Darkness in Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson Essay Example for Free

Darkness in Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson Essay E. A. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and E. Dickinson’s works contain similar elements and images which can be related to the theme of darkness. These authors used these motives as their main subject throughout their works. Some of them led very gloomy and dark life so they used those experiences to utter their feelings by putting them on the paper. These poems and works can come across as kind of morbid at first sight so they will be thoroughly explained in the further text. E. A. Poe was labelled as immoral, crazy and depressive by his contemporaries partly because of his most famous poem â€Å"The Raven†. Many of them considered Poe’s behaviour insane when actually he was just a version of Romantic period moody hero like Byron, Keats and Shelly, yet today those â€Å"insane† people are called artists. His works were marked as spooky, spine-tingling and most importantly dark. Furthermore, a solid comparison can be made between 19th century horror writer Poe and 21th century horror writer Stephen King. Although centuries have passed the motif of darkness stays present. The Raven is a poem filled with dark, lonely and melancholic symbols. One of them to begin with is Gothic setting of the poem. â€Å"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore†. â€Å"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;/ And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. † It’s almost like today’s readers can see in films. One can picture a small cabin deep in the woods on a cold December night with nothing but one candle and a man like shadow which can be seen through the window. Nevertheless, it is a perfect prelude to a horror movie or in this case to a horror poem. In addition to dark setting there is a dark protagonist, a young man suffering a great amount of pain, more precisely loss of a loved woman. Any human would start to question himself and talk to himself as he did in all of that loneliness and misery, but the only reply he got from the raven is â€Å"Nevermore†. That word is pretty devastating for the man on the edge. The Raven itself is a bad omen, dark one since it gives volume to a dark, spooky, ghostly atmosphere. His black feathers are traditionally considered to be a magic sign of something evil, rotten and ill. For the tone Poe is looking for, the raven is perfectly suitable bird. It looks just like the night it came out of. Yet again the night is another motif in poem which is entirely dark in physical and psychological sense. Night represents mysterious and slightly dangerous power of nature and it fits perfectly in the poem. Poe does not choose to write a horror of a sunny afternoon’s setting. One of the first things one can notice while reading The Scarlet Letter is enormous amount of hypocrisy. The society itself is hypocritical, nothing is white or black, people lie and everyone wears a mask, so that can be interpreted as dark motif. There are many examples of collision of light and darkness throughout the novel. Light is used to describe and emphasize good qualities of a human within or present state of emotions. And on the other hand, dark is obviously opposite of that. For example there is a scene when Pearl turns her head away from bright sunlight after stepping out in her mother’s arms from the dark, gloomy prison. This shows the contrast between light and dark and also evokes pity for the baby and her mother’s imprisonment. â€Å"She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison. † There is another example of light and dark in Hester’s description of Chillingsworth. She describes him as a devil-like figure with a black soul and eyes burning red like fire. Light and darkness represent change of behaviour and personality in a character and this is one of the best examples of that change. Chillingsworth becomes literally and figuratively dark and continues tormenting Dimmesdale. The forest in the novel is described as dark several times especially in comparison with the town. Everything happening outside of the town is considered to be dark which means sinful. For example, Hester who is a sinner in the eyes of society lives on the outskirts of town in the woods. Society dismissed her and marked her as an outcast. The fact she is living on a border of town and forest shows how certain people thought of her in certain situations. During the night she found refuge in the woods with Dimmesdale and during the day she was a sinner in the eyes of society in the town. The forest was seen as the place of evil by townsmen because it was unknown and mysterious. The wilderness of the forest is compared with the Hester’s moral wilderness. â€Å"She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest. In Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville one can use doubling as a dark motif. The first example of doubles is Nippers and Turkey. They act like one person which is shown in the way they live their lives. Turkey is off in the morning because of the alcohol he drank the night before and Nippers is off in the afternoon because of his indigestion due to the lunch he had not so long before. They act like two faces of a coin. The second example and most important one is Bartleby. Melville is evoking him as a kind of phantom double. Descriptions of him represent him as either ghostly or a corpse, â€Å"cadaverous†. His indifference toward anything makes The Lawyer feel guilty and the act of understanding and helping Bartleby is just a way of satisfying his conscience. Isolation is also a dark motif in Bartleby the Scrivener. During the day Bartleby stares at the window facing the wall and during the night he sleeps in his office. In fact, this is a perfect picture of Wall Street and people who were really emotionally imprisoned because of their work. The last author to be explained is Emily Dickinson. She was beyond her time, left all alone in her world with nobody there to understand her. Her life was lonely and that, among all else, resulted in two nervous breakdowns. The poetry she wrote was full of dark and mysterious motives. One of her many poems called â€Å"I’m Nobody, who are you? † can explain the core of Dickinson. Although this poem has element of comic sense to it, it’s not quite as comical as it seems. Here Dickinson has a light tone, childish voice and she invites reader to come to her dark side. The main thesis in this poem is the loss of identity and personality. „Im Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too? / Then theres a pair of us! / Dont tell! theyd advertise – you know! â€Å" She is explaining that there is a pair of them, nobodies and outsiders. The speaker fears to reveal their identity because they will not be anonymous free-thinking â€Å"nobodies† that they have chosen to be. It is not arguable that all of these authors were lonely and filled with pain due to certain tragedies but some of them felt it more than others. If every aspect of their lives is taken in consideration one should give a gold medal in darkness and despair to Poe and Dickinson. Nevertheless, all of them were human with real human emotions and their way of coping with pain was by writing it on a piece of paper. No matter how morbid and depressing these works are, they are works of art. It is important to remember how difficult it is to share your emotions publically and let every individual to interpret it in its own way, maybe even comparing it to its own life experiences. That is the beauty of it.

The Revised Blooms Taxonomy Tool

The Revised Blooms Taxonomy Tool For the twenty first century the requirements of kinds of learning is different than previous century. There is a need for all students, not just a select few, to develop their abilities to think, solve problems and become independent learners (Bruer, 1993; CTGV, 1997; Resnick Resnick, 1991). Course objectives or Curriculum consists of the knowledge and skills in subject matter areas that teachers teach and students are supposed to learn (Pallegrino, 2002). Course objectives describe what learners will be able to do after a particular learning experience. Articulated course objectives make students and educators aware of the learning expectations and teaching goals, respectively. For any course, learning objectives should not only list the topics that students will learn, but also the expected cognitive levels for each of the topics. Through instruction teachers apply different methods of teaching and the learning activities to help students master the content and objectives specified by curriculum. By applying summative and formative assessments teachers and learners both able to measure the outcomes of education and the achievement with regard to important competencies. The course objectives, the learning activities and the assessments used to measure the achievement of the intended learning outcomes are intricately related and connected to each other (Cohen, 1987; Wiggins, 1993). An assessment should measure what students are actually being taught and the cognitive level that is being intended to teach in course objectives. If any of the functions is not well synchronized, it will be misleading, or instruction will be ineffective (Pallegrino, 2002). Lack of alignment between course objectives and assessments is a major reason that students adopt a surface approach to learning rather than developing higher order cognitive skills. In an aligned system of instruction teachers needed to identify the appropriate verbs in the objectives and to embed those in the assessment tasks so that judgments can be made about how well a given students level of performance meets the objectives. As the teaching methods and the assessment tasks are accessed the same verbs as are in the objectives, the chances are increased that most students will engage with the appropriate learning activities (Biggs, 1999). There are several methods used to align course objectives and assessments based on the cognitive level. Benjamin S. Bloom was one of the first educators to realize the universality of a finite number of verbs across a variety of subject matters. He has built a framework for categorizing educational objectives in 1956 with the expectation to help to all teachers, administrators, professional specialists, and research worker to deal curricular and evaluation problems, which is widely known as Blooms taxonomy. The cognitive domain (Bloom, 1956) involves knowledge and the development of intellectual skills. This includes the recall or recognition of specific facts, procedural patterns, and concepts that serve in the development of intellectual abilities and skills. There are six major categories (Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation) starting from the simplest to the most complex cognition (Bloom, 1956). The categories can be thought of as degrees of difficulties. That is, the first one must be mastered before the next one can take place. Some course objectives might address some verbs (identify, enumerate, describe, list, combine etc.) to develop lower levels of cognition that learners will learn a major ideas or procedure of a subject matter but ignores those verbs (justify, theorize, hy pothesize, reflect etc.) that helps learner to achieve the skills so that they can apply these to solve different problems in relevant domains. Course objectives would refer to at least relational levels of understanding, where learners are not only expected to know facts and information, but also to structure them in forms that by the end of professional training they should be able apply into unseen problems and domains. Blooms Taxonomy Tool has been successfully used in multiple studies to evaluate the cognitive levels of course objectives and of assessments. However, these studies are focused on courses for general stream students and no such evaluation is currently available for students with learning disabilities. The purpose of the current paper is to use the Revised Blooms Taxonomy (Anderson Krathwohl, 2001) Tool to study the alignment between the objective and assessment for courses attended by the students with learning disabilities in High School settings. Students with learning disabilities do not have a hearing or visual impairment, a physical disability, or below average intelligence. However, they demonstrate difficulties in the receptive language (listening, reading), language processing (thinking, conceptualizing, integrating), and expressive language (talking, spelling, writing), mathematical computations, self-esteem and social skills, sequencing, time management etc. By applying Revised Blooms Taxonomy (RBT) on course objectives and assessment the level of cognition can be determined by identifying the verbs and level of knowledge can be determined by identifying nouns used in their objectives and assessments. Verb defines the category and sub-category of the cognitive domain th at students have reached and the noun describes the category of knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge) they are being assessed. The overall goal of the project is to better understand the effects of the alignment between the cognitive levels of the course (English, math, and science) objectives designed for the students with learning disabilities at high school level and the assessment questions used to evaluate their performance. The objective of this study is firstly, to apply the Revised Blooms Taxonomy Tools to evaluate the alignment between the stated course objectives and the questions asked for assessment for different competencies of each course, that is the level of each course objectives that have being taught; and the level of cognitive complexity of assessment task that have being used, and secondly, to analyze students grade to investigate the association of Blooms level of an assessment question on their performance, that is the possible positive or negative correlation between level of assessment task to the level of performance will be analyzed and thirdly, to analyze students grade to investigate the impact of variation in assessment objective with course objective at a different Blooms level on students performance. This study may generate data indicative of perfect alignments or possible misalignments between the learning objectives and the assessment procedure in a course designed for the students with learning disabilities. This information will either confirm the existing strength in the design of a course to the teachers or the curriculum coordinators and provide support for sound strategies or on the contrary this information will aware about the possible alignment weaknesses in the design of a course to the teachers or the curriculum coordinators and facilitate the implementation of corrective measures towards the improvement and enrichment the course. Findings from this study will be useful to inform the teacher education programs to make teachers aware of the importance of maintaining curriculum coherence for efficient teaching and effective learning. As Lorin W. Anderson (2002) mentioned that proper curriculum alignment enables teachers to understand the differences in the effects of s chooling on student achievement and poorly aligned curriculum results underestimating the effect of instruction on learning. Furthermore, findings from this study might create an urge to producing an instructors guide to the course objectives with specific examples and active learning activities that can be used in class and aligned exam question banks that could be used for effective assessment purpose. Furthermore, researchers could generate suggestions if any modification is needed in relation to better reflect key principles of learning for students with learning disabilities.

Analysis of My Last Duchess by Robert Browning Essay -- Last Duchess R

Analysis of My Last Duchess by Robert Browning Murder mystery intrigue. All describe Robert Browning's poem, 'My Last Duchess'. From the speaker's indirect allusions to the death of his wife the reader might easily think that the speaker committed a vengeful crime out of jealousy. His flowery speech confuses and disguises any possible motives, however, and the mystery is left unsolved. The poem is a great example of dramatic dialogue, a poetic form used to narrate and dramatize. It consists entirely of the words of a single speaker who reveals in his speech his own nature and the dramatic situation in which he finds himself. This format suits this poem particularly well because the speaker, taken to be the Duke of Ferrara, comes across as being very controlling, especially in conversation. For example, he seems jealous that he was not able to monopolize his former duchess' smile for himself. He also seems to direct the actions of the person he is addressing with comments such as "Will't please you rise?" The title of the poem evidently refers to a wall painting that Ferrarareveals to someone yet unidentified in the first fourteen words of the poem. "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall." He says. The line suggests self-satisfaction. The emphasis in the title is on last, as the ending of the poem makes clear; the Duke is now negotiating for his next Duchess. Fra Pandolf and Claus of Innsbruck are artists of Browning's own invention. Emphasizing the word Last as the ending of the poem implies; the Duke, identified as "Ferrara" in the poem's speech prefix, is negotiating for his next Duchess. Finding ourselves being given a tour of a grand home for the first time, by the owner himself, and be... ...ssiveness of the prospective son-in-law. I think that another positive aspect of the poem was the fact that Browning allows the reader to asses the Duke for themselves. I as the reader could see that such powerful Renaissance rulers were ruthless and greedy. I also saw how jealousy and possessiveness can destroy things that we love the most. I think that framing his former wife is a way for the Duke to prevent the count's daughter from misinterpreting him. His absolute rule will allow him to prescribe her behavior, but he depends on the count's representative to convey his indelicate hints about propriety better than he could verbally respond to the last duchess's miscues. I feel that in the poem there is pain, jealousy, rejection and happiness. The majority of the spectrum of emotions associated with love and marriage is contained by this piece.

Media Influence On Public Policy Essay -- politics, government

Policymaking is a political process which is affected by various social and economic factors (Hofferbert, 1974) and media systems play an integral role in shaping the social context in which policies are developed. Through the media, citizens learn how government policies will affect them, and governments gain feedback on their policies and programs. Media systems act as the primary channels between those who might want to influence policy and the policymakers '' controlling the scope of political discourse and regulating the flow of information. Textbook policymaking follows an orderly sequence where problems are identified, solutions devised, policies adopted, implemented, and lastly evaluated (Mazamanian & Sabatier, 1989). In reality, the policy process is more fluid, where policies are formed through the struggle of ideas of various advocacy coalitions (Sabatier, 1991) in what has been described as a policy primeval soup (Kingdon, 1995). The policies, on which the media focuses can, and often does, play an important part in determining the focal issues for policymakers. One of the fundamental roles of the media in a liberal democracy is to critically scrutinise governmental affairs: that is to act as a watchdog of government to ensure that the government can be held accountable by the public. However, the systematic deregulation of media systems worldwide is diminishing the ability of citizens to meaningfully participate in policymaking process governing the media (McChesney, 2003, p. 126). The relaxation of ownership rules and control, has resulted in a move away from diversity of production to a situation where media ownership is becoming increasing concentrated by just a few predominantly western global conglomerates (M... ... small media reforms (like public journalism) will be enough to reduce the commercial and corporate imperatives driving our existing media systems (Hackett and Zhao, 1998, p. 235). Instead, a fundamental reform of the entire system is needed, together with a wider institutional reform of the very structures the media systems work within, our democracies. This will be a difficult task, due to powerful vested interests benefiting from the status quo, including media, political and economic elites. Reforms will need to be driven by campaigns mobilising public support across the political spectrum, to enable the citizens of the world to have a media system that works to strengthen democratic principles as opposed to undermining them. This task is challenging, but it will become easier once people begin to understand the media’s role in policymaking within our democracies.

Contemporary Music Analysis and Speculation :: essays research papers

Nuova Consonanza - NC Berlino 1969 The piece begins with about 3 sounds occurring concurrently. I can identify a guitar or similar string instrument distinctly. I also hear a wind instrument drone. As the piece progresses, I hear random noises in the background. These begin with an object sliding down a wire, creating a downward scale effect. High pitched piano that is low in intensity is heard. Suddenly I hear a squeaky, high pitched sound that sounds like squeaking on glass with wet fingers. This is soon followed by clinging objects such as keys. It sounds as if they are made of plastic or wood. The squeaky sound continues and becomes more regular and frequent. Added to it is a sound similar to a xylophone. I hear objects being struck that produce different tones, medium in pitch. The mood of the piece gradually changes into a darker aura. Deeper, lower pitched percussion begins to take over as the most-noticed sound in the piece. This low percussion gets louder and more frequent, leading into some high pitched sounds that resemble an object striking wooden planks. Soon after, I begin to notice the sound of trumpets or some other brass instrument backed by low pitched percussion, such as a bass drum. The brass is joined by what sounds like a squeaky hinge for a short time. The metal-on-metal sound heard here is very distinct. These sounds gradually fade away as the piece becomes more silent. The instrumentation becomes more drone-like, resembling the beginning of the piece. After the period of reduced volume, I hear several instruments making short, fast sounds. The drone style continues, as the short, fast sounds are clearly the secondary focus. The first sound I identify sounds like a human blowing into a long tube. Next I hear a flute and what sounds like a high pitched electric motor speeding and slowing. This transitions into high pitched, continuous percussion, which sounds like cymbals. The brass heard before continues but now it is much more continuous and drone-like. After a while the volume gets louder, while the sounds continue in a drone fashion. The sounds fade away, but as the piece ends I hear springs creaking and a human inhale. As a listener I can categorize this piece into the collage category. I feel that while listening I am among a collection of objects and am free to observe any one of them at any given time.

Has technology shaped our society? Essay

When we look back to the mid 1930s, we’ll see that the US was facing a very difficult time. After the gigantic losses on the New York Stock Markets, the economy was on its way to an all time low. The unemployment rates were astronomically high, leading to even worse conditions. ‘But why did this happen?’, we may wonder. Well, there is a very simple answer to that question. Just before the economical downfall, many people worked on the land, in the agraric sectors. But technology had, as it always has, a cheaper answer to the quest for lower costs. Many people were replaced by machines, making the land-owner able to provide the same amount of products with fewer workers on the land. This lead to the gigantically high unemployment rates, which on its turn lead to an extremely high amount of overproduction (after all, people with no jobs could hardly spend much money on primary and secondary needs, let alone tertiary needs). This had a great impact on society back then. Because of the great poverty, people had to change their lives. And so many people did, leading to a different kind of society, with different kinds of relations. However, not only then, but also nowadays technology has its impact on society. At present many countries in the world face a hard economic time. With large gaps in the consumers confidence in the United States and Europe the short-term prospect does not look very colorful. This, evidently, changes the way society works. Especially when one considers that we currently live in a consumer society, and when consumers lack faith, so does society. But how did we come to live in a consumers society? Let’s look back a while. After World War II, there began to evolve a large need for machines that make life easier. Cars, airplanes, household-machines (such as vacuum cleaners, ovens, microwaves), televisions, you name it and it was produced. It began to become a hype, to always have better material possesions than the people in society around you. Having the maniest, newest material possesions stated that you were wealthy. And wealthyness made people respect you. And even today, when we look at cars, cellular phones and computers we still want the  best to make an impression on the people around us. If this advancement in technology hadn’t been here society would simply have looked completely different. We would not have tried to squeeze out every cent of our incomes to pay for a vacation trip that is better and longer than last years. We would not massively have ran to our banks for even larger loanes, for which we ‘only’ have to pay 11% interest, in order to buy that all-important house on Martha’s Vineyard. If we would not have been so hungry for wealth there wouldn’t be so many poor people existent as today. In the US alone, over 17 per cent of the population lives life below the poverty line. And why? Because they didn’t realize that when they lost their jobs they wouldn’t be able to pay for their huge debts they had from their loanes. By the way, would it be a coinsidence that the US contributes the most to the technology sector, and also has the largest consumers society in the world? Surely, we realize these facts, but still we remain in the same pattern, seeking life happiness in material possesions. This pattern is all caused by the technology sector, making people want more than they can have. It has shaped our society into a consumers society.

Moral Law in Trifles

Throughout history it is shown that women have been looked down upon by men. They have been considered inferior to the opposite sex and even as a form of property. â€Å"Trifles† take place in 1916 where the rights of women are yet to be stated a place that is ruled by the paterfamilias, the men. Only men knew what was right, only men knew what was best for their families. Men criticized women a lot and made fun of them.Men do not understand the difficulty of these duties and the hard working hours that are needed to keep a farmhouse and or a family tidy and well organized. Women just make their lives look easier by cooking, cleaning and caring for their children. Although today, we are not burdened with this struggle of being physically and emotionally abused by men, women in the early 1900’s struggled to break free from this mold formed by society.In the â€Å"Trifles† this type of living made lively, singing, happy Minnie Wright turn into a mentally disturbed, cold and routine robot after she married her husband, Mr. Wright. However, in the play women are far from being decorative. They actually show greater strength than the surrounding men. As the men went upstairs to investigate what happen to the husband, the women stays down stairs. They were able to look at the scene and pay attention to the details which lead them to uncover the clues that Mrs.Wright murdered her husband. At that time before the men came downstairs, the women hid the evidence and did not judge Mrs. Wright for her action. I can only say that moral justice prevailed and that law should not be so strict in some cases because there are more psychological aspects in a human mind. The women hid the evidence as an act of compassion for Mrs. Wright. Stealing the box with the dead bird is an act of loyalty to their gender and of defiance against a callous patriarchal society.A murder case like this at that particular time was a shocking thing to solve because it involved t iny details that men could not understand or view without the help of women. Details that are presented in women lifestyle, Mrs. Peter and Mrs. Hale was able to relate to Mrs. Wright to the murder of the killing of her husband. This conflict is the moral justice versus the legal justice meaning that justice can be based on what somebody conscience suggest what is right or wrong, rather than on what that strict law says to be done.Although Mrs. Peters was hesitating about the decision of hiding the evidence, she knew it was the right thing to do. The women understood the moral law and the Sheriff Hale and the County Attorney represented legal justice. In this world women have always been treated second best by men and like they were never good enough for careers outside of the home. The sex of a person should not determine what type of job a person should have. Due to those facts the women in â€Å"Trifles† stood by each other to cover Mrs. Wright tracks