Marriage is a word that instills a different meaning in every person that hears it. Some people think of the religious meaning, two people joined together in the eyes of God. Others don't involve a god into their union and see it as a union between two people. Occasionally people don't take marriage seriously and just consider it the next step after dating. Whatever the opinion, every person, whether married or single, has his or her own opinion of what a marriage is and what it entails. In the poems A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne and Conjoined by Judith Minty the reader sees two different views of love and the authors use metaphors to help explain their opinions of love and marriage.
In John Donne’s poem he explains the two lover’s love with a spiritual and cosmology metaphor. The title says that 'when we are apart we must not mourn'. In the first stanza John uses a metaphysical conceit when comparing their separation to two men dying. While Donne and his wife are apart, they cannot express physical love; thus, they are like the body of the dead man. However, Donne says, they remain united spiritually and intellectually because their souls are one. He says that while he must leave and the physical bond that units them 'melts' there is no need to cry 'tear-floods' as this is demeaning to our love. Unlike the many ordinary people or “laity”, their love extends beyond the physical attraction and it doesn't depend entirely on flesh and sexual attraction which the rest of the world defines their love. Donne likened the lovers to the planets. The same perfect spheres that are different entities but always remain the same. Their profound love is greater and finer than that of ordinary people. Their perfect spherical love belongs with the great planets and the stars. The trepidation of the spheres is movements of the planets and the general sense of movement to us is earthquakes and although these cause alarm they are slight movements compared to the trepidation of the planets because the movement of the universe, though greater, does not cause alarm. By using this metaphor of the movement of planets and the earthquakes is that "ordinary" lovers may fear and lament their separation, but the lovers, who are superior to them, can take theirs calmly, for they are never really parted. The main metaphor in this poem is when John Donne speaks about a compass, how you can pull the ends away from each other but never will be fully apart. They are connected at one point, creating a perfect circle of love. The circle also suggests it will last forever. The concept of death is turned into a celebration of love through clever metaphors, imagery and conceits by John Donne. This couple is different to most because there relationship is not idealistic. It is real and very deep, the fact that they see death as a beginning rather than an end shows a lot to there feelings. The comparisons made between this relationship and that of other peoples shows it is the souls that are in love, rather than the physical beings.
Judith Minty also uses metaphors in her poem as she explains the unhappiness of a marriage gone wrong. In the very first line, the onion is called a monster. It is two onions only “joined by a transparent skin.” The skin is the joining of marriage of the two onions. The deformity of the two onions “each half-round, then flat and deformed… where it pressed and grew together” puts a slight tilt on the joining. Where the two onions come into contact with each other they have warped and deformed. This transparent skin has held and warped the two onions into the monster of one union. The Chinese Siamese twins used are another example of the deformity of marriage. “Or like those freaks, Chang and Eng, twins… joined at the chest by skin and muscle, doomed”. This line describes the agony and pain of being joined physically with someone. These twins go though life never alone with one moment of peace. To feel the agitation of knowing they can never be separated from another is beyond the comprehension of most people. Such a permanent joining of two uniquely different beings drives the image of suffering into the mind. The deformed calf with the two heads from the result of a birth defect also shows another example of marriage. “An accident, like the two-headed calf rooted… in one body, fighting to suck at its mother’s teats” shows such deep sorrow and anguish. The use of such a pitiful creature as an example again reaches inside to dig out the feelings of remorse and pity.
Both of these poems have opposing views of marriage and love. Judith Minty’s poem explains more of a physical bond and John Donne’s poem opposes that. Ultimately, the usage of metaphors in both poems helps to better explain the relationship with the speaker and how the author views love and marriage.

Alright so first off that article was ridiculously long and it was tedious to read... so now i must begin, oh joy. Well i think that Jim Neilson had a very harsh, critical and negative outlook to "The Things They Carried". Rather then looking respectively at the whole aspect and book as a piece of literature Neilson stomped on the author's writing by saying explicit and gave a harsh public analysis of his view of "They Things They Carried". The author of the novel gave provided many analytical arguments and aroused many questions among the readers of his novel, for instance the set up of each chapter as a story concluded to the question of how honest the author was being... how much of what he says is true and is not true, and thus what should the reader believe? Although this was a very controversial issue (which every piece of literature should suggest i suppose), i felt that Jim Neilson did not give appreciation to these facts. His words were, "The weakness of The Things They Carried is that O'Brien's imagination is virtually the only reality. O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese. In so doing, O'Brien has constructed a text that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." Neilson argues in this statement that O'Brien does not provide any deeper meaning in his work but shouldn't that be left up to the audience and the readers? A narrative should have meaning to an extent and the reader should be left to interpret the rest... thats how stories and narratives work, it must be convincible, persuadable, believable. Ultimately, i felt Jim Neilson's criticism of "The Things They Carried" was quick to be conclusive and he has a strong opinion on his idea of what O'Brien did with this novel.

Well I really haven’t given this subject much thought but im gonna base themes off of the topics we discussed in class, such as Andreas concept of truth and lies or loneliness and the common role it plays in the stories we’ve read thus far. So I think by giving the narrator his own name and naming the rest of his characters after the men he actually fought alongside in the Vietnam War, O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, which makes it impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories truly happened to O’Brien. It’s like O’Brien intentionally heightens this impossibility when his characters contradict themselves several times in the collection of stories, rendering the truth of any statement suspect. O’Brien’s aim in blending fact and fiction is to make the point that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of telling a story. He is attempting not to write a history of the Vietnam War through his stories but rather to explore the ways that speaking about war experience establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjective truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. Also another theme is that O’Brien argues that in Vietnam, loneliness and isolation are forces as destructive as any piece of ammunition. For instance, he repeatedly emphasizes the impact of solitude on the soldiers. He shows that thoughts, worries, and fears are as dangerous…if not more dangerous, than the Vietnamese soldiers themselves. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Mitchell Sanders’s story concerning soldiers made so paranoid by their experience on listening patrol that they hear strange noises emphasizing how the imagination can take over instantly in the lonely silence.

“There is a sense in which if one sees modernism as the culture of modernity, postmodernism is the culture of postmodernity” (Sarup 1993). Postmodernism argues that truth is entirely a product of consensus values where science itself is just the name we attach to certain modes of explanation. It looks at the construction of scientific knowledge, scrutinizes modernistic ideals of progress, truth, growth and intrinsic value (science = truth = progress) to show that science is a product of culture, that scientific models are not removed from moral tendencies, i.e. belief that science is value neutral and thus it cannot be held responsible for environmental problems it creates. it is safest to grasp the concept of postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. It either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines, so it is difficult to characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity. Still, it is possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general, since its friends and foes understand it well enough to debate its strengths and weaknesses. At a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self and other notions. On a postmodernist view, there is no such thing as objective reality, truth, value, reason and so forth. All these are social constructions, creations of linguistic practices and, as such, are relative not to individuals, but to social groups that share a narrative. Postmodernism claims that truth is simply a contingent creation of language which expresses customs, emotions, and values embedded in a community’s linguistic practices.

I've concluded to many different thesis' for my essay topic on the graphic novel "Maus". The sole behind my conclusions is based off of last Tuesdays class discussion on the article "Postmodernism Provocation: History and "Graphic" Literature" by Linda Hutcheon. I found every topic we discussed very interesting. For instance, I was lured in on this discussion when we relatively jumped into the second question. The paragraph revealed the idea that events should not be categorized into a specific criteria. One should not specify and maybe even go as far as discriminate a certain event... Especially one that we refer to as history. The past events are so specific that categorizing them as art or words or anything that tries to make simple what was not is completely undermining the meaning of what the event is implied to provoke. We all know that a traumatic experience to us could never be understood by anyone even if that means eluding to language or music, no one will ever comprehend how severe the experience really was and if anyone is even gonna attempt to do that through the use of words or pictures or art it is still rather insulting to even try explaining the event. This topic leads to as differ et idea.... The idea that the past and present may co exist. This analysis concludes that as long as history exists the lack of people maintain distance. Although every historical and past event fits under the category of "history" it will still be subjective. There are too many events that co exist with eachother to ever say that certain histories are the same. "History literally becomes who does what to whom not only in the past, but in the present..." becUse history offers many different perspectives it inhibits the ablility for every single "listening, drawing son" to question it's severity, affectiveness and complexity. But to continue on, this idea leads to the topic me and my group received, the idea that history and literature combine to form the question if what should be categorized. We can even simplify our thought to the graphic novel of our essay itself... What should this novel be considered, literature or history? Should the implications of every ones personal histories make it into the historical regiment or is it's readable and analytical ability to personal to receive any history credit. Ultimately, because of every ones personal interpretation, experiences and perceptions of history itself, events at the traumatic level of the holocaust can not be subjected to the criteria of literature or history. Everyone has their own mediated version of what is represented and what we've learned is the holocaust. So is my scope of analytical consumption for a thesis topic wide... Yes. But I will somehow find a way to fit every idea into one thesis. Well, hopefully. :)

Wow this is a very interesting topic. At first I thought it was a little ridiculous but as I continued to read the article I began to agree with it. The idea of our mind’s being perfected and trained so that our competence becomes more important than our notion is realistically true and all of our actions speak to agree with this idea. Our decisions and beliefs support this theory because of the standard that we place technology in today’s society. For instance, when we think of labor, in our minds it becomes the worst thing possible. An easy escape is what we look for and if we get the opportunity to perfect it then it becomes a habit. For instance, the article states, “What we are all looking for, however, is the ready-made, competent man; the man whom some one else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom some one else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency.” He explains in this claim that we are always trying to discover something that can benefit us in anyway possible because we continue to diminish the mind with lower ideas and standards every day. We want someone to do for us what we can and we’d rather have our problems neat and tidied up and most of all being dealt with by someone else than doing it ourselves. So thus, this idea that google and the internet is controlling our minds by simply renewing rather than creating is something I do agree with because we can not plead that our motifs differ from it when our actions exemplify the complete opposing side.

Well to start off, the video we saw in class on Friday was very interesting. Although the video was just based on facts it was still an eye opener to the reality of this "post post-modernism" view. The article by Alan Kirby is a further detail of this perception that human knowledge may exceed to the extremity if uncontrollable measures. For instance after watching the video, I got idea of this evil view that we Americans bring upon ourselves. We know far more than even twenty years ago could only dream of knowing. Our world is industrializing itself to the point where things of concrete manner will exceed to know more than we could ever learn or discover. Because humans have the ability to discover the many wonders among our people we our taking advantage of our own ability, knowledge and the way we think will soon become what we once thought. The scary thing about this idea that the video provides o's that the video is merely facts, all it is telling us is things that are actually happening in this world and how it compares to the way the world once work and the way we reacted to what we knew. The article however provides a view of a "psuedo modernism" view. In kirby's article, he states, "the Internet and it's use define and dominate psuedo modernism, the new era has also seen the revamping of older forms along it's lines." this is explaining that we are making better what we already know. For example, this view is explaining the phenomenon that we make better what we see as important. Our knowledge can be perceived as evil because we our not using it for beneficial circumstances but to outsmart the way we think today which will ultimately weaken our society when this new world once begins to exist. I think this view is very interesting and the idea of this post postmodernism or as Alan Kirby says pseudo modernism is ultimately an explanation to why we make our exceeding knowledge to discover unecessary and concrete ideas exceptional.