Literacy, Schooling and Revolution, by Colin Lankshear Essay

Let us attempt to understand Lankshears argument. My interpretation of Lankshears position is that he supports the idea of literacy as being best understood as a concept which comes into affect by its application in day to day life. I further assess his statement as literacy being also considered as the formation of ideas which forms the uses of literacy as well as creating an image to convey its use (Lankshear, 1987, p.50). The uses of literacy may be to communicate with one another or to participate in society by working, or to help others in need. Without the idea one can not put literacy into use. Such ideas must make known their use, they do so by reflecting this use to the†¦show more content†¦Thus, a literate person has more and better opportunities than the one who isnt literate. Literacy produces good results and importance to the literate person as well as precious and valued qualities for him/her, the illiterate person gets none of these (Lankshear, 1987, P .39). Lankshear states a minimum of three similar misconceptions within the above views. He begins with the concept that literacy is unitary that is it is a single thing, that is it is the same for everyone (Lankshear,1987, p.39). He explains that literate people share (regardless of differences in their levels of literacy) their possession of literacy, where as what illiterate people have in common is that they dont have literacy or they have so little of it that it is regarded as negligible (Lankshear, 1987, p.39). In this perspective literacy is seen as a technology or otherwise seen as the ability to employ the technology of print (Lankshear, 1987, p.39). Lankshears second description of misconception is that literacy is a neutral process or tool, this is believed to be so due to the tendency to consider literacy to be a skill/technology. It is considered to be neutral in the sense that it is unattached from and not influenced by the concepts of power (Lankshear, 1987, p.40). La nkshear argues that for those who agree to literacy being neutral, its use is differentiated from the term literacy itself

Tennessee Williams Free Essays

Tennessee Williams is of the greatest playwright of the American theatre and also the most important writer in the world of the twentieth century. Like other creative geniuses, he died depressed and alone, never knowing the popularity he would enjoy after the death. He has written many great plays one of his greatest work is â€Å"The Glass Menagerie†. We will write a custom essay sample on Tennessee Williams or any similar topic only for you Order Now The plot, dialogue, setting and characterization were selected based on their potential to represent his experience and identity symbolically, the struggle between flesh and spirit was defined as he felt. When you live trying to meet the expectations of others, when you leave your dreams behind to please the other, or you hide what you really are, you live a confinement similar to that of an animal in captivity. This is what the characters experienced in this play. William explained innocence and spirituality through the imagery of tension, whereas for carnality he used imagery of flow. â€Å"In their own way, the Wingfields were fighting against the things that were threatening their life. Tom’s had a fear of working with a job that leads to no future. So,he decided to create his future in poetry, and the results were very rewarding. Amanda was disappointed with her life and attempted to make her daughter more social and popular. Laura’s had a fear of facing Jim O’Connor That led her to underlying concerns like not being able to indulge herself into society and physical appearance. Laura also represented things related to spirituality. Everything in the play served as a symbol between and what she signifies or thinks. In the discussion, Barnard analyzed each character in turn, explaining the symbols which pertained close to her or him, after that, he showed the interaction of symbols as the play draws towards the end (The-Symbolism-of-Tennessee-William_s-the-Glass-Menagerie-an-Inductive-Approach-Barnard). Laura admits that she leaves a work session that allows her to get a job, her mother, Amanda, tells Laura should get married. Tom told Amanda that he would go to dinner with Jim O’Connor. Amanda prepares herself extensively, hoping to become Jim’s matchmaker. After that, Jim left the house to meet his girlfriend; Amanda accused Tom that he did not tell that her about Jim engagement. Tom explains that after he left his family he was not able left Laura behind, he always felt a connection to her. Each character reaches a different climax in the play. Tom’s choice of not paying the electricity bill and use that money to leave the family looking for adventure revealed his decisive and initial break with the family’s difficulties. While, when Jim broke Laura’s unicorn horn and announced that he was engaged, the option of her helping him overcome his shyness and doubt was also defeated. When Amanda discovered Jim’s engagement, she lost confidence that Laura will reach the social position and popularity that Amanda herself has missed. Overall, in the play, Tennessee Williams has shown a tremendous work of art which proves that he will remain the most significant American writer and no other writer can reach his mark in theatre plays. The play showed difficulties people have to face which was the reflection of Tennessee’s own life experiences and imaginations and how a person can sustain himself in the harshness. The climax was the most exciting part of the play. How to cite Tennessee Williams, Papers

The Basic Dilemma of the Artist Example For Students

The Basic Dilemma of the Artist Biography We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all the laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate the existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science. A compromise was proposed long ago : the soul is nothing but our self awareness or the way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that the human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in the same manner or that pain that we experience is the same in all of us. This is even when the causes of the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored. A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find the exact part of the brain which is responsible for the specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and the aforementioned pain. In other words, the scientific claim is that the patterns of brain activity ARE the pain itself. Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide even if they do so forever does not make them identical. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the other the effect, as is well known. Similarly, the contemporaneous occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of the same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens it by no means follows that it IS the pain itself. A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces the same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in the brain. The gap is even bigger when we try to apply natural languages to the description of emotions and sensations. This seems close to impossible. How can one even half accurately communicate ones anguish, love, fear, or desire ? We are prisoners in the universe of our emotions, never to emerge and the weapons of language are useless. Each one of us develops his or her own, idiosyncratic, unique emotional language. It is not a jargon, or a dialect because it cannot be translated or communicated. No dictionary can ever be constructed to bridge this lingual gap. In principle, experience is incommunicable. People in the very far future may be able to harbour the same emotions, chemically or otherwise induced in them. One brain could directly take over another and make it feel the same. Yet, even then these experiences will not be communicable and we will have no way available to us to compare and decide whether there was an identity of sensations or of emotions. Still, when we say sadness, we all seem to understand what we are talking about. In the remotest and furthest reaches of the earth people share this feeling of being sad. The feeling might be evoked by disparate circumstances yet, we all seem to share some basic element of being sad. So, what is this element? .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 , .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .postImageUrl , .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 , .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346:hover , .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346:visited , .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346:active { border:0!important; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346:active , .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346 .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .ub33cecf90fcf87c9cae6e1c970d4e346:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Albrecht DurerWe have already said that we are confined to using idiosyncratic emotional languages and that no dictionary is possible between them. Now we will postulate the existence of a meta language. This is a language common to all humans, indeed, it seems to be the language of being human. Emotions are but phrases in this language. This language must exist otherwise all communication between humans would have ceased to exist. It would appear that the relationship between this universal language and the idiosyncratic, individualistic languages is a relation of correlation. Pain is correlated to brain activity, on the one hand and to this universal language, on the other. We would, therefore, tend to parsimoniously assume that the two correlates are but one and the same. In other words, it may well be that the brain activity which goes together is but the physical manifestation of the meta-lingual element PAIN. We feel pain and this is our experience, unique, incommunicable, expressed solely in our idiosyncratic language. We know that we are feeling pain and we communicate it to others. As we do so, we use the meta, universal language. The very use or even the thought of using this language provokes the brain activity which is so closely correlated with pain. It is important to clarify that the universal language could well be a physical one. Possibly, even genetic. Nature might have endowed us with this universal language to improve our chances to survive. The communication of emotions is of an unparalleled evolutionary importance and a species devoid of the ability to communicate the existence of pain would perish. Pain is our guardian against the perils of our surroundings. To summarize : we manage our inter-human emotional communication using a universal language which is either physical or, at least, has strong physical correlates. The function of bridging the gap between an idiosyncratic language his or her own and a more universal one was relegated to a group of special individuals called artists. Theirs is the job to experience mostly emotions, to mould it into a the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of a universal language in order to communicate the echo of their idiosyncratic language. They are forever mediating between us and their experience. Rightly so, the quality of an artist is measured by his ability to loyally represent his unique language to us. The smaller the distance between the original experience the emotion of the artist and its external representation the more prominent the artist. We declare artistic success when the universally communicable representation succeeds at recreating the original emotion felt by the artist with us. It is very much like those science fiction contraptions which allow for the decomposition of the astronauts body in one spot and its recreation, atom for atom in another teleportation. Even if the artist fails to do so but succeeds in calling forth any kind of emotional response in his viewers/readers/listeners, he is deemed successful. Every artist has a reference group, his audience. They could be alive or dead for instance, he could measure himself against past artists. They could be few or many, but they must exist for art, in its fullest sense, to exist. Modern theories of art speak about the audience as an integral and defining part of the artistic creation and even of the artefact itself. But this, precisely, is the source of the dilemma of the artist: Who is to determine who is a good, qualitative artist and who is not? Put differently, who is to measure the distance between the original experience and its representation? After all, if the original experience is an element of an idiosyncratic, non-communicable, language we have no access to any information regarding it and, therefore, we are in no position to judge it. Only the artist has access to it and only he can decide how far is his representation from his original experience. .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 , .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .postImageUrl , .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 , .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423:hover , .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423:visited , .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423:active { border:0!important; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423:active , .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423 .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u6447d8ecee935d05175a7e9c35a34423:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Henri Toulouse LautrecArt criticism is impossible. Granted, his reference group his audience, however limited, whether among the living, or among the dead has access to that meta language, that universal dictionary available to all humans. But this is already a long way towards the representation the work of art. No one in the audience has access to the original experience and their capacity to pass judgement is, therefore, in great doubt. On the other hand, only the reference group, only the audience can aptly judge the representation for what it is. The artist is too emotionally involved. True, the cold, objective facts concerning the work of art are available to both artist and reference group but the audience is in a privileged status, its bias is less pronounced. Normally, the reference group will use the meta language embedded in us as humans, some empathy, some vague comparisons of emotions to try and grasp the emotional foundation laid by the artist. But this is very much like substituting verbal intercourse for the real thing. Talking about emotions let alone making assumptions about what the artist may have felt that we also, maybe, share is a far cry from what really transpired in the artists mind. We are faced with a dichotomy : The epistemological elements in the artistic process belong exclusively and incommunicably to the artist The ontological aspects of the artistic process belong largely to the group of reference but they have no access to the epistemological domain And the work of art can be judged only by comparing the epistemological to the ontological. Nor the artist, neither his group of reference can do it. This mission is nigh impossible. Thus, an artist must make a decision early on in his career: Should he remain loyal and close to his emotional experiences and studies and forgo the warmth and comfort of being reassured and directed from the outside, through the reactions of the reference group, or should he consider the views, criticism and advice of the reference group in his artistic creation and, most probably, have to compromise the quality and the intensity of his original emotion in order to be more communicative.