Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Holiday Sales May Be Frightful Essay Example for Free

Holiday Sales May Be Frightful Essay The article â€Å"Holiday Sales May Be Frightful, But Discounts Will Be Delightful† discusses tough holiday season for retailers because Christmas sales are expected to increased up to 4%. Nevertheless, the season is claimed to be soft and sluggish. This season is, actually, slower compared with sales of the previous year. The decrease in sales is explained by macroeconomic problems as, for example, house slump and credit crunches which negatively affect customers. The author cites Niemira who argues that â€Å"a huge worry facing the holiday season is that the home-price decline and housing wealth decline will cut into consumer spending broadly†. I think the article is informative and provides up-to-date information as practically all people are interested in making purchases. It is known that one of the most popular leisure activities in American consumer is shopping. People are ready to spend money on things they are willing to possess, but housing problems make it less affordable for many citizens. All aspects of consumerism are paid thorough attention by marketing workers and economic analysts. I think the author is very logical and unbiased as the author firstly defines the problem and then explains what reasons have led to it. Credit crunch and housing problem, in my opinion, are two the most serious problems. For example, the author says: â€Å"the credit crunch makes it harder for all households, especially low-income families, to refinance and get other credit†. Apparently, the poor have been disproportionately hurt by high fuel prices. I think that the author does sense in his argument and suggestions. Moreover, all his ideas are properly supported by evidence and explanations of analysis and economists.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table Essay -- capital violenc

Gawain and Capital Violence In almost every example of romantic epics, and definitely every story concerning King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the characters carefully adhere to a strict code known as the chivalric code.. The five main tenets of chivalric code or in other words the knightly code are: showing courage and bravery, being honest, having honor and being respected among peers, being kind to others, and being courteous and well-mannered especially toward females. Gawain is the very embodiment of these chivalric values but through his encounter with the Green knight and the lady he fails to uphold the code because of its rigidness and strictness.. Violence is the mechanism that Gawain uses to gain his capital which is honor and the upholding of the chivalric code. Even though violence does lead Gawain to respect and honor in the end of the poem Gawain points out how cowardly it is to follow a code that is so strict, that it allows no room for any human mistakes and that he was justified in trying to save his life over his honor. Sir Gawain fulfills his requirements of the five tenets right from the beginning of the poem, as he shows courage and why he can be seen as the greatest knight in the round table. Sir Gawain asks Arthur to allow him to take the challenge. When the Green Knight first challenges the knights in Arthurs Court, it is King Arthur who takes up the challenge at first. But Gawain is quick to step in take the place of King Arthur as he says â€Å"I am the weakest of your warriors and feeblest of wit; loss of my life would be grieved the least† (Gawain 354-355). Gawain does not think highly of himself and feels that the only reason he is a knight of Arthur's court is because he is Arthur's nephew... ...rtesy toward females are all tested in the poem. Sir Gawain who is supposed to embody these principles is tested by the Green knight and the lady and he fails to uphold the chivalric code. The failure leaves Gawain scarred for life but it also reflects a change in attitude towards capital violence and the role that it should play in the knights’ life. Gawain makes clear that there is a limit to how loyal and strict a knight can be when he is following the chivalric code and that the demands of the code are so immense that eventually a knight will fail to uphold the code. But this failure to uphold the code and not adhering to capital violence does not show cowardice and is in reality just human mistakes that are expected and are justified Works Cited Armitage, Simon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Print.

Monday, January 13, 2020

Kant the Sublime

The Sublime In Lyotard’s reading Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, he explains how critical thought exists within an infinite amount of creativity with no principles but in search of them. Lyotard understands the Kantian sublime as a way to comply with the standards that critically analyze postmodernism using deconstruction. Kant differentiated the sublime between the vastness and greatness and the dynamic sublime. The vastness sublime is so great we can’t just use our senses like we normally do; it requires us to heighten our senses beyond comprehension. The dynamic sublime is the way in which rationalizes things and his perceptions.Lyotard describes the boundlessness of the imagination and reason as a ‘differend’ and this is ‘to be found at the heart of sublime feeling: at the encounter of two absolutes equally present to thought, the absolute whole when it conceives, the absolutely measured when it presents. ’ (Lyotard) Our imagination understands forms and measures while reason understands something without form of an infinite nature of something. There is a separation of imagination and reason and when we use the ‘enigmatic’ power of critical thought we can reflectively judge something.Kant's presentation of the sublime has been taken up by Lyotard and he explores different ways of finding a philosophical understanding of different artworks. Through Longinus and Burke we can explore the pre-modern and modern conceptions of the sublime and through all these critiques we can draw different manifestations of the sublime in art. Kant questions how can someone judge an object before knowing how to properly judge that object and how do they know what proper judging is? Longinus in part of his critique implies that man can go beyond his limitations as a human being by experiencing emotions and language.The art or technical talents was described, as the human while the sublime was something that escaped ou r experience of art. ‘Sublimity consists in a certain excellence and distinction in expression’ (Longinus, pg 100). To understand and have knowledge of the sublime, there needs to be a vague understanding of something that is beyond our experience or senses. He explains that there is more to the human ordinary life because we feel this through the senses, but these senses are an incorrect interpretation caused by a physical perception as opposed to a psychological one.If you think about the sublime, it cannot be pictured or imagined but we have translated and suggested through the arts and poetry. Longinus tells us that nature is the creative and the first principle of the sublime and what follows is a matter luck and good mentors. In Goodbye Lenin, a German film directed by Wolfgang Becker, Lenin tries to hide the unification of Germany during the 1990’s from his mother who was in a coma throughout those months and has to stay in bed. He successfully conned her into thinking nothing had changed by using tricks like old product bottles and filming his own news broadcasts.This film successfully executes the idea of the sublime in what was going on between his mother and the rest of the world. ‘Our faults spring from the same place as our virtues. ’(Longinus)She believed everything around her was real and time had not changed but the people around her were well aware that this was a deception of reality. The way in which Lenin created the same world and reality his mother had always known is overwhelming to the senses and questions what is really for real? Burke believes that the ideas of pain and pleasure cannot be defined, but pleasure of every kind satisfies quickly.He goes on to say that there are two kinds of pleasure: the first that simply is and has no relation and the second that cannot exist without relation. The film has preserved and stopped time that defies nature and in reality cannot be done. The son is so scared an d terrified that his mother will die that he tries to please her by keeping the world exactly the same. This terror is the source of sublime because it creates the most emotion and he imagines the worst. The fear that his mother will die has caused him to be terrified. It explores different areas of the mind by letting her believe this lie.His mother would not survive the fact that everything she has believed in had crumbled while she was asleep and that the world she once knew was suddenly a capitalistic society that now included Burger king, Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Lenin did not want to devastate his mother and cause another heart attack so he had to make everything appear, as it always was wile the outside world was growing and expanding at such an accelerated rate. The kitsch setting of the typical German 1989 apartment filled with yellow flowered wallpaper and dark wood furniture brings calmness to his communist mother.The film captures the nature of humans and their strong social beliefs and how it can affect the human psyche. Burke believes that terror is the source of the sublime and that pain is the more powerful than pleasure. Lyotard believes that pain is not the end point, there is the ‘movement’ of pain to ‘pleasure’ In Joseph Turners Impressionistic painting titled Slave Ship, he has created a seen of vastness that relates to the Kantian sublime but moreover he has demonstrated the use of color and dynamic composition to create a sense of horror.The brushstrokes give a natural look to the painting and the seemingly unintentional brushstrokes create an organized composition. We are aesthetically pleased when we look at the painting because an overwhelming response is experienced when looking at the picture. Burke believed that the Beautiful was very different from the sublime. â€Å"All privation is great because they are all terrible: Vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence. Low and intermittent sounds and shadows bring a bout feelings of the sublime. Above all, the actions of the mind are affected by the sublime. â€Å"The way in which Turner has used rough brush strokes and lots of contrast between moods and contrasting colors creates the Sublime as opposed to the Beautiful. The use of purple and blue shadows that cast over the foggy night, the bloodline skyline, the flaming enraged sea and the insignificant ship create a sense of horror. The Sublime is experienced in this painting because it is detached from the actual danger of being in an actual situation and rather experienced through the visual arts and poetry in its overwhelming vastness. There is a sense of elation and intimidation when traveling through the painting.Thomas Cole’s Landscape with Tree Trunks create a struggle to be able to understand what is being implied. It becomes uninviting to the viewer as the scary tree trunks in the foreground block our path into the painting and we get further into only for our view to be bloc ked again because of the mountains that come right into the middle part. The painting does not accommodate to human feelings. These are sublime components such as the scary trees, the contrasting light and dynamic sky create frustration in entering the painting make us feel that we are not welcomed and that we are in a wilderness that we cannot control.The overwhelming tree and sky not only creates and unexplained phenomena but also implies that time and power of nature is vast and infinite and these unpredictable forces can in themselves become sublime. The painting composition seems to have been distorted by Cole yet it feels genuine and believable. In the Pianist directed by Roman Polanski we are safe to knowing the reality of the actual circumstance of Jewish victims trapped in a concentration camp but we still enjoy the horrific actions taken against them caused by the overwhelming power of human nature.We are awed, disgusted and in disbelief by the question: â€Å"How can hum an beings do such things? † ‘There is no explanation for the communication of passion, but it is concluded through the experience or premonitions of others. ’(Burke) there is no way to rationalize how the Jews were treated during this time of suffering and we can’t even fathom such events to reoccur, but it still exists today. The pain and suffering that we experience as a witness is subliminal and in cannot be justified. Within the film Szpilman is able to detach from the war and all the pain and suffering he has experienced by playing the piano. When different men have a common faith in the object of admiration we come to the Sublime’ (Longinus). Szpilman creates his own sublime world through the piano. He creates a stimulus of powerful and inspired emotion and he seems to be dignified and elevated when playing the piano, not guilty or ashamed for being a Jew. His talent brings even his worst enemies to respect him and be in completely awestruck by his music breaking all boundaries of human laws and standards and elevating itself to a much higher place that is universal. The unknown and unbound is created in the film when everyone is awestruck and in total admiration of the music.In the end, art has the vastness that allows the mind to be free of obstacles of distraction. Basically, I understand Kant in his way of thinking of art as a way of means to letting the senses experience a feeling far greater than the everyday ordinary life and sublimity only exists in our minds and not in nature, and if we are conscious of this we can become superior to nature within and to nature which does exists without us. Lyotard explains that art should work with no rules and that it therefore cannot be judged and instead be combined and pluralized.Longinus explains that the human is the technical aspect of art while the sublime is the existential part of the human psyche that goes beyond our experience of art. Burke’s modern view of su blimity in art can only be experienced through actual knowledge an actual experience where things are only recreated and reordered. He thinks that death and fear are feelings of the sublime and that what one might expect is very different to what actual really happens and that expectation creates fear which in turn makes us unreasonable and therefore brings about the sublime.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

The Worth of a Demi-God - 1600 Words

In a group of bizarre, costumed crime-fighters, Dr. Manhattan must be put in his own category. Partly due to the facts that he neither fights crime nor wears a costume. But what truly sets him apart in this fantastic tale of superheroes is that he is the only character with superhuman powers. From the onset, we are given immediate clues that Dr. Manhattan is no ordinary character. His extreme powers tell us he is not like the rest of the superheroes. Before he utters a single word, his blue-ish color suggests his cold attitudes; his pupil-less eyes tell us that he sees things differently. The sum of the parts indicate that he is hardly human at all. He serves as a polar opposite to Rorschach who acts impulsively to defend†¦show more content†¦We admire and revere innovators like Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison, as well as the technological leaps brought by the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line. So it is not surprising that Dr. Manhattans seemingly limitless abilities cause many to question whether Dr. Manhattan is a god - or even the God. This fusion of science and religion cannot be overstated. Despite denying his own deity, Dr. Manhattan himself suggests that he could be a supreme being when at the end of the story he declares that he is leaving t his galaxy for one less complicated... Perhaps Ill create some [life] (Moore, Vol 12 Page 27). We do not know if he succeeds at mirroring the efforts of God. But the very fact that we wonder if he could indicates that science is the new god. We are a nation obsessed with doing more in less time: we worship productivity and efficiency. The word workaholic suggests an addictive compulsion to constant productivity. Yet American society sees it not as a vice or an escape like any other addiction, but an ideal to strive for. We want workaholics on our team to ensure success, yet we are apathetic to the toll it takes on their personal lives. Dr. Manhattan takes this idea to the extreme, as he is a slave to his research, working round the clock and requiring no food or sleep. As his relationship with Laurie JupiterShow MoreRelatedIliad Paper On Achilles And Agamemnon1182 Words   |  5 Pagesseduces the Spartan queen Helen, the wife of Menelaus, who is the brother of Greek king Agamemnon, the war lasts continually for many years. The Iliad not only includes the description of warriors, women, and war, but also emphasize the interference of gods and goddesses. As the main character in The Iliad, Agamemnon and Achilles look different, but they share some characteristics which are revealed by Homer while describing their behavior and speeches. 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