Meek AP Lit

While social opinions rarely correlate with private enterprise, the entertainment industry is the one area where it is imperative for corporations to have a core message that is being conveyed to the audience. This is as true for the comics of the mid-1900s as it is for TV shows consumed by mesmerized kids and adolescence today. The issue with this concept is that there are often external factors that complicated the validity and bias of these messages, including thematic popularity, audience, current events, political or social climate, and contrasting values. These companies are usually only focused on what sells or how they can influence their audience to accept their own values. Oftentimes, the entertainment industries is used as a platform of propaganda for the government or interest groups, not just in the obvious sense of commercials, but in subconscious or metaphorical representations of actual current issues, in the form of products that are geared towards young children whose...

Seasonal tourists arrive punctually every skiing season in intimate gaggles, on small chartered flights, and pass through the expansive one-roomed lodge that constitutes the airport for the small mountain town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Outside, they usually load unchristened patent leather suitcases into the back of Ron Wilson’s car. The first thing most people usually notice about Ron Wilson is his bushy handlebar mustache, which is a shocking dash of black compared to the cropped salt-and-pepper of his crown. His fair, leathery skin hinted that he lived and worked in cold, thin air all his life, and the rough jeans, woolen and tasteless shirts, and leather hats Ron wore made him the mirror image of other local cowboy relics who preserved the “western feel” of the midwestern town.   Ron Wilson is the antithesis of fidgety. Some describe him using stoic, settled, or assured. Every move he makes is done with straightforward purpose, and so it is not unusual for him to be standin...

The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay  has been described as a swash-buckling tale that conveys cultural atmosphere and popular media, often reviewed using a plethora of colorful adjectives to describe it's intangible idealism. These adjectives include exuberant, compelling, whimsical, idealistic, eloquent, and dynamic, and are meant to convey Chabon's storytelling ability in the setting  of persistent creativity in the harsh reality of American life in WWII.  It is critically acclaimed and unique in literature, because the novel builds an intangible cultural atmosphere into a surface-level story of young Jewish comics in the Gilded Age. It pulls much of the influence from qualities generally associated with comic books, such as the wildly popular jewish hero in Superman . The book is brilliant in it's composition because it employs characteristics that are distinctly reminiscent of comic books. Chabon intentionally filters the tone of his writing through a naive, ideal...

After completing Penelopiad , it is clear that Atwood's goal was to explain the plot hole of the twelve deaths of the maids in The Odyssey . However, in some ways, it raises even more questions. Towards the end of her book—or shall we call it an essay—Atwood plays around with the format and perspective. For the most part her writing is relatively consistent, switching from Penelope's first person perspective as events unfold in the afterlife and her version of events as they happened during her lifetime. Then, it begins to introduce much more unique and modernized concepts, such as in the form of a courtroom transcript. In these scenes, Odysseus is on trial in a modern-day court for the wrongful murder of the twelve faithful maids. This jarring effect strengthens Atwood's arguments about the injustice of the maids' suffering during their tenure at the palace by using the court system as a lens through which we can view the ancient events. Not only does this format...

Penelopiad , by Margaret Atwood The essay  Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood's rendition of the historic Greek epic The Odyssey , and she retells the piece of mythology in an attempt to fulfill her own personal questions about the plot. There was little explanation or reasoning for many of the storylines in The Odyssey , which inspires Atwood to connect and build the epic to be structurally sound. It is interesting to analyze this retelling because of the fact that Margaret Atwood is already an established author, and she carries a recognizable persona in her publications. There are common messages that appear in her writing, which often revolves around women's rights. Therefore, her decision to write from the point of view of Penelope is not entirely surprising, as she is giving a voice to a female character in a time period that did not acknowledge or discuss the rights of many groups of people. Yet this also creates confusion for the inspiration behind Penelopiad , as the...

1. Discuss the development of the "Urban Indian" identity and ownership of that label. How does it relate to the push for assimilation by the United States government? How do the characters in  There There  navigate this modern form of identity alongside their ancestral roots? "There, There" is one of the few novels that give the "Urban Indian" identity a platform in literature. Tommy Orange begins the novel by discussing the significance of the lack of Indian representation, because there exists a single, radical perception of Native Americans as wild people who practice an exotic religion and live isolated within tribes. The "Urban Indian" identity is not explored because it does not have the shock-value and contrast than the primitive Indian does with European/Western culture. The Urban Indian, instead, has the potential to blend or live normally within city society, and yet are connected as a group by their underlying shared heritage and cu...