Slouching Towards Bethlehem Summary

During the time period the novel is set, people were encouraged to stand out and strive for better things. However, in East Village the opposite is true. As Nomi said, “[T]he biggest sin in our town was to be sure of yourself” (Toews 65). She goes on to say that, “The second biggest sin in town was to need a lot of things” (Toews 65). This expresses how the citizens of East Village are expected to accept what they have been given and remain satisfied with how life is. The atmosphere is suffocating and leaves no room for personal growth or self expression. It is this kind of environment that creates a counterculture within the community; comprised mostly of young adults looking for an escape.

she

In 2017 our thoughts and actions are guided and molded in large part by social media, reality television shows and pop culture. Without realizing the extent to which constructed reality and self-curated life exhibitions shape how we see the world, we form perceptions and establish standards of what our lives should look like based on stories and photos posted on Snapchat and Instagram and find ourselves reflexively belting out song lyrics that directly contradict our values. Joan Didion, a unique and relatable but brilliant author, seems to have an understanding that the challenges she faced as a freshman in college in the 1950s would still be relevant and problematic for college students almost 70 years later. In Didion’s essay, “On

Many essays in Joan Didion’s book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, argues about the topic of dreams. In her essay “John Wayne: A Love Story,” she admires the star of her childhood, John Wayne. However, when Wayne becomes sick, Didion must decide if having Wayne shape her dreams was a mistake.

We sse this today with the way certain celeberties such as Kanye West dress and how they seemingly are able to wear any "hat" they wish. We look at the rich to be role models simply because of their money and refuse to look at the heart of a person. She hit on the fact that those with little money do all they can to look like something they are not. She talked about the struggle of haveing womens club in the poor neighborhoods as many wouldn't leave a home adress or even attend becase everyone knew they finacial situation but they were going to differnt parts of town to those that didn't to seem like they were a person who were very well off in life. The piece hit om the fact that these chidren were often asked to stop their develepment and work to help the family and for some parenst it was an expectation that the children would care for them. LAstly she talked about war and how it preys on the untutered and poor to fight a battle they knew nothing about. One huge theme of the pieces were that we cannot keep using history and old customs to justify our shortcomings in

Her

In a social environment, a community’s perception of a person greatly impacts an individual. In The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, we see two different societal perceptions of life through the female protagonists, Edna and Esperanza. Both Cisneros and Chopin use their protagonists to highlight how much of an effect society has on an individual. Through them we get a glimpse of communal impact on the protagonists as individuals, the developmental mindset of the characters, and how each character responds to societal perception of what’s acceptable and what’s not, as each embark on their own “awakening.”

she

In the poem Sandra, the tone of frustration is evident in the first line when she declares, ‘I’ve stuck it out’, implying that she has remained in the town despite her limited opportunities. By listing the different groups and roles fulfilled in the town, she implicitly highlights the rigidity of the social structures and by contrasting the roles of men and women in their ‘twinsets looped with pearls’, Page alludes to the expected dress of women in the 1950’s a symbol of the repressed roles of women and wife and mother. Similarly, the direct statements ‘it’s not enough … to be just indispensable’ and ‘the goal I have is not the one thought up by Mum and Dad’, shows Sandra’s emphasises her discontentment and lack of place in this town. These direct and clear statements represent how she desires to be part of a community in which her right to not to have her life dictated by the learned attitudes and expectations of the community, is possible. Also, the contrast between the attitudes between Janene and Sharon in their respective poems illustrates how even on a familial level Janene’s right to individually determine her own life is disregarded by her mother, Sharon. Sharon, in this way,

People cannot control the community they are born into, but through strength and determination, certain individuals can escape their community and find a place they belong in life. Author of A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid, and Didier Eribon, author of Returning to Reims, were born into overlapping economic difficulties and fought for successful careers as writers and professors during adulthood. The values, symbols, ideas, experiences, and even places that surrounded both Kincaid and Eribon in their childhood provided them with the opportunity to control their outcome and the communities they were apart of throughout their life. From a young age, Eribon felt he was born into the wrong community because of his homosexuality, value for education,

The powerful novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kelsey highlights the functionalism of society along with the themes of conformity and power. The central interpretation made was that of the division between 1950’s mainstream America and that of the emerging counter culture. The term ‘counterculture’ depicts cultural events and movements, mostly formed by the upcoming generation. Society in the 1950’s is portrayed in the text by the different roles of characters, the nurses and patients, with the emerging counter culture personified by McMurphy, who is attempting to rebel with the wards oppressive rules and structure. The author elucidates how society bestows labels upon nonconformist individuals in order for institutions to maintain

Assignment Four: Perspective: Yippie Leader, Abbie Hoffman. The song San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair), focuses on the people central to the hippie/ Flower power movement of the 1960’s-1970s. This counter-cultural movement was focused on a new social order which centred around peace, freedom and love, and many socialist ideals.

Shel Silverstein didn’t care, he didn’t care if The Sword-Swallower wore a collar, whether the Twistable, Turnable Man was almost unbreakable or if the Skin Stealer made your poor head spin, simply put, he did what he wanted and without question. Shel Silverstein was an American poet, author and songwriter. He won two Grammy Awards and his books have sold over twenty million copies but it was not his accomplishments that made him great, but instead how he achieved them. Silverstein looked to combat social norms and and did so with outright confidence. In modern day the idea of fitting in has become a driving point in our society, people have become afraid to be themselves for fear of becoming a social outcasts, but Shel Silverstein did not conform to the idea of “normal” and instead pushed boundaries and tested limits. Silverstein valued his idiosyncrasies and taught me how to value my own. He lived in his own world, filled with abstract ideas that were seemingly incoherent, but each had a meaning, each word was carefully placed. Silverstein, to me, was a cure-all, an individual who helped me escape from fitting in, and accept myself for who I am not what others want be to be.

Her

Los Angeles possesses the characteristics of great fame and fortune as well as immense homelessness and poverty. Often times, young people are misled by the financial success of some and assume that is typical of city people. Writers Joan Didion and Carol Muske-Dukes characterize the realization that an adolescent’s lifestyle is not suitable for the demands of a city as signaling the dawn of the apocalypse. In the essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion highlights how the failure of society is brought about by a family’s inability to fulfill traditional roles and a lack of education as exemplified during the Hippie movement. While poet Muske-Dukes utilizes gothic language and allusion to illustrate the notion of an apocalypse in the poem “Like This”.