I can be alone,""But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, i want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin,"In these two examples we see a shift in the syntax of John the Savage's speech. Instead of speaking in eloquent sentences, his speech becomes short and almost exasperated. It conveys a quickened pace and it almost seems as if he is out of breath. It strongly reflects the idea that there is so much running though his mind and that all of his senses are overloading and becoming too difficult to process.

3) It could be argued that there is several different protagonists to this play, but the major one would be John the Savage. John grows up on the reservation, and therefore has certain ideas about love, sex, religion, compassion, and what his meaning in life is. I would argue that John is in some ways a static character because though he is opened up to many different ideas through his time in the World State, in the end he has the same ideas about what is right and wrong.


4) At the end of the book I mostly came away feeling like I met characters because what takes place in the book is so far-fetched its really hard to imagine anyone thinking and feeling that way, though Huxley does a great job of making it realistic. An example is the conformation between Lenina and John, where she is desperately trying to seduce him while he violently tried to fight his urges.

MY TEAM

Right now my team consists of Taylor Duguran, Hannah Savaso, Ian Stellar (?), and Kylie Sagisi, who is in the 5th period class. Today we spent a lot of time talking about what exactly it is that our project should be, and brainstorming events that we could easily and cheaply put together. We came up with hikes, making lunches for homeless people (in SLO), a bonfire at the beach, movie nights, and possibly a camping trip. Together, we all looked over our schedules to see which weekends or week days would work best to hold the events on.

I, JURY

What I found form my peers essay responses was that they possibly did not completely understand the book, or maybe just had not been given enough time to finish it. A lot of the essays seemed to have a broad idea of what Huxley was trying to say through Brave New World, but few had specific examples of details to support their statements. I know there is very strong writers in this class and given more time to talk about and complete the book will probably bring better responses from my peers and myself.

BRAVE NEW WORLD ESSAY TOPIC

One essay topic that I found and really liked was this:

"How does Aldous Huxley incorporate his views of history (that men do not learn enough from history) into Brave New World? Do people, in general, learn enough lessons from history? Furthermore, examine the role the future plays in Brave New World. Consider the following: If individuals have knowledge of future events, do they have the same responsibility to the future as they do to history? Finally, what lessons might readers take from Brave New World? Should society be more affected by knowledge of the past or of the future?"

This prompt was posted on a Yahoo answers page from this link:  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100122204636AAacFhN

I AM HERE

At this moment in time, I am not completely sure what it is that I will create as a Senior Project. I am leaning towards an area that, in an offhand way, relates to my Big Question, which was about whether or not "goodness" can win over all the bad that their is in life. There is many ways I could go with my Senior Project, but I want to dedicate my time to building some kind of online scrapbook with my friends while also trying to make a positive impact on people. I would love to combine these two elements, but am unsure how to exactly.
If I stuck to this general idea for a project, I could also try to combine elements of the Collaborative Working Group idea I created in the beginning of the semester, but failed to carry on and actually create. My idea was to travel to different sights and trails around the Central Coast and document my experiences on a blog. My hope was that I would be able to take time to appreciate the beautiful area we live in and also possibly direct others toward some sights they might not have previously known of.

BOB I

Ranks of my period's blogs best to worst in a hard copy.

LIT TERMS: LIST 6

1. Simile: An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as like or as.
2. Soliloquy: A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions and provides necessary but otherwise inaccessible information to the audience.
3. Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.
4. Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.
5. Stereotype: A character who is so ordinary or unoriginal that the character seems like an oversimplified representation of a type, gender, class, religious group, or occupation.
6. Stream of consciousness: Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception.
7. Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.
8. Style: The author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects.
9. Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important  structures of language. 
10. Surrealism: An artistic movement doing away with the restrictions that might be imposed on an artist. Artists sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind, which resulted in the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality of surrealistic writings.
11. Suspension of disbelief: Temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story.
12. Symbol: A word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level.
13. Synesthesia: A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery or sensory metaphors. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in what seems an impossible way. EX: How a color sounds, how a smell looks.
14. Synecdoche:  A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part. EX: "Twenty eyes watched our every move," meaning that ten people watched the group's every move.
15. Syntax: The orderly arrangement of words into sentences to express ideas." EX. The standard word order and sentence structure of a language.
16. Theme: A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work.
17. Thesis: An argument that a writer develops and supports.
18. Tone: The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood.
19. Tongue in cheek
20. Tragedy: A serious play in which the chief character, by some peculiarity of psychology, passes through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe.
21. Understatement:  The opposite of exaggeration.
22. Vernacular: The everyday or common language of a geographic area or the native language of commoners in a country as opposed to a prestigious dead language maintained artificially in schools or in literary texts.
23. Voice: The narrative or elegiac voice that speaks of his or her situation or feelings.
24. Zeitgeist: The preferences, fashions, and trends that characterize the intangible essence of a specific historical period.

WELCOME TO THE INTERDISCIPLINARITY

I am sharing a project with Hannah Savaso, Taylor Duguran, and Kylie Sagisi, where we plan to schedule events and outings for us and others of our friends to participate in. During the event we will take pictures and videos that we will end up posting to a shared blog. We are focusing on the relationships we have established and developed over the last four years, or even longer, and how we can simultaneously build our friendship, create a database of memories to be able to enjoy after high school, and spend time helping out our community. An example of an event we came up with was to go on a hike with friends and document it while also picking up trash along the trail.

HAFTA/ WANNA

I feel that nothing after high school will change as suddenly and drastically as we have been led to believe. For myself and some friends of mine, responsibilities will not be a completely new thing. A lot of us already have jobs, own cars, and pay for some of our own expenses like car insurance and phone bills. Just like how you are no different on January 1st compared to December 31st, no one will wake up June 7th feeling like a whole new person. For a lot of my friends and I, life will stay somewhat the same as we spend our last summer together in our hometown before leaving, or possibly staying, to college in the fall.
I think what will bring one of the most dramatic changes after high school is finally setting off to live by ourselves; whether it be in an apartment or on-campus housing. That's when I feel like we will truly be "adults." Though obviously we can't do whatever we want, not living under our parents' roof anymore will bring all new kinds of freedom. I feel that that freedom will either make us or break us. In college we could skip class every day, spend zero time studying, and party into the early morning every chance we get and almost no one would know.
This year I have really struggled to have the motivation to complete all of my homework every night. I mean I already got into a couple colleges, as far as I'm concerned I could just keep my grades to a C- or above and not seriously mess up in any way and still be attending college next fall. What does stop me from failing to do anything at all is mostly my awareness that the major I'm going into (civil engineering) is actually going to be pretty tough and that it might actually help knowing some stuff from the Physics and Calculus classes I'm taking this year. And on top of that, not having to pay for certain courses if I manage to pass the three AP tests I'm taking would be nice as well...
My hopes are that in college I am able to find a happy medium of getting my work done, while also exploring what else that it is I want to do in life besides working, and making some good memories with good friends along the way.

LAUNCH DRAFT

- What am I passionate about?  What do I want to do?
Right now I am starting to think that I may not exactly know the answer to these questions, or at least that the answers change day to day. I would really love to look more into engineering and architecture, but what I really would love to do is work with children. And some days when neither or those options sound good I feel that I would really love to learn more about photography because I would really love to capture some of the places around on the Central Coast that my iPhone camera does no justice to.

- How can I use the tools from last semester (and the Internet in general)?
I can use the Internet in general to make connections with people and learn more about what topic I choose to focus on.

- What will I need to do in order to "feel the awesomeness with no regrets" by June?
Again, there is a lot of different ways that I could answer this question. Honestly, I feel that the best way to feel no regrets in June is to spend as much time as possible with the people I love and have a positive attitude.

- What will impress/convince others (both in my life and in my field)?
In my field, hard work, dedication, and assertiveness, especially because it is so male-dominated. In just life in general, I feel that honesty, sincerity, compassion, but enough self-assurance to not let anyone walk over you is what is going to make people want to trust you and listen to what you have to say.

- How will I move beyond 'What If' and take this from idea --> reality?
I’m still not sure what the “idea” is honestly… So that would be the first step.

- Who will be the peers, public, and experts in my personal learning network?
I’m sure teachers and peers will be what I will focus on as my personal learning network.

LIT TERMS: LIST 5

1. Parallelism: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. EX: "King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable."
2. Parody: Imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. EX:  Using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks.
3. Pathos: In its rhetorical sense, pathos is a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience. EX: Evokes a deep feeling of suffering, joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, etc.
4. Pedantry: Rigid to book knowledge without regard to common sense.
5. Personification: A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions. EX: The moon "is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea after it like a dark crime."
6. Plot: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction that starts with a catalyst. Focuses on how events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects. 
7. Poignant: Affecting or moving the emotions.
8. Point of view: The way a story gets told and who tells it. EX: First person, third-person narrative, dramatic third person, objective, omniscient, limited, unreliable.
9. Postmodernism:  A general label referring to the philosophical, artistic, and literary changes and tendencies after the 1940s and 1950s up to the present day. (1) a rejection of traditional authority, (2) radical experimentation, (3) eclecticism and multiculturalism, (4) parody and pastiche, (5) deliberate anachronism or surrealism, (6) a cynical or ironic self-awareness.
10. Prose: Any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry. EX: Short stories, novels, letters, essays, and treatises.
11. Protagonist: The main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention. EX: Harry Potter.
12. Pun: A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning. EX: "Thou art Peter [Petros] and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church."
13. Purpose: The reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.
14. Realism: (1) Generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world. Written to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner (as it actually is.) In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events. It tends to focus as much on the everyday, the mundane, and the normal as events that are extraordinary, exceptional, or extreme.(2) Refers to a literary movement in America, Europe, and England that developed out of naturalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
15. Refrain: A line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song (these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work.) EX: "With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" in the song from As You Like It.
16. Requiem: Any musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the dead.
17. Resolution: The outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot.
18. Restatement: To repeat something again or in a new way. 
19. Rhetoric: The art of persuasive argument through writing or speech.
20. Rhetorical question: Question that implies an answer, but usually does not provide one explicitly.
21. Rising action: The action in a play before the climax.
22. Romanticism: Artistic philosophy prevalent during about 1800-1830. Rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment, and instead asserted that reliance upon emotion and natural passions provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living. Typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over "artifice" and "convention," the human need for emotional outlets, the rejection of civilized corruption, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. 
23. Satire: An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards.
24. Scansion: The act of "scanning" a poem to determine its meter, or which syllables have heavy stress and which have lighter stress.
25. Setting: The general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a fictional or dramatic work occurs.