Vonnegut Question

Of the six options we had, I chose the first one. That first one was: "What rhetorical stradegy does Vonnegut employ in order to appeal to his reader?"

    In "A Man Without a Country," he uses a sarcactically humerous approach to keep the reader interested and entertained throughout the story. However, he sometimes uses a more serious tone when he needs to.
    In terms of examples, some of his humerous style is known in Chapter 3; Page 24, where he says "I'm kidding" at the end of each sentence. Another example is the page before it, when he tells the "funniest joke in the world," which is: "Last night I dreamed of eating flannel cakes. When I woke up, the blanket was gone!"
    An example of his more serious style would be on Chapter 2; Page 17, when he says: "Evolution can go to hell," "We wounded this life-supporting planet," and other statements like that. However, he  says that Earth is the only life-supporting planet in the Milky Way. That must mean he doesn't believe in extraterrestrial life. This... concerns me.

    As I was saying, his stradegy really is an effective one and if I ever write any literature in the future, I'll try it out myself.

Thoughts on Labor Day

My thoughts on Labor Day are... mixed. Don't get me wrong. I like to have an extra day off during the weekend, but it just seems like something is missing during Labor Day. Not to mention the it passes by EXTREMELY fast for me. Honestly, I don't like national holidays that much. Not that I'm against my country (if anything, it's the opposite), but I like holidays that allow me to be free, and to have all of the stores and restaurants closed makes it just a complete bummer. Labor Day is no exception. But, since this one is about giving all of the workers in the world an extra day off for all of their hard work, I guess I have to let that slide. So, in my opinion, Labor Day is a good holiday, and it's a great way to show appreciation to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country, and I'm thankful for that.

First Day of School

 It was the second Thursday of August and I was at Christ Episcopal Church with several other people. There, I would see which classmates would stay, return, leave and be introduced to school. We did usual church stuff and rode the bus to school after that. When we made it to CES, we got to find out our post-lunch classes. Mine were Speech II (Dr. Fox) and Studio Art (Mrs. Sparkman-Boyd). The next day, we found out about our pre-lunch classes, mine being Chemistry (Mr. Soto), Geometry (Ms. Burkenstock), English II (Mr. McElveen), American History (Mr. Henson) and PE II (Mrs. Dessaur). I was worried about some classes that I haven't heard of, but they weren't bad at all when I went to them for the first time. And they are still great classes. Last year was sort of mediocre. There were good classes, some even great, but they were all usually in separate buildings, so the traveling from one class to another was quite repetitive. This year, it's mostly at the high school building, and I was fine with that. I had little to no idea on what to expect this year, but I guess it met what little expectations I might have had. Overall, this year looks like it's going to be a good year!

American Romanticism

"Romanticism," as a term, derives from "romance," which from the Medieval Period (1200-1500) and on simply meant a story (e.g. all the chivalric, King Arthur legends) that was adventuristic and improbable.  "Romances" are distinguished from "novels," which emphasize the mundane and realistic.  The period between 1860 and 1900, for the U.S., is often called "The Age of Realism," because of the many authors (e.g., Theodore Dreiser & Stephen Crane) who present their novels' subject matter in a realistic manner (Melville's monomaniacal Ahab, chasing a monstrous, symbolic whale, would be out of place in a realistic novel, although Moby-Dick has many realistic details about the whaling industry).

The "Romantic Period" refers to literary and cultural movements in England, Europe, and America roughly from 1770 to 1860.  Romantic writers (and artists) saw themselves as revolting against the "Age of Reason" (1700-1770) and its values.  They celebrated imagination/intuition versus reason/calculation, spontaneity versus control, subjectivity and metaphysical musing versus objective fact, revolutionary energy versus tradition, individualism versus social conformity, democracy versus monarchy, and so on.  The movement begins in Germany with the publication of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (about a love-sick, alienated artist type, too sensitive to live, who kills himself; after it was published a number of young men committed suicide in imitation!) and the emergence of various Idealist philosophers (who believed mental processes are the ultimately reality, as opposed to Materialists).  The movement then goes to England (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats), until about 1830 (upon which the Victorian Age begins).  Romanticism does not appear in the U.S. until Irving and Emerson are writing; so, somewhat confusingly, the Romantic Period in the U.S. (1830-1860) overlaps with the period in which U.S. culture may also be said to be "Victorian" (1830-1880). One consequence of the latter: a writer such as Hawthorne is both Romantic and Victorian (he is simultaneously fascinated by and worried about Hester's rebelliousness in The Scarlet Letter).  Other works of the period--such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-seller Uncle Tom's Cabin--are not "Romantic," but are rather much closer to the realistic fiction of Victorian Britain's George Eliot.