The Misunderstanding of Art in Grendel
Humans have used art for centuries as a response to their environments. The use of icons, perspective, and cubism have all reflected the cultures and societies of those times. However, art has often been mistaken as a substitution or creation of reality, rather than a reflection. John Gardner has taken up this attitude in his novel Grendel. While Grendel is a provocative and innovative work, John Gardner's views on art, as reflected in Grendel, are based upon a misunderstanding of art and are therefore unfounded.
Throughout Grendel Gardner interprets art as a type of cultural propaganda. For example: "the old man sang of a glorious meadhall whose light would shine to the ends of the ragged world . . . There he would sit and give treasures out . . . to the final generation" (47). Or again: "If the songs were true, as I suppose at least one or two of them were, there had always been wars, and what I'd seen was merely a period of mutual exhaustion." (34). The phrase "Oceania was at war with Eurasia; Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia" comes to mind (1984, 236-237). Gardner uses the Grendel quotations to show humans attempting to change the past to reduce the image of barbarism and violence. In assigning this role to the Shaper, the novel's representative of art, Gardner declares that this is the role of art: the falsifying of the past to enrich the present. The falsifying of the past is something better left to propagandists and revisionists rather than artists. While it is true that artists draw upon the past for ideas, artists apply those ideas to the present and future, as will be shown. Gardner is sadly mistaken that the artist's role is to refine the pas...
... middle of paper ...
...s possible that with an informed, ecological approach to media (technology) we could create our own order of existence. The tentative guidelines for such an undertaking can be found in Laws of Media by Marshall and Eric McLuhan.
John Gardner has used Grendel as an argument proclaiming that art is really cultural propaganda, a lie to improve human existence, and the creator of rational order in our world. Art, however, is not any of the ideas mentioned above. Art is the human effort to escape the deadening effects of our contrived environments and the principle way for us to maintain our humanity.
Works Cited
Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Random House, Inc., 1971.
McLuhan, Marshall and Eric. Laws of Media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc., 1949.
Gardner, Helen, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective. N.p., 2014. Print.
Throughout John Gardner’s Grendel, the audience bears witness to a creature who has been ostracized by the world around him. Throughout his journey, the stories protagonist tries to live out his own life the way he wants to, despite being labeled as evil by those around him. Due to this constant criticism by his peers, he develops an inferiority complex that he desperately tries to make up for as the story progresses. Throughout his development, Grendel very rapidly moves past his existentialist beginning, through a brief phase of forced skepticism, and into a severely nihilistic point of view.
Grendel’s point of view as a narrator adds an added sense of violence to the scene, which suggests that absurdism is useless, as absurdism ultimately decay into nihilism due to the chaotic nature of life.
If I were to ask you what is art, and how can one find it? What would you say? Well if it were me being asked those question, I would simply say that art to me is a form of a picture; a visual painting or model of some design and it could be found all among us. You may define it differently only because art could be defined in many ways. I could simply say that art to me is a form of a picture; a visual painting or model of some design. Well according to an article written by Shelley Esaak, an art history expert she mentioned that art has a way of stimulating different parts of our brains to make us laugh or incite us to riot, with a whole gamut of emotions in between. She also mentioned that art gives us a way to be creative and express ourselves. [1]
John Gardner’s Grendel portrays a monster searching for his purpose in life. The characters know the meaning of their lives, but Grendel tries to discover his role and what life has to offer him. Grendel discovers his identity through other characters’ actions and beliefs. In Grendel, John Gardner illustrates the contrasting views of each character to show their view of society and the influence they have on Grendel.
So as you can see, women in the United States Navy have proven that they do belong because many women have overcome gender-based biases, made great historical impact, and lead combat situations over men successfully.
The article Artists Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History (1980) by Griselda Pollock is a forty page essay where Pollock (1980), argues and explains her views on the crucial question, "how art history works" (Pollock, 1980, p.57). She emphasizes that there should be changes to the practice of art history and uses Van Gogh as a major example in her study. Her thesis is to prove that the meaning behind artworks should not be restricted only to the artist who creates it, but also to realize what kind of economical, financial, social situation the artist may have been in to influence the subject that is used. (Pollock, 1980, pg. 57) She explains her views through this thesis and further develops this idea by engaging in scholarly debates with art historians and researcher, and objecting to how they claim there is a general state of how art is read. She structures her paragraphs in ways that allows her to present different kinds of evidences from a variety sources while using a formal yet persuasive tone of voice to get her point across to the reader.
The focus on how social structures determine, and are effective in maintaining the equilibrium is functionalism or structural-functionalism, which is the theorizing of Durkheim and Parsons (Dillon, book, 179). What this means is that we need to look at the structures effectiveness of social structures and make sure that it is at a satisfying state of equilibrium. An example of this would be the human body, we have many different organs and they all work together to produce the fully functional human. What it comes down to is, everything has its own place in society and even if a conflict is introduced, there is a way of working itself out and the society will go back to functioning normally.
During WWII, the initial acceptance of woman in the military was controversial because they were deciding whether just needed more people, whether they should be an official part of the services, and whether they could perform the jobs. Most people were concerned that women would obstruct the view of American culture because they would be considered “masculine”. By 1944, women proved to be effective in helping during the war. Some were even trained to shoot guns next to the men. In 1994 the DOD (Department of Defense) created a policy that prevented women from combat with their male colleagues. They also could not be assigned to units below the brigade level, whose number one objective is combat on ground. Over the years women have showed that they are physically, mentally, and emotionally able to keep up with men in the military.
Special agents provide protection for people and manage security. They preform undercover objectives and while they are undercover they develop relationships with informants. Agents examine records and can serve subpoenas if necessary (“Criminal Investigators”). Special agents obtain warrants to collect and secure evidence. Sometimes agents have to write detailed reports on the cases. Special agents have to investigate crimes and arrest the people who do wrong (“Police and detectives”).
Of the few people that know what breast cancer is some of them just believe that it is a lump. They do not know that there is a process to breast cancer they do not know that the tumor comes from somewhere and does not magically appear. Breast cancer can happen a few different ways in the breast, but “the most common type of breast cancer is ductal carcinoma” (cancer.gov). This type of breast cancer begins in the lining of the milk ducts. The ducts are the tubes that carry the milk from the lobules to the nipple. Think of them as little veins running from the nipple to a little pouch. Another place that the cancer could start is...
... over time – and the viewer’s personal experience, essentially her history. This gets very near to a common sense perspective – what we look at, and what we think about what we see has much to do with who we are and what we have experienced in life. Thus, art may be described as an interaction between the viewer, influenced by her experiences, with the work of art, inclusive of its history and the stories built up around it over time. When we look at art, we must acknowledge that the image is temporally stretched – there is more to it than meets the eye at present. What we learn from Didi-Huberman’s approach is to give this temporal ‘tension’ its due. Didi-Huberman describes and defends the importance of of how we look at artistic works: images that represent something determinate, while always remaining open to the presentation of something new and different.
On the Internet, peer-to-peer (referred to as P2P) is a type of transient Internet network that allows a group of computer users with the same networking program to connect with each other and directly access files from one another's hard drives.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a substitute network design to the conventional client-server architecture. P2P networks utilize a decentralised model in which each system, act as a peer, and serve as a client with its own layer of server functionality. A companion plays the role of a client and a server in the meantime. That is, the node can send calls to other nodes, and at the same time respond to approaching calls from other companions in the system. It is different from the traditional client-server model where a client can just send requests to a server and then wait for the server’s response.
Breast Cancer is a type of cancer originating from breast tissue, most common from the inner lining of milk ducts. The most common type of breast cancer is called Ductal Carcinoma. Another type of breast cancer is Lobular Carcinoma, which begins in the lobules of the breast. Breast Cancer can occur in all men and women, sometimes male breast cancer is rare to happen. Breast Cancer can be two types it can be invasive or non-invasive. Invasive means that it has spread from the milk duct to the other parts of the breast and non-invasive means that it has infected other parts of the breast.