Modern Exam

Exam 3: Modern Era 20th Century

Short Answer
1. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness -Chinua Achebe. This piece was written as a response to the Heart of Darkness and the working racism it represented. The argument is by having the setting be Africa it strips the natives as people and makes them into things that are irrelevant. It is said that this is arrogant and at one point he argues that anyone who doesn't see the blatant racism in the work doesn't know what they're talking about. His goal was to bring to light the fact that it was a racist work and claim that Conrad himself was racist. What Achebe never took into account was the time period in which Conrad was alive and the cultural contexts of his lifetime and his locale.

3. Arcadia - Tom Stoppard. This quotation is a good example of the Age of  Enlightenment being overrun by the Romantic Period. In other words, Lady Croom wanted to redo her garden that was neat, logical, organized, nature as God intended it to be in order to replace it with the gothic macabre of nature being overgrown and taking its territory back from the civilized world. The organized garden is a representation of the Age of Enlightenment because it uses reason and science, it is the logical and explained. Romanticism is the unorganized, unexplainable, relying on emotion and feeling, which engulfs the logic of the mind by controlling it with emotion. The changing of the garden is a visual representation of the changing of the time and ages.

4. Shooting an Elephant - George Orwell. This was written in order to explain his experience in having to shoot an elephant when he was a police officer in India for the British. In it Orwell explains having to shoot the elephant, when he didn't really want to do it. He explains how he was pushed to do it because the natives were expecting it of him, that he could feel them willing him to shoot the elephant because it had already unleashed death upon the natives. It is the narrative of explaining how you don't know what you're capable of until you are put into a given situation. Orwell didn't want to look foolish and he didn't want to be wrong, to a certain extent it was all about saving face. There is also another way of looking at this piece, using the elephant as a metaphor for imperialism, by shooting the elephant it's like breaking down imperialism. Such as making Britain let go of the colonies they have ensnared.

6. The Wasteland - T.S. Eliot. The Wasteland is one of the works of the Modern Era that is especially unique. There is a certain amount of disorientation that occurs when reading the work. It jumps around and tries to form of disconnection of what you know. All the while he uses references across the text that is rare for the common people to get all of the references thrown about. He references the most obscure parts of popular works, changes languages for a couple of lines, and shows the reality of the world by causing a defragmentation of the references. To be alive is to not understand everything, there's a certain human quality in the misunderstanding of this work. As far as the relation of the quotation within the entirety of the work is the London bridge is the connection of the land masses that were separated by a river, in this case it is symbolically representing bridging this life with the afterlife.

9. Arcadia - Tom Stoppard. This quotation is from Thomasina when she is talking about the phenomenon of stirring rice pudding. Here she is disputing that the laws of motion rule over all things. She mentions that if you stir jelly into rice pudding you cannot ever stir the jelly out of the rice pudding. This is where the second law of thermodynamics begin to play its role in this work which states that different temperatures will reach an equilibrium. What it means to the novel is that entropy always increases (in other words chaos increases). Basically this is relevant to the novel because it explains that not everything can be explained entirely, chaos can sometimes get in the way of rules. Thomasina gets a glimpse into the theory of thermodynamics which didn't yet exist during that period, yet she lacked the math capability to explain the discovery she stumbled upon or glimpsed into.

10. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. This quotation relates to the text because there's a common theme of light and darkness throughout the story. It implies that the shadows/darkness is lying in wait within the wilderness. Darkness exists in nature and can creep upon anyone given the right circumstances. No one knows what it will take for someone to fall prey to the darkness. Darkness is always there right next to the light. The darkness and the light call upon one another, and neither can exist without the other's help. The implication is that they work together, yet they are at constant odds with each other. The question this brings about, however, is does the wilderness/nature turn civilized peoples into dark barbarians, or does nature only allow that aspect of the civilized to really shine through?