ESSAY CEMETERY

"Deor", an Old English poem found in the tenth-century poetry collection The Book of Exeter, is generally considered to be a song of lament for the poet's own misfortune. The poem consists of a series of seven stanzas that describe the travails of well-known historical individuals and groups. As the final stanza contains an account of the ostensible poet's own misfortune – being removed from his position as court poet – scholars have conjectured that the poet's aim in depicting these historical travails is to compare these with his own fate. However, the final stanza does not constitute the poem's final words. The poem ends with the refrain that recurs after every stanzaic description of misfortune in the work – "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg!" – "that passed over, this can too". The placement of the refrain after the final stanza indicates that, just like the other historical hardships, the poet's grief over his demotion, too, has passe

  In his article Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence , Zygmunt Bauman characterizes Modernism as an era of certainty. In Modernity, Western civilization "was bent on dominating the rest of the world by dissolving its alterity" and conforming it to its own Western values. In this way, the difference was seemingly done away with, creating an all-encompassing universal truth. Modernity proposed one single mode in which to perceive and experience life. Along with difference, contingency was abolished, creating ostensible destiny, born of the sense that the fate of the individual is part of that universal truth. In Bauman's contemporary era, however, there came "the realization that … the hope [of destiny] will not come true and hence one needs to learn to live without the hope that supplied the meaning – the only meaning – to life." The postmodern subject, then, experiences "that state of discomfort and anxiety" from which the modern subject had be

The process of envisioning or implementing a new society is one of complete reformation. Regardless of the nature or content of the reform, the visionary, aspiring leader, or established leader seeks to introduce entirely new concepts and practices into society. Acceptance of new utopians ways requires, as a basic prerequisite, the rejection of old behaviors and paradigms. Often, thinkers choose to modify the past and conceal the reality of the present to facilitate these changes. However, no new world can be built from nothing: the new ways must inevitably be constructed using old conventions. Language is utilized to skew present, past, and future; reality is severely modified to correspond to the revised ideology. The means to express, disseminate, enact and enforce a reform are all subject to and relegated by, language. Language has always been political on every scale and in every locale, as demonstrated by ubiquitous phenomena in everyday life: in extreme reactions to declarations

1. Mental illness as a social construct I do agree that mental illness is variable rather than constant, that it is a function of many elements in the ever-changing cultural and social discourse. Definitions of mental illness are also influenced greatly by scientific, but mostly para-scientific and pseudo-scientific discourse. That is, psychologists and psychiatrists feign to know much more than they do about the workings of the brain and mind. However, along with the negative aspect of social stigmatizing and overmedicating, the plurality of mental illnesses is not entirely a negative phenomenon. Women who were once burned at the stake as witches are today considered to have schizophrenia; people who were lazy or stupid now have learning disabilities; post-partum depression is an acknowledged phenomenon and there are rather more humane resources available to these new mothers. In addition, the profusion of mental illnesses results in (almost) everyone having some mental handicap or an

The life of The Color Purple's protagonist, Celie, is populated with both men and women. Whereas the men in the narrative wreak damage to Celie's self-esteem, emotional capacity, and love of life, the women around her have a rehabilitating effect on Celie. Kate, Sofia, Nettie, and Shug Avery all strengthen Celie in different ways, so that she is able to reconstruct her life and find optimism and joy in her experiences. From a very young age, Celie is abused by the men in her life. The man she believes to be her father rapes her and takes her out of school when she has the first of his two children; the man she marries as a teenager beats her repeatedly and engages her in passionless sex. Her supposed father discusses Albert, Celie's future husband, with insulting derision: "She ugly. Don't even look like she kin to Nettie ... She ain't smart either, and I'll just be fair, you have to watch her or she'll give away everything you own … And another thing?

Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing and Patrick Marber's Closer , written fifteen years later, have much in common. The plays are structured in two acts and twelve scenes. Both feature two principal couples who exchange partners, one of whom is a writer; the characters frequently lie, cheat and make false assumptions about one another; meta-literary and self-reflexive techniques are often used to endow both works with additional depth. The Real Thing and Closer are also both set in London. Although the plays share the same urban setting, the backdrop of the city is utilized in different ways, and with a very different effect.             Closer is set almost entirely in public spaces. Alice, Dan, Larry and Anna move between a hospital, an aquarium, a gallery and a museum, a restaurant and a public park. In all of these, of course, privacy is out of the question. When the characters are situated in locations inaccessible to other people, however, these are rarely cozy

Featuring exclusively female characters, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is indeed filled with remarkable women. The 1988 play contains women from across the globe who have distinguished themselves over the span of a thousand years, from Joan, the ninth-century pope, to Marlene, a twentieth-century career woman. The women, despite their vastly diverse backgrounds, have all had to sacrifice their femininity, freedom, and their families in order to pursue their individual goals in a male-dominated, male-oriented world. Churchill cleverly uses historical figures to create powerful criticism of contemporary feminism, particularly of that present in 1980s England, and explores what it really means to be a "top girl". With disorienting theatrical and linguistic technique, she ensures the audience's active participation and encourages critical socio-political thinking and self-reflexivity.             From its very beginning, the play disorients and confuses, subverting thea

Not an Ode: On the Reader-Writer Relationship in Kincaid's A Small Place Jamaica Kincaid's personal essay A Small Place is a highly polemical text. Written by the Antiguan native in 1988, A Small Place encompasses two voices: that of the impoverished, post-colonial Antiguan native and that of the luxuriating, capitalist Westerner. In the text's very syntax resides a meeting between these two very different types: its narrator is an Antiguan native who utilizes the second person throughout the entire text, a style generally associated with poetry, advertisements and open letters. The narrator accuses its presumably Western reader of being a personal contributor towards the suffering of the natives. With its inflammatory language, its breathless-angry style, and unapologetic imagery the text binds its readers to the natives of Antigua through discomfort and guilt. Kincaid creates a debate between the natives of Antigua and the Western tourist, in which the tourist has