Writing Exercise for Creative Non-fiction (01-27-12)

I love going to bed at night, as it is my favorite time of day. Another one completed, only so many more to go. No matter what, I always go to bed around eleven o’clock at night. I am obsessed with maintaining this part of my daily schedule. It is a ritual, only one of a few that I maintain from day to day, week to week, month after month, year after year.

I either walk or crawl up the stairs to the bedroom, depending upon how tired from the day I feel. I kick myself out of my clothes, and then go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. When this ritual is over, I void myself of the last remaining fluids that remain from the day, and then make my way to the bed, ready to be face down in the pillows, soon to be riding the flying carpet of my dreams.

My girlfriend comes to me after going through her own evolutions toward the intended aim of slumber. We sleep in separate beds, due to a number of reasons: different sleep schedules, different levels of sleep, different patterns of sleep, different qualities, and levels of devotion to the god of sleep.

She sleeps to rid herself of the misery of toil of the working world, and to rest and rejuvenate herself physically to participate in the same way, going through the same motions, day after endless day.

I, on the other hand, sleep hard into myself, to escape this world and become unknown to myself. Asleep I believe I am travel to some far off and magical place, to become my true self, the ideal of myself in another world, that although I have no recollection when I arise, I can still enjoy the effects of, during the days when I wander aimlessly in this world.

Informal Essay One (American Literature II) 01-24-12

Although I barely remember high school literature, I remember “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Huckleberry Finn”, “Catcher in the Rye”, and a few other books that are popular for high school curriculum. As I was still young I had no capacity to appreciate them, the books were just another assignment in another class, just another stepping stone towards graduation. But I had always had an innate love for literature, and a desire to create my own, and so I discovered other authors at random through culture, i.e. Nietzsche and Burroughs, Bukowski and Kerouac, among others through my reading. Yet I still did not have a clear cut driving ambition as to learning the methods by which literature was created and developed, its techniques and purposes, what stories I would see fit worth to tell, and how to go about telling them.

As an adolescent, and later as a young adult I could not be anything, or do anything that didn’t coincide with the preoccupations of being an adolescent or young adult. But I always knew that I had the desire to write, perhaps unconsciously I knew a writer is only as good as the stories he or she can tell, and the stories we tell are based on the lives that we survive, a culmination of the dares we set and win for ourselves, the disorganized mess of life that we are capable of putting together after we have learned some of life’s lessons. But one has to first live to learn, and only after learning who we are from our lives, can we then begin to know the importance and worth of the stories of others in order to clarify the telling of our own. I think this was what I was subconsciously picking up from my reading, and what kept me continuing to search through book shelves. I felt that eventually I would find something that would give me a clearer understanding of my random reading if only I kept searching.

In the past couple of years I have enhanced my desire to become more intimate with the mechanics of the novel, rather than blind stumbling upon writers, yet not knowing what they are really saying, and how they came to put their words together. I have focused my reading to books about books, how literature functions and its devices. Examples of these types of books are: How to Read Novels Like a Professor, and How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Like a Writer by Francine Prose. I have come upon many great books in my other courses, like The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other books by Joseph Campbell. I have been introduced to books on mythology like Once and Future Myths, and Trickster Makes This World. I have also been introduced to the methods and ideas of Edward De Bono on creativity and idea generation. These books have been very helpful, and my favorite books of his are: Lateral Thinking, and Serious Creativity which is a comprehensive collection of his techniques. I have also been reading the works of Jung as well. I think an understanding of psychology is important to the understanding of literature of well, as people write books, and books are always about people.

            I was led to this study as part of my degree choice, Creative Writing and Literature. I was laid off from the best job that I have ever had, even though I was miserable in what I did, and didn’t see myself moving upward and forward, except in the pay they gave me for all the tears in my muscles, the cracks in my spine, and the continuous striving to hold my sanity in check as I became just another automation going through the motions in an increasingly pointless preservation for the sole sake of surviving. When I was laid off, I was awakened to the fact that if I didn’t do something drastic, my life would probably continue within its same limited and pointless cycle. So I have now devoted myself to learning how to excavate my dream from out of my head, and on to paper.  

            I have taken multiple literature courses such as Mythology and Modern Life, Literary Theory as a Method of Inquiry, and Stories and Creative Leadership, as well as the American Literature I. I have learned a great deal from these courses and now I hope to be able to read and fully appreciate the books of this course through the filters of understanding that I have gained from others. I look forward to becoming introduced and familiarizing myself with the authors that have arisen since the civil war up to modern times. Hopefully through studying these authors I can become ever closer to learning how to tell my own stories that have for far too long been gestating in my head. This will not be my last literature study either. In next two semesters, which should be the last for my degree, I intend to take Shakespeare, Creative Nonfiction Advanced (I am taking the introductory level along with this class), Ideal Worlds: Utopian Literature, U.S. Multicultural Fiction, and Drafting the Novel where I will have to create a 75-100 page manuscript.

            As far as being American, I think it is how well we design ourselves after being able to explore whatever interests we discover and encourage in ourselves. We have lots of freedoms, but many people take them for granted, or don’t know how to properly use them. We can be loud and obnoxious, or courteous and sophisticated, an American can be anything that they are intelligent and imaginative enough to define and create, for good or bad. It’s all in how you are able to bring it about. I think the definition of an American is the degree of which the individual has chosen to refine their expressiveness, as most Americans I believe, are an expressive people.

Name exercise for Creative Nonfiction I (01-22-12)

My name is Joe, short for Joseph. It is one of the most famous names, as it comes from the Bible, the name of the father of Jesus, the most famous name of all. It is also used as the term for the average guy, or an "average Joe". It is also a nickname for one of the most popular drinks in the world coffee, as in a "cup of Joe".

Joseph is a serious name to me, formal like a title like Pharoah, or Prophet. It is as serious as death, it denotes the separation and demarcation between I, and the rest of the world. Joe, and Joseph look strange to me on paper, even stranger when I hear these sounds in my ear, as if I have to remind myself that someone is calling me by the name someone chose for a newborn son some decades ago. And it seems at times I almost forget these syllables are somehow attached to me.

Joseph comes from the Hebrew "Yosef", meaning "he will add" (www.behindthename.com). Joseph in the Bible is the father of Christ, and later saint. The Bible also mentions Joseph as the son of Jacob in the Book of Genesis, and the name of the tribe that he originated (Wikipedia.org). The Bible also mentions a Joseph of Arimathea, who "according to the Gospels was a wealthy man "who donated his own prepared tomb for the burial of Jesus after the crucifixition" (Wikipedia.org). I got it from my grandfather, Joseph Fex, my father's father. Many people call me Joe for short, assuming a familiarity that I am not always comfortable with, and every once in awhile someone calls me Josephine, either in jest or in seriousness. I think my name is very neutral as far as masculinity or femininity goes, as many women can be called Jo, short for Joan, or Joanne. My name is unique, I couldn't imagine having any other.

The name Joseph is one of the most recognizeable names from the Bible, and being given this name urges one to create something world changing, larger than oneself, outlasting one's lifetime for eons, signifying to later generations that I was here, and that I was worth something. And somehow I must create this thing that grows and chafes within me, strangling me from the inside out for release, urging to be given form, and having life breathed into it before this thing named Joe someday dissolves into microscopic particles, and disperses itself forever across the four winds, reclaimed once again by the universe to be used as parts for other things that form, and separate.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (American Literature II) 01-14-12

Frederick Douglass was born a slave but died an important official, holding multiple public offices in the United States Government after his many accomplishments in the abolitionist movement. He was both an example of the typical slave, and also a prototype of the potential of what anyone could accomplish with an education and enough personal determination. Through his writings Frederick Douglass was able to expose the truths and horrors of slavery for the typical slave, the damaging effects of slavery upon not only the slave but for slave owner as well, the hypocrisy of a so-called Christian society which enabled the institution of slavery, and revealed through his writings that through education anyone can overcome all obstacles.

            The horror of the typical slave experience was not completely appreciable until those who experienced it firsthand as Frederick Douglass did were able to make themselves heard. Frederick Douglass was separated from his mother while still an infant, as was a typical custom of slavery. Taken from its mother before “the child has reached its twelfth month”, Douglass states, “the child is placed under the care of an old woman” (1749). Douglass proposes the reason for this is to “hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child” (1749). After this early disruption from the child’s natural parent, the slave child is introduced to the world of horrors that comprises slavery, witnessing not only the cruelty of whites upon other slaves, but also becoming a victim as well. Douglass relates through his narrative the cruelty of whites upon blacks on several different occasions. One of the first beatings that Douglass witnessed as a child was of his Aunt Hester who was “stripped naked from neck to waist”, had her hands bound, then the slave master whipped her with a “heavy cowskin” until “warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor” (1751). Frederick Douglass had himself suffered many brutalities under several slave masters, in one instance before he was able to become a free man, was beaten so severely that his attackers only stopped after his “eyeball seemed to have burst” (1789). Until Frederick Douglass and others like him were able to record their experiences, the grim reality of slavery would be unknown to the larger awareness of America and the world.

            Slavery not only was physically and psychologically damaging to the slave, but also had a detrimental effect on the slave owner as well. As rape was an institutionalized part of slavery, Douglass states that mulatto children are “a constant offence” to the slave owner’s wife, and such children must be sold “to human flesh-mongers” in order to avoid having to personally administer upon the slave owner’s own offspring the brutality that slavery inevitably requires (1750). Douglass himself suspected he was the offspring of his original master, a fact that probably caused both father and son much chagrin.

To keep slaves in line, slave owners often employed such characters that took pleasure in their cruelty. Douglass relates the tale of several such characters in his narrative, one example is of a Mr. Severe, “a cruel man” who “seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity” (1753). The presence of Mr. Severe brought to the fields “blood and of blasphemy”, where he “from the rising till the going down of the sun”, was “cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field, in the most frightful manner” (1753). Douglass gives us Mr. Severe as one of several examples of such types that were hired by slave owners to terrorize the slaves.

            Douglass relates how slavery was detrimental to the slave owner as well as the slave. One wife of a slave owner who originally looked upon Douglass with kindness, impressed him so much that he “scarcely knew how to behave towards her” (1762). After trying to teach Douglass how to read, this pursuit by his mistress was discovered by her husband,  and his master forbade this practice as at the time it was “unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave how to read” (1762). Now that she was instructed in the reality of slavery by her husband, Douglass states that his mistress turned against him, her “tender heart became stone, and the lamb-like disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness” (1764). It was the philosophy of the slave owner Douglass states, “that behave well or behave ill, it is the duty of a master occasionally to whip a slave, to remind him of his master’s authority” (1781). The institution of slavery led the slave owner to believe that it was necessary to lower himself to the level of a savage in order that he may control his slaves, destroying his own soul in the process of brutalizing those who the slave owner was compelled to believe were less than human.

            Frederick Douglass, through his writings, exposed the hypocrisy of a so-called Christian society that allowed and maintained the inhumanity of slavery. Douglass states,

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere

covering for the most horrid crimes, -- a justifier of the most

appalling barbarity, -- a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, -- and

a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most

infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection (1781).
 

Douglass relates multiple examples in his narratives of the behavior of so-called Christians that condones the terrorism and savagery against one’s fellow human beings. One such example is of a time when slave owners discovered a clandestine prayer group to which Douglass belonged. These slaves who were trying to understand the word of God, and were being denied this right by their masters. They had their improvised “little Sabbath school” broken up “with sticks and stones” by slave owners who considered themselves Christians and “humble followers of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1783). Douglass exposes to the world the hypocrisy of a society that calls itself Christian, that holds in high esteem the word of God, while permitting the worst inhumanities to be perpetrated against others, often in the name of religion.

            Frederick Douglass disproved the belief that a slave is uneducable and less than human by his many accomplishments which resulted from his persistence and determination in teaching himself to read. Frederick Douglass was first taught the fundamentals of reading by the wife of one of his masters, until she was forbade to continue, the reasoning being that “learning would spoil the best nigger in the world” (1762). Douglass was determined to pursue this ignited desire to learn until he could read as well as any white man. He discovered the “The Columbian Orator” around the age of twelve, which became his literary bible, reading it “every opportunity I got” (1764). He tricked and bribed white children to teach him the writing lessons which they were being taught in school, “which it is quite possible” Douglass states, that “I should never have gotten in any other way” (1766). During this time Douglass made every “board fence, brick wall, and pavement” his writing tablet, while his “pen and ink was a lump of chalk” (1766). He used the abandoned lesson books of his master’s son to learn what the boy was being taught in school, then Douglass surreptitiously copied “what he had written” (1767). Douglass states that he “continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas” and after “a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write” (1767). With persistence and determination Douglass proved that not only was a slave educable, but through his sustained effort to read he demonstrated to the world that he as a black slave did not have diminished mental capacities as the slave owners wanted everyone to believe.

Frederick Douglass overcame many obstacles in his arduous life of being born into a slavery. Due to the effect of his literary capacity in relating his and other’s experience of slavery, and the importance with which he played a part in the abolitionist movement, he was able to become a distinguished office holder in the United States Government in his later years. Despite his early life as the typical slave, who despite his circumstances, earned through his dream of being able to learn the English language, a freedom not only for himself, but also played an important role in gaining the freedom of other slaves as well. Through his writings Frederick Douglass was able to expose the institution of slavery for all its horrors, not only upon the slave but for the slave owner as well. Through his writings Frederick Douglass exposed the hypocrisy of a so-called Christian society that supposedly stood for freedom while still allowing for certain races to be legally oppressed in the supposed “land of the free”. Frederick Douglass proved through the example of his writing that anyone, with enough persistence and determination, can overcome any and all obstacles.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. The American Tradition in Literature. 12^th ed. Ed. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. 1747-1801. Print.

Theories of Personality Final Paper (12-27-11)

Three Fundamental Ideas of Theories of Personality

            The three most useful ideas that one can learn from this course is that: we are subject to the influence of unconscious forces, that ideas have power, and that the ego is something we construct based on the stimulus of our social environments.

            Along with our conscious awareness of our existence, there is a larger and greater mental world that influences our perception of reality in the form of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud states that the unconscious mind is “a repository for urges, feelings, and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict, and pain” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). This repository is responsible for the “core operations” of our personalities (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). These core operations of Freud also contain the Eros, or life instincts, and the Thanatos, or death instincts (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 170). As much as we are able, we can still only express so much in one lifetime, most often we have to “displace” or “sublimate” our unconscious desires and urges (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Displacement is “a change in how energy is used or the object toward which its used”, or directing feelings which we may be uncomfortable expressing in our personal lives into an environment where we are more comfortable (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Sublimation is a shifting “socially unacceptable” actions into actions that are “acceptable or even praiseworthy” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Along with these urges, feelings, ideas, and instincts that comprise the core operations of our personalities that we can displace and sublimate, we are also subject to unconscious reflexes that we become conditioned to perform when some stimulus from our environment activates these automatic responses. These unconscious reflexes can be changed when we recognize that we are performing these automatic, yet unconscious responses to our detriment in our lives. Upon discovering our conditioned, yet self-sabotaging responses to some environmental stimulus, we can then counter condition ourselves to display “a new response that is incompatible” with our former behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 506). A great deal of our lives is guided and influenced by forces which are largely unconscious, yet nevertheless these forces play an important part in our functioning and participation in the world.

           The world constantly projects upon our minds information that has a power over us, whether or not one recognizes this fact. In the cognitive self-regulation perspective, we are introduced to the idea of schema, or “mental organizations of information” that forms our mental experience, and our personal interpretations of the world (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 373). These schemas “develop over experience” and are adapted to emulating the behavior of successful “prototypes” which are actual or idealized representatives that we respect and admire (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 396). “Problems in behavior can come from information-processing deficits”, according to Carver and Scheier (2008), come from our inability to encode or absorb information from our environment, from “ineffective allocation of attention” to information that would assist us in developing our potentials, and “negative self-schemas” or the beliefs that we create and maintain about ourselves which limit our proper functioning in the world (p. 396). Ideas as powerful information is also reflected in the social-cognitive learning perspective. This perspective recognizes that “thought processes” play an integral part in our behavior, and through observing successful people, one can “learn from one another” to emulate this successful behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 315). In this perspective people can be divided into an “internal” who recognizes the importance of reinforcement on their behavior, or an “external” who is not motivated by “social reinforcers such as acceptance and approval”, and who believes “their outcomes to be unrelated to their actions” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 316). One can also find in the observational conditioning perspective a basis for the concept of world as powerful information. In the observational conditioning perspective, one observes a model of desired behavior to absorb “huge amounts of information quickly” by “paying attention to the model”, and retaining this observed behavior by mental imaging or “imaginal coding”, or by “verbal coding” which is mentally describing the behavior which has been observed (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 301). Once we recognize the fact that our world is constantly projecting information upon us, it then up to us to best learn how to make use of this information to our own personal advantage.

            The egos with which we use to participate in our social environment is a personal construction with which we can continuously update and modify to improve our functioning in the world. Freud states that the ego is only one part of our conscious, waking mind that is responsible for mitigating and maintaining a balance between the other two components of our minds, the id and the superego. The id “is all the inherited instinctive, primitive aspects” of our personality that largely remains unconscious, coming from basic, biological drives which are constantly looking to our environments for stimulation and satiation (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 163). Our superego is the value system our mind creates to mediate the id desires against the need for control and order within our social environments (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 166). The need for the ego to constantly balance the desires of the id, against the moralizing superego, can result in much stress if a person is unable to construct a strong, yet flexible sense of self. Once one understands that it is crucial to our success in our social environment, and to our own healthy development, we can then create an ego identity with which we can achieve a life of satisfaction. Our “ego identity”, Carver and Scheier (2008) state “is the consciously experienced sense of self”, deriving “from transactions with social reality”, which constantly modifies itself “in response to events in the social world” (p. 244). Our ego identities go through eight “psycho-social stages” in our lifetimes, each of which has its own respective crisis “that dominates each stage” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The respective eight stages (and their respective crisis) are: infancy (the sense of trust), early childhood (independence), preschool (influence and power in social environment), school age (sense of personal value), adolescence (the consolidation of self), young adulthood (learning intimacy), adulthood (creating something that will outlive oneself, whether it is art or children), and old age (sense of satisfaction). Our highest potential can only be reached by navigating each stage as best as we are able to learn to accomplish. There are various psychological perspectives that we can use to evolve and adapt our personal construction of the ego throughout our lives. One such perspective is known as the personal construct theory, where one attempts to create a structure of personality “through the lens” of an interpretation of reality that is based on predicting and anticipating future events (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 351). In this personal construct perspective, a person essentially becomes a scientist of self, measuring their self-created hypotheses against their effect in social environments (Neimeyer and Bridges, 2003, para. 2). Identifying the fact that our egos are of our own creation, we can then learn to construct an ego that can evolve and adapt to place ourselves in the best position that we are capable of, and achieving the highest potential that we are wholly committed to and determined to pursue.

           There are three useful ideas that can be learned from this course. The first is the influence of unconscious forces upon our lives, and once we recognize the effect that these forces have, we can then begin to distinguish what decisions we are making consciously, and what is motivating us without our conscious realization into automatic behavior. The second most useful idea is that ideas have power, and these ideas are merely a reflection of the information that our world is constantly projecting upon our senses. It is up to us to learn to decipher this information and how we can use this knowledge for our own, and for others betterment as well. The third and final most useful idea is that the ego is something we construct based on the stimulus of our social environments. Instead of seeing ourselves as having a fixed and unchanging personality, we should see our egos as a mere tool that can continuously be enhanced for higher functioning within our social environments, modifying and adapting it to our present circumstances, yet attempting to prepare our egos for possible and probable events in the foreseeable future as well.

References

Carver, C. S. & Scheier, M.F. (2008). Perspectives on Personality, 6th ed.   Boston, MA:  

Pearson.

Neimeyer, R.A. & Bridges, S.K. (2003). “Personal Construct Theory”. The Internet

Encyclopaedia of Personal Construct Psychology. Retrieved from

http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/main.html

(Picture)  http://davidwees.com/eportfolio/sites/default/files/WeesD.jpg

An Analysis of “The Philosophy of Composition” by Edgar A. Poe (American Literature 12-23-11).

 An Analysis of “The Philosophy of Composition” by Edgar A. Poe

            Edgar Allen Poe was an accomplished writer, poet, and literary critic who produced many famous works that are still popular in our modern era. Over the span of his literary career he developed a method of writing that he used to create his literary pieces and recorded this method in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition”. In his “The Philosophy of Composition”, Edgar Allan Poe sets out the successful method by which he wrote his popular works and offers it to other hopeful writers as a guideline for creating their own literary masterpieces.  

            Edgar Allen Poe believed that an author of prose or poetry must begin with the end of a literary work, or the denouement, in mind before the work is even begun. “Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before any thing be attempted with the pen” (Poe 905). Poe goes on to state that only with the “denouement” in mind that the author can establish the steps toward the “tone at all points” and the “development of the intention” (905). It is only after the denouement has been clearly established in one’s mind that the writer can then proceed to insert the structures by which the literary work can reach its successful conclusion.

            Once the denouement of a literary work is established, according to Poe the next step to consider is one of “effect”, or the overall framework with which the literary work will occupy and fill. Poe states, “of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” (906). After deciding upon a narrative, and then the effect he wishes to produce within the reader, Poe then states the writer must then “consider whether” how effect “can best be wrought” (906). Concerning the frame work of effect, Poe gives us gives us two categories: “incident” and “tone” (906). Within these two categories of incident and tone, Poe believes that combinations of “ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity of both incident and tone”, and by searching his environment and within himself for similar combinations of desired incident and tone, “shall best aid me in the construction of the effect” (906). The effect that Poe intends to put across to the reader is the framework that Poe creates from observing incidents, from either himself or his environment, that seem most similar to the incident and tone he has in mind for his literary work.  

            The second step to composing a piece of literature for Poe is of length, or what he calls “extent” (907). According to Poe, “if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (907). Poe believes that if a literary work is too long to be read in one sitting then its “totality is at once destroyed” (907). To deal with this loss of totality, Poe states that the writer must maintain the “excitement or elevation” during whatever length or “brevity” of the piece in proportion to the “intensity of the intended effect” (907). Poe remarks that “a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all” (907). To Poe, the length, or “extent” of a literary work must maintain a consistent emotional consistency throughout a length of a literary work.

            The third step to completing a work of literature is the impression the writer wants to impart to be popular among many readers. Poe states, “I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable” (907). The three main categories to which Poe believes a literary work is found favorable with the general public is: Beauty, Truth, and Passion (907). Poe goes on to assign Beauty, which most readily appeals to the soul, as the “sole legitimate province of the poem” (907). Truth and Passion, the other two means to appeal to the reader, is the “satisfaction of the intellect” for the former, and a satisfaction to “homeliness” or plainness for the latter (Poe 908). While Beauty is the realm of the poem, Truth and Passion to Poe are “far more readily attainable in prose” (908). Poe concedes that Truth and Passion can be “profitably introduced into a poem” to serve as an “effect” by “contrast”, Beauty is still “the atmosphere and the essence of the poem” (908). Once the effect, or overall framework, and the length of a literary work is established, the third step for the author in creating the literary work is impression, or the actual filler for the structure that the author has already created.

            Poe gives us his poem The Raven as his example by which he intends to demonstrate his philosophy of literary composition. Poe states that after he determined “the length, the province, and the tone” of the work, he then searched for the “pivot upon which the whole structure might turn” (908). Poe decides upon using the refrain, or “a phrase, verse, or group of verses repeated at intervals throughout a song or poem, especially at the end of each stanza”, or a “a repeated utterance or theme” (www.thefreedictionary.com). The refrain being “limited to lyric verse”, depending upon how it sounds and looks, creates the “sense of identity” in its repetition (Poe 908). This refrain to Poe, establishes the effect, or repeated pattern or structure of continued tone or mood, as well as the length of the structure, and the impression or substance with which Poe creates his literary work.

            The particular refrain with which Poe settles upon for his example is the word “nevermore” (909). Poe selected this word “nevermore” to frame each stanza closing, after deciding upon a word that had a “force”, and was a word “sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis” (908). Poe decided upon a word with a “sonorous vowel” in the “long o”, and “in connection with r as the most producible consonant” that would most easily be matched with other rhyming words to achieve the aims with which he could best tell the tale that he intended (908). The use of the word “nevermore” for Poe, encompasses the refrain that could best achieve his intended effect and impression, while also allowing him the most rhyming words as he interspersed “nevermore” throughout the structure of The Raven.

           Edgar Allen Poe developed a method after many years of writing which he sets out in his “The Philosophy of Composition”. In this work he sets out the criteria by which he believes a literary work should be created: its overall effect, the length by which this effect can be maintained, and the impression by which the structure is filled to create the desired effect. Once the denouement, or the conclusion of a literary work is decided upon, Poe gives us in “The Philosophy of Composition”, the guideline in the categories of overall effect, the required length, and general impression by which the reader can most satisfactorily be brought to the denouement that the author had first decided upon.   

Works Cited

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/refrain

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition”. The American Tradition in Literature. 12^th ed. Ed. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 905-913. Print.

Clint Eastwood and his Evolution in the Western Genre (American Cinema)

           Clint Eastwood is an American actor and director, most identifiable in his roles as the lone gunslinger and avenging angel in his western movies. Clint Eastwood embodied the strong yet silent masculine ideal in these western films which featured him alone in the wasteland, surrounded by corrupt individuals, and with nothing between them other than the speed and accuracy with which he could draw his gun. In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1984), and Unforgiven (1992) one can chart the evolution of the masculine ideal with which Clint Eastwood embodied his roles and the development of his persona over time in the genre of Western films.

            As Richard Slotkin writes, the Western myth portrays "the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation [from 'civilization'], temporary regression to a more primitive or 'natural' state, and regeneration through violence.'" In the Western myth, ritualized violence is purgative because it cleanses society of the "Other" in eliminating the outlaw or "savage" (654). As we see in the three films A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992), we follow the evolution of the stereotype of the lone gunslinger in the embodiment of Clint Eastwood as he goes into the midst of a savage world, cleansing it of outlaws who terrorize and oppress the innocent.

            In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Clint Eastwood plays the “Man With No Name”, or Joe as he is sometimes called, which is another name of anonymity. This movie was a western remake of the Kurosawa movie Yojimbo (1961), a samurai who plays two outlaw factions against each other in the attempt to get them to destroy each other, and free an oppressed town from their presence. According to www.clinteastwood.net, “A Fistful of Dollars marked a change in the way western heroes were portrayed” (A Fistful of Dollars page). The stereotypical honest and upright, the “Gary Cooper sheriff type who would never draw first” was replaced by an anonymous character embodied by Clint Eastwood as the “Man With No Name”, with “dubious morals, who emerges as the hero more by comparison with the other characters than by his own merits” (www.clinteastwood.net). According to www.clinteastwood.net, “this change of attitude gave the western a new lease of life in the changing social climate of the sixties” (A Fistful of Dollars page). In the era of chaotic and turbulent societal change of the 1960’s, Clint Eastwood in his role as the “Man With No Name”, becomes one of the first anti-heroes, who embodies “personal power, flint-like resolution, resourcefulness, uncanny endurance, and above all, heroism”, but only a hero because he is less evil than the one’s that are doomed to suffer his punishment. Clint Eastwood in his role of the “Man With No Name”, embodies an American character that had yet to suffer its Vietnam, while still trying to reconcile the horrors of a previous war, in a land that no longer had any clear demarcation between right and wrong, good or evil, only what one could accomplish in the pursuit of one’s goals. 

            In Pale Rider (1985), Clint Eastwood plays another lone gunslinger as avenging angel, but in this instance Eastwood is reinvented as an honest righter of wrongs, and an avatar for good and justice in his character aptly named the Preacher. In this movie, Clint Eastwood is reinvented from the nameless and cunning self-interested manipulator, to the honest hero who delivers a terrified people suffering under the power and whims of evil men, after one of the oppressed prays to God for a savior.

            In Pale Rider (1985) Clint Eastwood evolves not only his stereotypical character, and his role as actor and movie star, but evolves himself into the role of director as well. Clint Eastwood, now a successful and accomplished veteran performer from decades in film, “chose the theme for the film and then commissioned a screenplay” for the story that Mr. Eastwood was compelled to tell (www.clinteastwood.net). In the early nineteen eighties, Clint Eastwood had already become a well known actor with a highly recognizable name, becoming the “established star” that guarantees “a certain return on the high-venture capital invested in a film” (Belton 89). The tale that Mr. Eastwood wanted to tell was one of a moral savior of a fearful people, exploited by the rich and powerful tyrant who ruled with brutality, a theme originating in the stories of religion. In the nineteen eighties as well, America had suffered the war in Vietnam and was still trying to heal from this lingering wound, trying now to define a new sense of morality while fighting a cold war with an enemy that was capable of ending the world in a nuclear war.

            In Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood is now an old widowed farmer named William Munny, who having promised his dead wife that he had retired from violence, and having no great talent at being a farmer, returns the life of a paid gunslinger when prostitutes put a bounty on some cowboys who abused one of them, and they could not receive any satisfactory closure from the legal authorities. William Munny has no choice but to return to a life of violence when his farm suffers from misfortune, and his children’s financial future is now at risk.       

            Unforgiven (1992) was produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, as well as featuring him in its starring role. The movie features several other accomplished actors: Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, and Morgan Freeman, each being veterans of decades of Film, and recognizable for their own starring roles in popular films. The movie featured the typical tale of the hero who is searching for “personal redemption in a modern-day world corrupted by selfishness and greed”, a tale told endlessly in film, but in Unforgiven (1992) this timeless theme had been refined to resonate with a modern audience by experienced and professional storytellers (Belton 246). Because of these refinements Unforgiven (1992) won multiple Oscars at the 1993 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Clint Eastwood, and a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for him as well (http://www.imdb.com). Unforgiven (1992) was a polished project created by Clint Eastwood’s decades of experience in film, utilizing familiar faces of other successful A-list actors, telling a refined tale to a modern audience using the most sophisticated techniques available to visual storytellers at the time, and using the western genre of film which at the time had been abandoned as tired and outdated.

            By the time of Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood had become a familiar face to the American audience, not only for his roles in film, but from his introduction on “the TV series "Rawhide" (1959-1965), where he was a supporting cast member for six years” (www.imdb.com). Clint Eastwood had experience in multiple roles, both in and out of the genre of the western, becoming familiar with its strengths as well as the limits of this masculine ideal with which Mr. Eastwood perpetuated throughout his movie career. This masculine ideal with which Mr. Eastwood perpetuated began in the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone who directed Eastwood as the strong yet silent type of protagonist who rides into town to pursue his own self-interests while taking advantage of his skill and cunning at outwitting predators who had made themselves tyrants over a fearful people. This role of the “Man With No Name” made Clint Eastwood a recognizable star overnight but also perpetrated a false and dangerous masculine ideal of a lone thug who manipulates the situation for his own good, and despite whatever lasting good or harm his actions cause, he rides off into the sunset to presumably continue the same cycle of violence upon others, alone and unattached to anyone or anything.  

            It was Unforgiven (1992) that allowed Clint Eastwood his opportunity to dispel this harmful perpetuation of the masculine ideal of the anti-social anti-hero who is only out for his own gain that was becoming a mainstay of our entertainment culture. Clint Eastwood, in this point in his career, had evolved not only in his roles but in his capacity to develop and portray both our American mythology and his own mythology as well. In regards to Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood states, the movie “gave me a chance to sum up what I think violence does to the human soul” (Jardine par. 9). Mr. Eastwood was now an accomplished and experienced actor and director who could now tell his own stories as he saw fit to tell them. “Instead of glorifying masculine violence, Unforgiven (1992) exposes it as a costly masculine endeavor” (Jardine par. 8). Unforgiven (1992) according to Jardine “offers a "hero" alien to American masculine mythology: a celibate, broken-down widower who can no longer mount a horse or shoot straight, a man who expresses genuine remorse over his violent past, a father of two who prays over his deceased wife” (par.8). Unforgiven (1992), according to Jardine, “stands as a culmination of Eastwood's career-long interrogation of American culture, providing an accurate historical expression of women's lives and raising questions about the disturbingly oppositional construction of gender” (par. 9). Up until this point in his career, Clint Eastwood’s characters were lone killers unattached to anyone, and women were just another background character that served to be used and manipulated like all the others.            

           Clint Eastwood, in his three roles in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992) shows not only an evolution in his characters but in his own personal evolution from character actor to accomplished director and producer of film as well. Clint Eastwood, having gained his start as a supporting character on the television screen of the late 1950’s, had now become in the early 1990’s a major player in the development of our entertainment culture, standing side by side with other accomplished actors in their own right, and featuring himself in the starring role as a criticism of the type of character that had first brought him to the attention of America. Clint Eastwood reflects through his characters in these three films, not only the times that these movies were made in: the turbulence of the sixties, the greed of the nineteen eighties, and the uncertainty of the 1990’s but also his personal evolution from a barely speaking character actor to a man who is capable of show casing his multiple talents in the realm of film. Clint Eastwood, in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992) shows an evolution in not only his stereotypical character, his personal capacity and abilities in the creation of storytelling, but he also evolved the western genre and the art of film as well.

 Works Cited

A Fistful of Dollars. Dir. Sergio Leone. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonté, and Marianne Koch. Constantin Film Produktion. 1964. Film.

Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. 2009. Print.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/awards.

Jardine, Gail. “Clint: Cultural Critic, Cowboy of Cathartic Change.” Art Journal 53.3 (1994): pp. 74-75. Web. 10 Dec. 2011.

McDonald, Archie P. Shooting Stars: Heroes and Heroines of Western Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1987. Print

Pale Rider. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, and Carrie Snodgress. Warner Bros. 1985. Film

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: HarperCollins. 1993. Print

Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Morgan Freeman. Warner Bros. 1992. Film.