Wolff’s Analysis of Chopin’s The Awakening Essay -- Chopin Awakening

Wolff’s Analysis of Chopin’s The Awakening In her essay "Un-Utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in Kate Chopin's The Awakening", Cynthia Griffin Wolff creates what Ross Murfin describes as "a critical whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." (376) By employing a variety of critical approaches (including feminist, gender, cultural, new historicism, psychoanalytic and deconstruction) Wolff offers the reader a more complete (albeit complex) explanation of Edna Pontellier's behavior and motivations than any single approach could provide. Wolff contends that locating the source of Edna's repression is the key to understanding Chopin's story. Wolff's perspective is feminist in that she focuses primarily on the character of Edna. By analyzing The Awakening in a historical context Wolff is also able to effectively explain not only Edna's motivations, but also those of nineteenth-century women in general. According to Wolff, Edna's repression can be traced to the gender crisis that developed within the Presbyterian church during the nineteenth-century. Unli...

Children of the City :: essays research papers

Water Imagery in â€Å"Children of the City†   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Rain has always been an important symbol in life. It is one of very few actions that can be both destructive and harsh, but at the same time constructive and life-giving. Throughout literature the visual image of rain is usually connected to feelings of sorrow, death, and despair. The most commonly known example of this would be in Hemingway’s â€Å"Farewell to Arms†. Hemingway uses the rain to tell of peoples negative emotions, so it is easy to take that idea into other readings. Outside of literature, however, rain is seen as being connected to positive thoughts of growth, prosperity and cleansing. In this story of adolescent love the author uses the presence of water to saturate the subjects with these positive feelings.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  At the beginning the author introduces the rain as â€Å"urban† in contrast to â€Å"field or shore† rain. Immediately the image of urban rain is less threatening than that of a field or shore. It gives the reader a playful image of almost being teased by the rain. In the city one has to hide from it and jump from umbrellas to awnings, yet never has to worry about the danger of being caught in it for too long. These playful and teasing characteristics of the rain are the exact guidelines to the relationship between the two main characters. The rain represents the couple’s emotion and they experiment with it just like in a real adolescent relationship. They see how long they can be drenched by its passion, nevertheless they return to the overhangs not knowing how much of it they can handle.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Looking at it in a biblical sense, the rain is both destructive to them and helping their relationship grow. God sent the flood down to man because of our sins causing much destruction, but at the same time giving us a rebirth and purification. Too much rain may flood their relationship with emotion; however this â€Å"urban† rain teases them and lets them feel free and pure. The idea of the rain giving growth to their relationship is seen in the lines ending â€Å"a scrawny tree,† and â€Å"their forested way†. Alone they are fruitless and scrawny, yet together they are given life by the rain to create an entire forest.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Conversely, after all that the rain has provided them with the author’s last mention is that of a negative connotation.

History of Computers Essay

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand calculator. The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B. C. by the Babylonians. The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far east. A modern abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below dates from the time when pebbles were used for counting (the word â€Å"calculus† comes from the Latin word for pebble). In 1617 an eccentric Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier’s Bones. In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator but couldn’t sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren’t that accurate. Up until the present age when car dashboards went digital, the odometer portion of a car’s speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to increment the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. Pascal was a child prodigy. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of Euclid’s thirty-second proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent probability theory, the hydraulic press, and the syringe. Shown below is an 8 digit version of the Pascaline. Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz managed to build a four calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system, Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone. In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since. By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. This machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. Hollerith’s invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count, and a large wall of dial indicators to display the results of the count. Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous. Your gas bill would arrive each month with a punch card you had to return with your payment.