This TED talk focused around "Are we in control of our own decisions?" and I really enjoyed this talk because it reminded me of a paper I just wrote for my sociology class.
In the TED talk Dan Ariely talked about his research on how people rational their decision making. Ariely talked about how the things around use can affect the way people decide things, and sometimes we don't even know our answer started off on a bias. I thought an interesting point made was the organ donating countries, and the forms given to each one. The difference between opt-in and opt-out significantly changed the amount of people who signed up for organ donation. How just one word affect thousands of people. Race was also a point Ariely talked about and how people relate race to different physical characteristics. Like Obama everyone considers him Black, even though his is half white. Or Tiger Woods who is more Asian than black, but everyone still refers to him as black. The difference between race, and ethnicity is huge and people tend to mix up the two. By mixing up the two, people make false assumptions about people based on that they believe is race. In my sociology class my paper was about how media affects children's development of self. In my paper I stated that media, specifically social media, pushes impressionable teenagers and young adults to unrealistic ideals. Like on Twitter there are always pictures of fun dates with captions like "relationship goals" but those "goals" aren't a reality. Goals like vacationing together to beautiful beaches, exploring, isn't a reality or option for a middle class citizen. So I think people live with a lot of false ideas, and they're not even know as false, just these ideas get pushed and pushed over and over again, they become norms. I guess after all of that I am saying people don't answer for themselves, and instead they are answering based on how they were socialized when they were younger.
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This week in AP Lit we read the book Oedipus and I was confused for the majority for the book. Reason number one, I couldn't keep track of which character was which and how they related to other character's. Number two, the beginning of book started in the middle of story, so for me it was hard to keep track of which knowledge characters knew or didn't know.
I don't necessarily think tragedy is horribly confusing but Oedipus probably wasn't the easiest example to follow. When I think of tragedy I think of it as a pretty straight forward set of events, something bad happens, and then you as a person look and see the repercussions of the after effects. But in the book Oedipus in order to find the tragedy within the story, you have to be aware of why characters proceed with certain actions. Since the book's events all happened based on a prophecy (which later ends up being true), and all of the characters are aware of the prophecy, it creates an supernatural thing within the story that doesn't happen in reality. I actually did like the book Oedipus after we finished the whole book. I noticed that my many questions of who were who, and how they related to each other didn't really matter because the endgame of the story is that the prophecy did come true. I think that's one weird thing about this book is that none of my questions about the context of the book needed to be answered, in order for me to understand the legitimate ending of the book. In AP Lit this week we read "Tragedy and the Common Man" by Arthur Miller and basically it was three full pages full of different passages about tragedy. So our whole class read the Miller piece and we each had to pick a passage, or sentence from the pages. I picked the sentence "The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself."
So I broke that sentence into three different parts and that is how I interpreted it. The first part "the tragic right is a condition of life" to me means that with every like there is always doing to be tragedy involved, and it just how life goes. The second part, "a condition", saying it is a condition just states the fact that no matter who you are tragedy will strike your life. So no matter how much money or fame, tragedy will impact your life somehow. And the third part, "human personality is able to flower and realize itself" I see that as with tragedy in your life, you will get something out of it, a positive. So the sentence reveals that when tragedy comes to you in life, take away from it an opportunity to learn or to grow from it. This week we watched a ted talk and it was really interesting how this TED talked related tragedy to the rest of the talk. The majority of the talk wasn't centered around tragedy, but talked about society. I liked this TED talk because I was able to relate what I am learning in my sociology class to the video. In sociology we go into the development of society, and how society interacts with culture, the people within different cultures, and the people. During the TED talk I heard a lot of familiar words like "status" and "roles", so it was nice to be able to connect two of my classes. This TED talked about how a loss doesn't necessarily make a person a loser. So big picture, there is a difference between a small loss, and the overall view of life. And I thought that was important because within tragedy there are different types of tragedy. Perspective ties the two concepts together. For example a B could be an amazing grade to one student, but be considered a failure to another student. While in tragedy you have to know the perspective of whoever is telling the story. Perspective changes everything. Going into this next unit, tragedy, I don't really know a whole lot a bout tragedy in the context of literature. The basis of what I know is, tragedy is a title to an event that has occurred, and typically sad. When I think of the base word, tragic, I think of a sad event that has happened, and then after that I think of What even has happened? Why that event has happened? And what will happen after the event has struck?
So over all I really don't know what tragedy is, but I went on Wikipedia. The definition that was given was "Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in audience". Tragedy was first started within Greece theater around 2500 years ago. By using tragedy forms of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change are shown. Major forms of tragedy are represented through novels, poems, drama, short stories, and novella. As I searched more, Aristotle's name appeared a lot, so I can easily come up with the conclusion that he heavily shaped tragedy to what it is today. The articles talk a lot about how Aristotle used tragedy to make genre distinctions. Aristotle talked about how tragedy can be different within the context of how the story is told. Like if how the story is told through rhythm, the goodness of the characters within the story, and how the narrative is presented. Rome also had to do with the development of tragedy, starting around 509 BCE. Although Greek tragedy was performed the majority of the time, Roman literature came out of it. To this day there isn't much found examples of Roman tragedy, but there some known difference between the Greece and Roman tragedy stories. They differ from the Greek versions in their long declamatory, narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralising, and their bombastic rhetoric. |
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