Marc Chagall’s piece “I and the Village” was painted in 1911 after the artist moved to Paris from his hometown in Belarus. He migrated to Paris from a small village outside of the city of Vitebsk. Migration from rural to urban communities was a large aspect of the Industrial Revolution and is representative of one area of modernism, which focused on this movement of people. Chagall’s piece involves memories of the peasants from his village tending to animals and crops. Unlike the city, people in villages were self-sufficient in that these animals and crops were used for nutrition for the peasants. In the city, people worked in factories and earned a wage that they then used to buy produce, which aided in the rise of consumerism. The painting depicts the enlarged faces of a cow and person, presumably Chagall himself, staring at each other while other images float either inside or around them. Chagall breaks up the images in a geometric manner, which was most likely influenced by the Cubist movement going on at the same time. The broken up images create simultaneity in that multiple things happen all around the painting but they exist cohesively. The theme of the painting is sustained throughout the depictions of lined up cottages, a woman milking a cow, and a man shearing wheat. This geometry calls upon the paintings of artists such as Picasso and Leger who acted as important figures in Cubism. Chagall’s piece takes the techniques they utilized when depicting urbanism, from factories to buildings, and applies them to rural life, which shows how heavily modernism influenced the piece.

Painting: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6EOsZl8TDDoZnhiY24tVmtocE1PdEVDY2NXQmZuc2FPeGYw

There are different levels of connections depicted in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. While some characters are interconnected through explicit relationships such as friends or spouses, others are just mere strangers who still share in the novel’s important moments. According to Woolf, the world is a work of art and we are all pieces of the tapestry. The shifting point of view in Mrs. Dalloway shows how all these different pieces work. Clarissa Dalloway is the center of the novel and from her the web extends to characters such as Peter Walsh, an old friend whose proposal she had rejected, Sally Setton, a girl she had known in her youth, and Elizabeth and Richard, her daughter and husband. With people close to her, Woolf relies on memory and introspection to tether them to Clarissa’s story. She recalls Peter’s proposal and, following her rejections, his subsequent remarks about how she would become a rich man’s wife. This affects her present day outlook on herself and how others see her as just an extension of Richard Dalloway. In this way, Woolf utilizes people from the past to inform Clarissa’s present and show their part in her weaving together a larger story.

The next level involves minor characters who have brief appearances in Clarissa’s story but make an powerful impact. Lady Bexborough brings up feelings of inadequacy for Clarissa, who is hidden in her husband’s shadow and envies the other woman’s autonomy. Hugh Whitbread also evokes this feeling in Clarissa when she becomes self conscious of her appearance beside him. These characters act as people who revolve in close circles to Clarissa and influence her narrative indirectly by acting as mirrors. On another level are strangers Clarissa meets on her day out. Septimus Smith is introduced when a car backfires on a street both he and Clarissa are on. This shared moment cements Woolf’s idea that everyone plays intertwining roles in the world: the narrative shifts among several people’s perspectives in this scene, showing their inner thoughts and how this event links them together. Septimus’ story then becomes another focus of the novel, even though he is not directly connected to Clarissa.

Woolf does not highlight the degrees of separation between the characters, but instead chooses to focus on how these characters are brought together by circumstance and chance. The connections become more intertwined as Woolf moves into the point of view of different characters. One section focuses on Peter Walsh after he leaves Clarissa’s house. He heads to the park she was in earlier and sees Septimus and his wife Lucrezia, and comments on how Clarissa would most likely start a conversation with the couple. This moment ties these characters to both each other and back to Clarissa through memory and present day action, this melding Woolf’s literary techniques together. In the next part, scenes of Clarissa preparing for her party are interspersed with Septimus visiting a doctor, showing how their lives may not be tangential but that there still exists juxtaposition between them. Scenes such as this one help form a more intricate chain of connection between the characters as well as helps the draw the reader deeper into the artistry of the novel.

A strong gust of winds hits her when she steps out the door. Today is not a good day, Beatrice decides. She texts the bus app, but the closest bus is 16 minutes away. She steps into a snow bank and it’s 3 minutes away and she runs for it and the driver closes the doors right in her face. The anger when her legs burn and she makes the fifteen minute trek, knowing that driver saw her. What if he had a bad day? Well, she was having a bad day. The Q train finally pulls into the station with a grating sound. There’s an event, and an interview—oh, two events, but then the homework won’t get done. The man across from her sits with his legs spread and takes up an entire seat. Carol Williams, an elderly woman standing next to him, stares wistfully at the small space. She glances at Beatrice, thinking, “Why won’t she give up hers?” but Beatrice is too busy staring at her phone. “Oh, the youth,” she thinks. So, okay, event, event, “Did you turn off the heating?” Mom asks, but she forgot…again. “It takes two seconds!” Mom says, but it’s summer and her jacket feels heavy. Her hair swings against her shoulders and she has no hair tie to pull it back. “14th St-Union Sq,” and her hair prickles against her neck as she cuts someone off on the staircase. 6 train delay, again, waiting twenty minutes in stiff business clothes in July. “My weaknesses? Well, I would say they are…” There’s a bustle in the Baruch lobby; she sidesteps straggling students. The assignment won’t get done tonight.

Sigmund Freud’s “Family Romances” discusses the inner conflict that arises when a person tries to establish their individuality amidst familial and generational pressures. According to Freud, children start out as wanting to emulate their parents as these are the first people they know. However, as “intellectual growth” increases, a child starts comparing their parents to others and therefore takes part in the critical thinking process when categorizing their own parents’ personalities and behavior (237). This is the period where children begin to interpret even a small degree of hostility from their parents as a slight against them and thus their desire to break free from their parents grows. The next stage involves imagining one’s parents as different people of a higher social status, which serves to rip away the foundations of a child’s origins. At this stage, a child ponders the differing roles each parent plays: the mother becomes a certain figure, but the image of the father remains uncertain. This is where Freud declares that the “family romance undergoes a curious curtailment” since doubts arise about the father while the mother becomes cemented as part of the child’s origins (239). These disconnects between reality and fantasy serve as the child’s way of mourning the days when they put their parents on a pedestal and saw them as their only source of authority and beliefs. This connects back to the beginning of the passage, in which Freud says that it is important for a child to understand that their parents’ views can be separate from a their own views of the world, and that this liberation can only be born out of the conflict of identity the child faces as they grow up.

M. NourbeSe Philips’ reading of “Discourse on the Logic of Language” greatly relates back to Douglass’ own relationship to language. The first part of the poem sets up a connection between language and anguish, which parallels a slave’s experiences: their usage of language is limited as they must censor themselves when speaking to their masters and even strangers. An example is when Captain Lloyd asks one of his slaves whether his master treats him well and the slave, without knowing that it is Lloyd who is asking, says no. Weeks later, the slave is sold to another state. There is no truth for slaves since truth could mean consequences like the one this slave faced. Language can also be used from the side of the owners as a means of oppression and exploitation, which Philips mentions in her poem. Douglass first realizes the power language has when Hugh Auld, his master after Captain Lloyd, tells his wife to stop teaching Douglass how to read. Auld discovered what his wife was doing and ordered her to stop, saying that teaching a slave to read would make him “unmanageable.” It was in this moment that Douglass understood the importance of language to freedom. As Philips said in the poem, owners would buy slaves from different ethnic groups so that they could not communicate and thus plan a rebellion. Douglass ended up utilizing his language to write down his story and help the abolitionist movement through both writing and speeches. Without language, he would never have been able to achieve freedom and work to rally against slavery.

Each clip portrays the creation in a vastly different tone that does not seem to capture the mood Mary Shelley was setting up in the novel. The actual details of how Frankenstein brings the monster to life are condensed into one sentence, which reads, “With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” The scene is introspective and goes on to discuss Frankenstein’s reaction to the Creature at length. Both James Whale and Kenneth Branagh’s versions of the scene focus more on building up the suspense of the Creature’s birth and zeroing in on the minute details, such as what levers are pressed and wheels are turned. Branagh’s version especially packs the scene with action and visuals. In the novel, Frankenstein is anxious and in poor health due to how obsessively he worked on the Creature. Yet Branagh portrays him as excited and energetic, running around the room and jumping on machinery. What Branagh does get right at least is the solitary nature of the moment: Frankenstein alone shares in the creation of the Creature in the novel. Whale’s film sets it up to be a spectacle where several people watch from the sidelines and await the birth. In the aftermath, both versions of Frankenstein feel triumphant, with Whale’s version crying out, “I know what it feels like to be God.” Shelley, however, writes Frankenstein running out of the room, disappointed with his creation. In the end, it is obvious that the films had to include certain theatrics that the book could ignore due to the difference in medium, but these two clips do seem to show a misunderstanding of what the scene was trying to accomplish.

René Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method” takes us through a proof-like deconstruction of what it means to have independent thought and therefore exist as an entity. An interesting point he makes is about the presence or absence of a body not mattering in this situation since existing is tethered to a different plane. “…if I had merely stopped thinking altogether,” he writes on page 15, “even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I would have had no reason to believe I existed.” From this, Descartes then draws on the fact that doubt exists in his mind since he knows he is not a perfect being yet one must exist in order for him to know this. He defines something more perfect as being “superior,” which I personally find to be an incorrect assumption since there is no one scale to measure perfection, but for Descartes’ purposes this perfection is superior because the idea was “put into [him] by something that truly was more perfect than [he] was (pg 16).” This perfect being is God. It is interesting how Descartes takes a quality like faith, which we see as something almost beyond reason, and connects it to geometry. As Descartes puts it, “the idea of a triangle includes the equality of its three angles or two right angles” is just as evident as “the idea of a perfect being included existence (pg 17).” In his final paragraphs, Descartes discusses how reason even plays a role in our dreams, but dreams do not necessarily signify truth. I find that dreams may often bring more truth than being awake, but it is also true that the ability to reason is a trait that exists more readily in our thoughts during wakefulness. It is fascinating to see Descartes draw all these connections and, while I may not agree or even understand all of his reasoning, I do inevitably agree that our existence is proven by our thoughts.

The theme of individualism plays an important role Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself,” but Whitman also discusses the importance of harmonizing your own identity with the identity of others. He illustrates this point in the very first verse with the line, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Deciding which college to attend was not only a deeply personal time but also encompassed my family and friends. I knew I wanted to stay close to home and close to the city since I viewed both as extensions of one another. I figured commuting would not be the highlight of my day, but the environment of a subway car seemed to represent a microcosm of the city, which Whitman describes in section 26 with the lines, “I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following / Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night.” Therefore, step one was complete.

When it came to choosing my area of study, however, I found myself overwhelmed with options. I was unsure of what I wanted to major in, which made it difficult to narrow down my college search. I knew Baruch was a revered college and I was exploring the idea of studying business. So I took the plunge and entered Baruch with Whitman’s philosophy that “there was never any more inception than there is now.” Discovering my passion for marketing later on made me realize I first needed to go down the path of being unsure in order to find my calling. Just as Whitman says in section 30, “All truths wait in all things / They neither hasten their delivery nor resists it.” My decision to go to Baruch and to major in marketing came from internal as well as external forces, showing that it took meeting and interacting with others to help me figure out what I wanted. However, my journey both at Baruch and in life has just begun and, as Whitman puts it in section 51, I am “proceed[ing] to fill my next fold of the future.”