Weekly Reflection

3/8- 10/10

Modernism is an extension of enlightenment. The painting of “The Scream” (1894) gives off the realization that there is nothing, no point in living. The representation of the painting is of being alone and modernist alienation. Dickens once said that only facts matter for scientific progress. There is no point in things if everything is facts in the world. Post modernism is just an extent of modernism. There is a defense mechanism that is constantly at odds that there is something bigger out there.

Amory, from This Side of Paradise, is trying to find himself and what he is there for. His identity and nationalism, no matter what it is he is always trying to find his self through out the whole book. At the end I believe that he still has not found who he really is, what he wants to be, or what he actually wants to do in life. He goes through a lot that he thinks that he knows who he is even if no one else does.

Weekly Reflection

3/1/10

Citizens monitor and maintain each other is panoptic. The control is now horizontal and not vertical where every citizen has the power to report a neighbor for any bad conduct. Everyone is watching each other instead of talking and coinciding with each other. There is a difference in being cast away and being quarantined by a community.

In Allen’s film Manhattan, the characters are being shaped by the city itself not the characters shaping Manhattan. The geography of New York City is a really fast pace version on L.A. Allen’s character is not able to leave New York City, he shows that it is part of him that he can’t leave behind to go live somewhere else. He barely made it out to go after the woman he loved.