Narrative Conventions Of Formal Realism English Literature Essay

Narrative Conventions Of Formal Realism English Literature Essay So they forgot her like an unpleasant dream during a troubled sleep. Occasionally the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photographs of a close friend or relative- looked at too long, shifts and sometimes more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but they dont, because they know things will never be the same if they do. He had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. Now I know what a ghost is he thought, Unfinished business, thats what. Since the last decades of the Twentieth century many African American writers have set out to revise the slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to reaffirm both their historical and historiographical significance. For many writers, reclaiming an identity or narrative voice is vital and functions as a means of countering centuries of dispossession and misrepresentation. For Toni Morrison, interpretation represents an integral part of black cultural and social identity  [1]  and her novel Beloved, as Henry Louis Gates argues, invents and articulates a language that gives voice to the unspeakable horror and terror of the black past  [2]  . The novel is an allegorical representation of this unspeakability; Everybody knew what she was called but nobody knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be found because no one is looking for her  [3]  . Morrison in Beloved weaves her narrative around the complex history of slavery, its unrelenting brutality and the devastating cruelty it inflicted on African Americans. Critic Caroline Rudy suggests Beloved is a unique historical writing; historiographic intervention, a strategic re-centring of American history in the lives of the historically disposed  [4]  . Morrison sets out to re-write traditional historical narrative from the standpoint of those dispossessed and challenges the notion of what it is to be American. To reclaim a voice denied by imperialism and racism and to forge a literary discourse that transforms notions of blackness, Morrison rewrites and revises the conventions of genres. In Beloved Morrison revises three genres, those of the slave narrative, historical novel and the gothic novel. Critics such as Peter J Capuano in Truth and Timbre and Rafael Perez Torres in Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread have, as Heinert argues, the capacity to explain how Beloved responds to and rewrites the slave narrative tradition in American literature, for which Beloved is often categorized a neo slave narrative  [5]  . Ashraf Rushdy in Daughters Signifying History and Kathleen Brogan in Cultural Haunting, have argued effectively that Morrison by revising the case of Margret Garner or conducting, as Morrison herself suggests, literary archaeology  [6]  , creates a narrative for the real- life fugitive Seth. In doing so Morrison faces the challenge of transforming Seths Rememories of a brutal past into a discourse shaped by her own narrativity. Morrisons revivication of the dead and her summoning of Seths dead daughter are all, as Timothy Spaulding suggests in Reforming the Past, conventions of the Gothic novel  [7]  . Morrisons revisions of these genres are multifaceted and have a fundamental purpose: a rejection of conventional realism. Morrison shifts from one genre to another to account for the absences left by previous literary forms, or as Ritashona Simpson argues, to create a suitable receptacle of language which transforms and releases the slaves word  [8]  . Rewriting truth and narrating the gaps in history left by conventional realism is Morrisons way of narrating, Unspeakable things unspoken  [9]  . The crossing of genres, styles, and narrative perspectives within the text suggests it filters the absent or marginalised oral discourse of a, pre-capitalist black community through the self-conscious discourse of the contemporary novel  [10]  . In revising earlier literary traditions, dominated by the logic and values of the dominant culture, Morrison as Heinert argues, Disrupts formal realism  [11]  . Morrisons revisions of earlier slave narratives and history clearly expose the absence of the black voice within the context of formal realism. In Beloved, gothic elements reveal the collusion between a Western scientific world view and slavery; and according to Truffin, uncovers distortions in the lens through which the rational discourse views the world, indicating the features of life and the lives of others for which Western empiricism fails to account  [12]  . While earlier slave narratives sought to speak directly to a white readership and elucidate the brutality of slavery, Beloved, as Bloom has argued, exposes the unsaid, the psychic subtexts that lie both within and beneath the historical facts  [13]  . In interviews Morrison has remarked that, the documentary realism of the slave narratives imposed complete silence about those excessive proceedings of slavery too terrible to relate  [14]  . These silences are re-membered and rewritten by the main protagonists and the readers, like Ella, listened for the holes, things the fugitives did not say, the questions they did not ask  [15]  . To quote Carl Plasa, if Beloved is a story about a ghost it is a story which itself has a ghostly status or existence, hauntingà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦the gaps and silences of the tradition on which it draws, seeking release. To articulate black Identity and construct a literary discourse which lifts the veil of silence, writers such as Morrison imbue their texts with fantastic or non-mimetic ruses to create a contradictory narrative form. However, Morrison discredits the labels, fearing they suggest a breach with truth, and her single gravest responsibility (in spite of that magic) is not to lie  [16]  . However, in essence, postmodern slave narratives implement elements of the fantastic not as a way of undermining their narrative authority but as a means of establishing it. The text revises gothic elements into a device for exposing the junctures between slavery and science, and for delegitimizing western logic as it controls slavery. According to Goldner, As hauntings carry the perspectives and powers of slaves, gothic representations of slavery in the texts disrupt the Galilean project in the service of the enslaved. As hauntings position the dead amid the living and the past amid the present, they defy the concept of linear time, the bedrock of cause and effect that enables prediction. They thus defy the Western dream of control  [17]  . Gothic haunts elucidate what is invisible to the dominant culture and within the text haunts and gothic devices also confront the Euclidean conception  [18]  of the world as a uniform space, challenging western notions of linear time, juxtaposing past and present. Haunts and Gothic elements permeate the absences, central to history with the suffering of slaves, arraigning the atmosphere with emotive, ethical, and political forces which the endeavour of science claims to dis-credit, and the project of slavery seek to ignore. Harpham also argues; The haunts of Gothicism break through the boundaries of the dominant cultures paradigms and identities signalling potential political crisis  [19]  . Morrison, like Chestnutt in The Conjure Woman, subverts the claims of science, infusing them with gothic hauntings, whose vocal cadences carry African American oral culture and express the pain of slaves  [20]  . Gothic hauntings act as the vehicle through which the suppressed returns and Linda Krumholz in The Ghosts of Slavery shows how Morrison has integrated the conventions of the gothic novel by using African cosmology to manifest the dead child, Beloved. The haunts convey all that a scientific and imperialist discourse seeks to dominate, including feelings, and more specifically, the feelings of the oppressed. While the gothic signifies a disruption not to conventional realism Morrison extends this disruption to the cultural logic and ideology of the dominant culture. Whereas a scientific discourse would consider the haunting of Seths house as illogical, Beloved categorizes the gothic as reality. The ghost seems logical to Seth and the other characters that understood the source of the outrage as well as knew the source of light  [21]  . When Paul D is confronted by the poltergeist, Seth simply explains that the spirit haunting the house is, her daughter  [22]  . The ghost is als o visible to Denver who, kneels in a white dress beside her mother  [23]  . The heartrenching tale of Baby Suggs lost children explains why haunting seemed normal. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebodys house into evil  [24]  . Such is the acceptance of the supernatural as reality that Baby Suggs believes there is not a house in the country aint packed to its rafters with some dead Negroes grief  [25]  . Goldner argues that, until its final pages, every African American character accepts the haunt as true.  [26]  Rather than seeing Beloved as any kind of ghostly contrivance, the novel also delineates the gothic as a reality when it gives its ghost a body with inimitable physical powers: Beloved simultaneously embraces and chokes Seth; she seduces and manipulates Paul D, and in the end takes the shape of, a pregnant women naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun  [27]  . Once Beloved appears on Seths doorstep, the gothic becomes a n embodied reality, and also grows in scope, invading the confines of 124 Bluestone Rd and the narrative itself. As Morrison revives the gothic conventions of ghosts she stretches the convention of the gothic novel to breaking point. No longer ethereal, Beloved is made real, as real as the existence of slavery and its experiences once were  [28]  . Some critics have maintained that the novel merges white and black literary ethnicities, including components of European American female Gothic tradition in its reading of the slave narratives. In one sense, it is possible to make a connection. Kate Ferguson Ellis account of the characteristic Gothic novel with houses in which people are locked in and locked out,  [29]  and preoccupation with violence done to familial bonds that is frequently directed against women  [30]  , does seem applicable to Beloved. Pamela Barnett in Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved takes an opposing view, arguing that Beloved is more than a supernatural embodiment, she is a menacing hybrid of European American and African American cultural traditions  [31]  , a succubus, a vampire, and a female demon, nourishing itself through (literally and metaphorically) draining Seths strength. The spectre, or the ghost, represents this American Jeremiad of the minority. Spectre, as Derrida defines it in Spectres of Marx, is something that remains difficult to name  [32]  . Toni Morrison in her novel, Beloved, attempts to name the unnameable by confronting a brutal past. This space can be valuable, a means by which to re-inscribe spaces of oppression as sites of subversion and resistance. Beloved is finally set apart from the distinctive form of a ghost story in that Morrison, as Edwardss points out, provides no corner from which to smile skeptically at the thrills were enjoying  [33]  . The thrills of myth and magic are embedded in real horror and terror. The illusory elements cannot, in the end, be said to be merely narrative ploys, creating tension or suspense or guiding the reader further into a magical, mythical world. Rather than merely pervading a world of fantasy and myth, the reader is forced to confront the horrifically real, the unspeakable reality of sla very. Morrison, in her own words, blends the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world at the same time  [34]  . This configuration of the supernatural can be demonstrated by Barbara Christians argument that Morrison, in configuring Beloved as an embodied spirit, a spirit that presents itself as a body  [35]  , purposely distances her novel from the perspective of Gothic tradition, and instead places it in relation to, the African traditional religious belief that Westerners call ancestor worship  [36]  . Barbara Christians argument underlines the cynicism of the very idea of something called supernaturalism. Magic can be supernatural and natural and the supernatural can extend beyond notions of magic. This concept of superstition and magic is for Morrison, just another way of knowing things, an alternate epistemology discredited only because those who contribute have themselves been similarly disavowed historically. As Toni Morrison argues the discredited knowledge that Black people had was discredited only because Black people were discredited  [37]   Considering the dichotomy between fact and fiction Morrisons work might, she admits, fall into, the realm of fiction called fantastic or mythic or magical or unbelievable  [38]  in the minds of some. Her use of the supernatural or gothic origins can also be seen as emphasising the reality of her subject. The boundary between what is true and what is not is decisively distorted as Morrison says, the crucial distinction  [39]  for her is not that between fact and fiction, but between fact and truth because, facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot  [40]  . While narrative truth is a construct, and, the burden of constructing it belongs to its readers  [41]  , Beloved constructs a literary discourse that alters as Perez Torres states, Western notions of blackness  [42]  . Morrison transforms absence into a powerful presence and in doing so helps readers reconsider the past as a way of re-evaluating its history, class and conventions whilst seeking the truth. While the formality of conventional realism alters the way in which slavery and its facets are (dis)remembered in the canon of American Literary discourse, Beloved emerges as an alternative, a counter-narrative to the racist representation of slavery. Beloved disrupts generic conventions to expose how conventional realism cannot account for race, and calls for readers to respond  [43]  . Without special privilege going to any single form of storytelling, and through an authenticity based on inclusiveness, the many voices within the text contribute to, and give voice to, those formerly excluded from history. C:Documents and SettingsJoannaMy Documentsfirst chapter for beloved_filesspacer.gif

Mock Job Application Formal Letter

Miss B Watkins Darlington College Haughton Road Darlington DL1 1DR 5th November 2012 Mr L Fordham Tewit Park Harrogate HG1 1JD Dear Mr. Fordham I am writing to you with regards to the open job position Business Support Assistant. I discovered this position in a recent internet search and was immediately interested. I am currently searching for a job in which I can broaden my knowledge and progress myself further whilst also gaining experience. I believe I am the best candidate for this particular position as I have a wide business background and will be extremely committed and hard working.As well as this I personally believe I have the correct characteristics for this type of work; confident well organized, polite, punctual, motivated and ready for a challenge. I also have excellent computer skills. I studied ICT at GCSE level and I also have lots of experience using computers throughout my previous jobs. As required I have a great understanding of Microsoft office and can efficient ly use all of the Microsoft programs including Word, PowerPoint, Publisher and Excel. I work well individually as well as part of a team as I love to meet new people and I have a very friendly personality.Due to this, I can communicate very easily and efficiently. I have previously worked in a call centre therefore I have a good knowledge of how to deal with queries over the telephone and I can fulfil this role with confidence. I feel I would thoroughly enjoy being a part of your team and contributing towards your future developments. I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my letter and It would be much appreciated if you could consider my offer and I will look forward to hopefully hearing from you soon. Yours sincerely B. Watkins Miss B Watkins

Inigo Jones and the Classical Language of Architecture

Inigo Jones and the Classical Language of Architecture Classical architecture elements can be traced from early Greek and Roman styles. Classici refer to the highest rank of Roman social structure. Classical norms are based on a formal hierarchal system of clarity, symmetry, deceptive simplicity, harmonious proportion and completeness. (Curl, 12) There is a difference seen between the inside and the outside of a building. Classical architecture develops every part individually as these parts become a larger whole. Orders, or columns, play an important role in the development of classical architecture.The parts of the order include a pedestal, but not always, a column and some type of horizontal element above the column. Within the structure of orders a composition pattern and proportional system develop. Although Greek and Italian architecture used the name Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders there were distinct differences between the appearances of the columns. In classical architec ture a Doric order is slender, usually with a base and a smooth shaft. One can see an elegant molded base on Ionic orders. Ionic orders also have fluted shafts and some type of cornice ornamentation.The Corinthian order is the most elaborate and may have engaged columns that are partially attached to a wall. Many of the classical orders are straight lines meeting at right angles with an equal distance between orders creating a piece with equal parts. There is symmetry from left to right and right to left that is not seen when looking top to bottom and bottom to top. (Tzonis 9) Inigo Jones is regarded as the first significant English classical architect. Jones combined his personality and understanding of classical architecture in his designs.His admiration of Italian architects and architecture is evident as many of his designs look more like Italian villas than traditional English buildings. Jones pursued his building projects to further his own political and personal interests. (A nderson 41) One of Inigo Jones’ first projects was building a stable, brewhouse and doghouse for King James at his royal hunting site. The Queen’s House, Queen’s Chapel and the Banqueting House are some of Inigo Jones works that are still standing. Other Jones designs include Covent Garden and Wilton House.The Queen’s House, once named the House of Delight, was built in Greenwich. The house looks like two Italian palaces facing one another connected by a narrow passage lined with equally spaced orders on each side. The orders appear to be Doric because of the simple base and smooth shaft. The exterior sides of the building show the classical norm of being symmetrical left to right and right to left. Following classical lines there is no up and down symmetry having one arched window on the second story. The wall facing south also has a center second floor balcony with orders.Materials used on the outside vary from floor to floor. Brick and stone work were used for the first floor while the second story walls are plastered and limewashed. Inside the main halls are shaped like a cube with flat ceilings. Surrounding rooms are symmetrical with cornice work showing an Italian influence with very ornate chimney sculptures. Orazio Gentileschi’s canvases originally filled the ceilings of the house. The Duchess of Marlborough had them taken down and brought to Marlborough House. (Lees-Milne 70) The Banqueting House is regarded by many as Jones’ masterpiece.Jones was commissioned to re-build the structure after a fire destroyed the original building. Jones based his design on Venetian palaces so Banqueting House would stand apart. The outside gives the appearance of a multi-story building. Two cherubs support a large shield in the pediment which was intended to contain a coat of arms. (Anderson 157) Ionic and engaged Corinthian orders are used. The orders on the exterior side walls combine flat and rounded columns with a pair of coupled pilasters at the end of each facade. Exterior street facade show the classical element of symmetry matching left to right and right to left.One can view the differences from top to bottom and bottom to top. Lower window tops alternate rounded and pointed where upper windows are all flat topped. Each window and order section is a separate design but is also part of the complete building. The interior of the Banqueting House is not multi-storied but a single double cube room. The space has Ionic orders under and Corinthian orders over a cantilevered gallery. (Summerson 53) The flat ceiling is covered with Ruben panels. The Banqueting House is still in use today for concerts, government function and private parties.Inigo Jones was picked to design a new Chapel at St. James Palace. The Queen’s Chapel is a double cube hall with a coffered ceiling that has an adjoining Queen’s Closet. There is a triple window rising behind the altar. The center rounded window rises h igher than the two flanking windows and is topped with carved angels and falling garlands. The Queen’s Closet is a gallery separated from the chapel by Corinthian pilasters and festoons. The Closet chimney piece and over mantel portrays classical Italian interior decoration. Harris and Higgott 184) The front exterior of the building is done with Portland-stone masonry. Side to side symmetry is present but there are no orders in the design. Wilton House is another Inigo Jones design. The main front dimension ratio is almost identical to his design for the Prince’s Lodging but on a larger scale. Wilton’s south front has side to side symmetry. The grand portico is in keeping with the classical association of royalty. Ionic orders are in front of the portico’s central Serlian windows which are surrounded with carved figures. There are corner towers and balustrades.The main interior room is a double-cube. Very ornate moldings, carvings and ceilings are present . Wilton House is one case where symmetry is not followed. The fireplace is not central on the main wall but gives the illusion that symmetry is maintained. (Lees-Milne 102) There are matching king’s and queen’s apartments for royalty use. Wilton House seemed out of place surrounded by smaller houses. This building provided Jones a bridge between his smaller and grander royal works. (Worsley 82) The Covent Garden project by Inigo included a new church, houses and gates leading to the square.Simple and classical Tuscan design variations were used in the arcade surrounding the houses. The entrance to the square is a false doorway and the church is entered through an enclosed yard. Classical architecture was used to update homes. Jones’ drawings show the use of banded columns and smooth columns against a rusticated wall. (Anderson 206) Jones designed a Tuscan portico on the east end of St. Paul’s church comprised of two central columns flanked by piers attac hed to a sidewall with arched openings. The Tuscan order throughout Covent Garden brought bout simplicity for urban life. As an architect Inigo Jones gave England a classical, innovative style using his love of Italy and Italian design. His use of orders was based on the specific function of the building, the context in which it was to be built and his own interpretation. (Anderson 208) Jones wanted his identity as an architect to be defined by The Banqueting House and St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Anderson 25)Works Cited Anderson, Christy. Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Curl, James. Classical Architecture. New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold,1992. Harris, John and Higgott, Gordon. Inigo Jones Complete Architectural Drawings. London, A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1989. Lees-Milne, James. The Age of Inigo Jones. London, B. T. Batsford Ltd. , 1953. Summerson, John. Inigo Jones. Middlesex, Penguin Books Ltd. , 1966. Tzonis, Alexander and Lefaivre, Li ane. Classical Architecture the Poetics of Order. Cambridge, MIT Press, 19986. Worsley, Giles. Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradtion. New Have, Yale University Press, 2007.

The Civil War A Building Block Of The Constitution

The Civil War was a building block of the Constitution we have today. If the Civil War would not have been fought, the United States would look very different -- it would be divided, years behind in its addressing of racial issues, and certain Constitutional issues, especially involving states’ rights, would never have been resolved. After decades of heated tensions between the Northern and Southern states over state rights and federal authority, slavery and westward expansion it finally exploded into the Civil war on April 12, 1861. The presidential election of anti-slavery republican Abraham Lincoln in the year 1860 caused 7 southern states to secede from the union. After the first shots of the civil war were fired 4 more states joined†¦show more content†¦The congress then kept the peace and agreed on a two part compromise granting Missouri its request upon entering the union as a free state and also admitted Maine as a free state. The Missouri compromise also was a product of an amendment that was passed creating an imaginary line across the former Louisiana territory establishing the boundary of free and slave states. The Missouri Compromise held the union together for about 30 years until it was repelled by the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1854. It allowed people in the states of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether they did or did not allow slavery within their borders repelling the Compromise which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36 °30 ´. Three years later, the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, stating that congress was prohibited by the 5th amendment from depriving citizens from private properties such as slaves. Basically stating that even though the north has banned slavery, they are still required to return fleeing slaves to their rightful owners. Fort Sumter was the scene where it all went down. Located on Charleston Harbor in South Carolina was a fort meant to protect the state from amphibious attacks. U.S. Major Robert Anderson took over the unfinished fort not long after North Carolina Seceded from the Union. The Union forces