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Building Background and Comprehensible Input Essay

Building Background and Comprehensible Input - Essay Example Acknowledge that educators must address the issues of English students while...

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Toni Morrison Sula and Mahasweta Devi Breast Giver Essay

Toni Morrison Sula and Mahasweta Devi Breast Giver - Essay Example For a book of this stature, most readers wanted a heroine they could identify with- someone who was basically good despite her minor flaws and few blunders- someone like Nel. But that is not to be. Sula is the protagonist of the novel and she is by no means a traditional heroine. In fact for many, she is an evil woman who refuses to conform to societal expectations of her and does some truly inexcusable things such as sleeping with her best friend's husband. Sula presents a different, unique but definitely negative image of a woman. But it was not done to highlight the evil side of women instead it was done more with the purpose of asserting women rights and independence. Women rights and their position in the society is also the topic of controversial story Breast Giver by Indian author Mahasweta Devi. The story revolves around a woman Joshuda who considers her breasts her chief possession since they bring food for her family. She is hired as a professional mother for several children in a high class Brahmin family referred to as the big house in the story. The story deals with the subject of unpaid labor and a woman's reproductive capabilities going unwaged. Joshuda's low caste body that goes from being the most fruitful to decayed and diseased is used as an allegory and thus the entire plot can be considered allegorical. For many in the west, this story may appear too fictitious to ever be true but we must not forget that this is about an Indian woman in a small town of India where breast feeding children of wealthy families had been a custom for a very long time. The author chooses to highlight the social divide as well the collapse of Mother Ind ia myth. She uses Joshuda's body as a representation of third world countries while the big house represents the capitalist bourgeois in the developed world. While the capitalist powers have always been a source of contention in India, the author explains that by creating such vast social divisions, we are actually fostering the very capitalist forces that we otherwise vehemently oppose. Spivak in her analysis of the story thus asserts that the fictional character Jashoda 'calls into question that aspect of Western Marxist feminism which, from the point of view of work, trivializes the theory of value and, from the point of view of mothering as work, ignores the mother as subject' (Spivak 1987:258). 'Breast Giver', further argues that in this story 'we see cancer rather than the clitoral orgasm as the excess of the woman's body' (Spivak 1993:90). Breast giver highlights in almost dramatic fashion the exploitation of a woman's body in much the same way as colonies of imperial powers had once been exploited. The gruesome death of Jashoda from breast cancer is another important highlight of this work as Spivak notices the importance of the phrase, 'The sores on her breast kept mocking her with a hundred mouths, a hundred eyes' (Spivak 1987:260). Sula is the story of two black women coming of age in Ohio sometime during the two world wars. Sula is wild and aggressive woman with an individualistic streak and a strong desire to break free of tradition and rules. Nel on the other hand is the compassionate gentle figure that can best be described as a 'nice' person. But Sula is not interested in being the conformist. She is an independent woman whose personality is largely shaped by the place she lived in- Bottom. Bottom was not even half as good as it was made out

Monday, February 3, 2020

How do (metaphysics and epistemology) affect ethics or values Essay

How do (metaphysics and epistemology) affect ethics or values - Essay Example In short, religious belief or knowledge has its roots in two separate and most probably different epistemological grounds and that is where the boundaries start. The connection between ethics and metaphysics or epistemology is essential and it has to exist. Without this connection, how can one define ethics in the first place? Ethics are some rules or guidelines on behaviors that are supposed to be named as ‘good’. Now epistemology would question, what is good? This can push us into a deeper hole where we have to question everything, even our own existence. For the sake of argument, let’s leave it to a preliminary definition of good as something which is opposite of evil or bad. Again, epistemology question would rise, why do ethics have to be good? And the answer lies in the fact that it leads to personal pleasure. This personal pleasure can be connected to immediate benefits in this reality knows as life or it could relate to benefits understood in the life after death. This notion of life after existence arrives from the premise that every living thing dies after a certain period of time and humans are nothing but a decaying organic matter which has an expiration date. This begs to question that there is nothing without purpose; rain, clouds, winds, animals, mountains, minerals, everything has a purpose, and then what is the purpose of a human life? This leads to various destinations like religion, heaven, hell and God. This idea that things should live up to their purpose or end has two aspects. The first ‘end’ is a means to fulfill some other purpose known in Aristotle’s terminology as instrumental end whereas the other end is the intrinsic end and is an end in itself, serving the purpose of its own existence. For instance if a carpenter builds a barrack for soldier, it’s purpose as a carpenter is over or he has found his end as a carpenter because he has done his job. But such an end