American lifestyle Essay Example for Free

American lifestyle EssayIn your opinion what are the dickens near significant characteristics of neoist literature? Use any TWO texts from the course to substantiate and illustrate your argument. In my opinion, the two most significant characteristics of lateist literature are the pessimistic view of advanced society or modern doubt, expressed through alienation and fragmentation, and the technique of stream of consciousness. In this essay I pass on talk over these characteristics and several important texts to illustrate my argument.Gertrude Steins work is a perfect specimen of fragmentation, or rather in her case, literary cubism. In art, cubism means showing multiple perspectives, taking a form and breaking it waste to rebuild it on canvas (analytical cubism) or taking materials to create a sort of collage (synthetic cubism). In modernist literature the same process occurs mint, feelings, locations are fragmented, only bits and pieces are described instead of the who le picture. As Picasso said I paint objects as I think them, not as I forgather them. Stein was inspired by modernist artists such as Picasso, and wrote a series of literary portraits, including one on Picasso. She defended the representational nature of Cubism and believed that through the distortion, repetition and altering of a subject one could get a resemblance of human perception. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a good example of both alienation and fragmentation. both(prenominal) Prufrock and his valet de chambre are fragmented. He cannot re everyy connect with the women he sees, the conversations he hears, the city he walks through, or the mermaids he hears.The descriptions of the women he meets are not realistic, but fragmented, the song never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter and in fragments Arms that are braceleted and white and bare Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. But not only the women and his environment are described in fragments, Prufrock himself is growing old, fading in a fragmented way I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. / Shall I founder my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? Even his fathom is a fragmentation of voices past and present ( Dante, Shakespeare) that somehow harmonize. The fragmentation in the poem the worries, the interruptions, the repetitions all conglomeration up his relation to the world. The images are used to convey meaning, coherence can be established from the ruins of fragments. Prufrocks plans may perhaps move from one to another, but they do so in a way that mimics our thought process. He moves from one doubt to another, and his seemingly random observations are rooted in his past and his insecurities, salutary like ours are.This poems fragmentation to some extent serves to display Prufrocks indecisive, second-guessing, and pessimistic nature, but it more importantly reflects the fears and uncertainties we all posses. Moreover, Pruf rocks question Do I dare//Disturb the universe? mirrors his insecurity and anxiety about his genial standing. From the fragmented images provided by Eliot we come away with a coherent analysis of Prufrocks character. He is the typical modern man, and his fragmented and often unsure voice is proof of it. The other issue raised by this poem is the modernist feeling of alienation.Prufrock alienates his emotions from those around him. He is scared to show the real him for fear of being rejected or alone. He cannot connect with heap on an emotional level. There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. In this particular quote Prufrock tells us how he is not himself, but someone people want him to be. Prufrock experiences feelings of exclusion and alienation from the modern world and industrialised society, which becomes clear in his low self-esteem and his inability to form relationships, and makes him worry about what people think of him.He even claims he should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of tongueless seas and feels pinned and wriggling on the wall when people scrutinise him. With the lack of self-confidence, his alienation grows stronger. The quote Do I dare? is repeated often throughout the poem. He asks himself time after time whether he should be himself or the person other expect him to be. Because of his alienation Prufrock feels unable to act on his desires, since he feels that people will automatically reject him.This can be seen as a reflection of the fast-paced modern American lifestyle, with people feeling trapped and unable to connect with other people and to society. Another example of the alienation evident in modernist literature is core group of Darkness. Modernist writers often present the world as desolate, and Conrads Heart of Darkness is no exception. As Marlow describes My isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the saponaceous and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a doleful and senseless delusion (p.30)