Postcolonial lens

The viewpoint I decided to use to analyze Things Fall Apart is the postcolonial point of view, partially from it being present fairly often in the story and partially due to an incomplete understanding of how the feminist theory can be applied to said book.  I’ll probably show areas where the Ibo culture (the colonized Africans) runs directly counter to the missionaries’ (the colonizers who are capable of insuring obedience) faith, explain how these examples tie into the postcolonial point of view, and hopefully how the results from these events influenced the Ibos.  This is kind of simple to show how the missionaries’ relations with the Ibos can be read in a postcolonial light, however I think a disclaimer to the effect that I will still quite likely find a way to incorrectly convey the message is both appropriate and required, but I’ve stayed up too long to write one so I will leave the prior portion of the sentence to apologize for me.  Seeing as I’m not from a country that was colonized I’ll not be asking myself the ‘who am I’, ‘how did I develop into who I am’, and ‘to what countries or cultures am I forever tied to’ due to my ancestors not being colonized, to be far they didn’t colonize any poor uncivilized savages either, so I will be looking for how the missionaries asserting the dominance of the Christian faith over the Ibo’s pagan beliefs and practices changed them, including the loss of the violent nature that Okonkwo both embodies and sees as lacking in his kinsmen.  While the tribes’ culture had endured and even thrived in their savage conditions it’s followers lacked the ability to prevent the missionaries from coming amongst them to spread Christianity and their culture, and probably if it weren’t for the missionaries acting with restraint then it is quite possible that the murder of the first missionary and the tribes’ actions toward them may have led to them being destroyed along with their culture.

On technopolies...

            In the article we covered the discussion was centered on the difference between the core values of tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies.  Essentially the article seemed to have been devoted to the origin of technopolies and how the view it imposes on us differs from tool using cultures and technocracy, which explains the title of the article.  Tool using cultures, according to the article, kind of have a system of beliefs to allow the people to view life in an acceptable fashion and not let their lot in life get them, technopolies have a core of values where the quest for improving technology and efficiency is the reason for humans existing, while in a technocracy ‘two opposing world views-the technological and the traditional-[coexist] in uneasy tension’ (Postman 48).  Technocracies are the link between a non-mechanical culture and a technopoly, humans work too produce more and better technology, but still are viewed as being human beings with souls and not as drones whose sole purpose is to improve technology.  Frederick Winslow Taylor fits into the article since his ‘book The Principals of Scientific Management, published in 1911, contains the first explicit and formal outline of the assumptions of the thought-world of Technopoly’ (Postman 51).  The article explains and cites the Brave New World as an example of a technopoly since the society extols efficiency and the whole point of the citizens’ existence is based off of being another wheel in the ‘social machine’ to have their society chug along the road to progress.  In Brave New World ‘Huxley himself identified the emergence of Henry Ford’s empire as the decisive moment in the shift from technocracy to Technopoly,’ (Postman 49) leading to Ford being the reason why the values of society, according to the book, switched from being based on family, on religion, on morals, to being based on the central value of increasing efficiency to aid the economy and causing the world in the novel to become a global technopoly.

An Opinionated Singularity

            Well, apparently we get to find a link between two well known and famous dystopian novels, which have been used to show possibilities of where society may eventually go, with an article about the predictions on a technological event horizon for our society from the scientist Raymond Kurzweil.  The article generally attempts to let the reader know that eventually we’re going to make intelligent computers which will make intelligent computers that will make intelligent computers and so on, until eventually the computers and machines will make us look like bumbling incompetents who’d be lucky to try and put the square peg in the round hole.  Apparently hope may be found that any eventual mechanical intelligences won’t want to cause our downfall, seeing as ‘one of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly’ (Grossman) so we may not have to deal with a sociopathic machine which wants to destroy us or machines which want to turn us into batteries. Thank God for small blessings. 

In Brave New World nothing existed that didn’t in some way keep the economy pumping, if that soulless land had a God it would have been efficiency with its son Ford.  For those that believe in an eventual future of machines, according to the article at least, their basis seems to be practicality and ‘realism’, since ‘they have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality’(Grossman).  Apparently in order to be rational to these people you have to have an emergency plan for when your mind might be copied and pasted to a computer and your body’s chucked into a meat grinder.  It’s vaguely sensible to think that at some point our lives may be greatly expanded, perfectly fine to think that we’ll keep producing more and more ‘intelligent’ computers, possibly alright to think we may eventually have robot bodies as an eventual pinnacle of the limb replacements, but to think we will eventually produce androids that will seek our doom or robots which mirror a human so closely as to be well nigh indistinguishable as of yet is still just a midnight tale to inspire worries in programmers.

I'm slightly forgetful on occasion...

Yea, I couldn't quite remember all of what we were supposed to do for posting the essay rewrite deal, I'm sure there was some paper detailing what we were supposed to do or something, but seeing as I uploaded it and all and it had some link deal at the top which apparently leads to the final draft I'm just going to post the link here and hope that this is a good enough alternative to trying to remember the steps for however long or asking someone or whatever else. Hopefully this is a good enough attempt and I won't be the only person who forgot how to turn it in properly. May I get an A for effort, or does this not count?

Analysis of a Sonnet Comparison

In the essay I reviewed, Comparison of Petrarch's Sonnet 292 of the Canzoniere and Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 by Steven A. Carbone II, the author compares the different ways Shakespeare and Petrarch discuss the appearance of their loves, from ridiculously poetic and idealistic in Petrarch’s case to a more reasonable and realistic description in the case of Shakespeare. Although he supposes that the reader has a basic understanding of what a sonnet is the author follows any points he makes with a clear example of what he’s talking about, such as frequently citing the words of the sonnets for those of us who haven’t read them or explaining the structural differences between Italian sonnets and English sonnets. The author follows many rules for ‘proper writing’, such as a clear introduction and conclusion with unique paragraphs for each new thought he introduces, but he really only uses logical appeals in this essay since he doesn’t actually need to sway the reader’s judgment. Although the central focus of both of the sonnets is the narrator’s love it becomes clear early on and repeatedly through that this and the fact that it is considered a love sonnet are some of the few similarities, seeing as the sonnets themselves are considered different based off of their structures' origins and their means of letting the reader understand what the sonnet’s author wants to convey. The author himself uses language comprehensible to any high school student, but the verses he cites are written in a sophisticated manner of old English origin leading to some of the quotes and the comments he makes about them being slightly difficult to understand if you didn’t know what the terms meant.

The author structures his paragraphs in such a way as to clearly contrast the differences between the two sonnets, whether how they are structured, how they differ in descriptions of their love’s appearance, or any difference which he figures is important enough to mention. The author brings up several interesting points about how the authors based their sonnets, whether Petrarch’s habit of virtually making his love into a goddess and using adjectives which make him seem so far past head over heels he must have walked over a cliff for her to Shakespeare describing his love in a way which makes a bit of a mockery of Petrarch’s over the top characteristics by almost insulting his love’s appearance. He describes the ways in which the two use literary devices such as metaphors or rhythm scheme in the differing sonnet forms, in Petrarch’s case it’s primarily seen in the original Italian version of the sonnet but is still slightly seen in translations, but in his comparison of the two sonnets and their authors he simply lays down the facts needed to get his point across, stressing a point if attention is required but otherwise stating differences and citing the sources only. In his comparison of the sonnets the only time that the author waxes poetic is when copying down the verses, the comparison between the writing styles, Petrarch’s flowing descriptions, Shakespeare’s unflattering statements, and the author’s blunt description, allows for the essay to clearly display differences between how the author’s have their narrators speak.