Extension: Dickinson Flashcards
I Felt a Funeral in my Brain Quotes
- “I”
- “Brain”
- “numb”
- “Mind” goes “numb”
- “beating-beating of the ‘Service, like a Drum”.
- “ear”
- “here”
I felt a Funeral in my Brain analysis
Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral in my Brain” warns of institutional hierarchies restricting individual thinking in context of Calvinist religion, a perception shaped with Transcendalist scepticism in response to contexts of organised religion. The poem is prefaced with the personal pronoun “I” immediately characterising the experience of the speaker as one individual, an individual experience contrasting the collective of the Church represented by the Christian custom and linked with the “Brain” through capitalisation. The Church’s capacity to “numb” individuality, restricting the ‘Brain’, is warned of in Stanza 2, where the speaker’s “Mind” goes “numb” through the “beating-beating” of the ‘Service, like a Drum”. Using repetition, Dickinson warns that the pressure to conform to the Church’s values numbs individuals to alternative beliefs. This draws from her own experience of being pressured to publicly profess her faith from her Puritan friends and family. Dickinson commends this pursuit through the rhyme scheme of ABCD lapsing into ABCB in stanza 4 with “ear” and “here”. This creates a melodious tone that symbolically promotes ‘listening’ to various schools of thought to form one’s beliefs, rather than laying within rigid boundaries, such as the Church.
My life stood a loaded gun quotes
- “bullets” in the “loaded gun”
- ”gun” is “carried away”
- “hunt the Doe”
- “Sovereign Woods”
- “And do I smile, such cordial light”
My life stood a loaded gun analysis
Similarly, Dickinson utilises the figurative narrative of a persona’s perception of herself as a “Loaded Gun” to comment on the identities of period era women as contextualised through a male-dominated, patriarchal society. The figurative destruction of the “bullets” in the “loaded gun” reflects the dominating nature of rage as the only way to seize agency in a patriarchal society. The wording of how the ”gun” is “carried away” by the Owner insinuates patriarchal wording of how women are “carried away” with their emotions, denoting ideals of “hysteria” used in period-era societies to demean female agency. The gun utilised to “hunt the Doe”, furthermore corroborates this reading of suppressing femininity (a doe often an image of beauty and innocence) if to succeed in a patriarchal male-dominated society - This hunt is set within “Sovereign Woods”, the juxtaposition of authority and nature referencing Manifest Destiny, which Dickinson masterfully subverts as within the context of this poem, these woods instead symbolise the landscape of the female poet’s mind, where she expands visions of her identity by experimenting with versions of herself that are condemned by society. Accounting for the inevitable influence of external structures, Dickinson notes through “Gun” that poetry provides some distance away from such structures, allowing individuals to explore alternate ways of being. In this poem, the marginalized 19th century female poet undermines rigid societal constructs of ‘femininity’ through the poetic space, where she hunts her ‘feminine self’ with her ‘masculine’ side, represented by the motif of the “Loaded Gun”. Moreover, through the satirical statement “And do I smile, such cordial light”, the female poet powerfully rejects the mask of cordiality that the 19th-century woman was pressured to present. Dickinson employs slant rhyme in lines 2 and 4 of most stanzas, a feature that draws from rigid structures (rhyme) but simultaneously disrupts, mirroring her subversion of Manifest Destiny to amplify her disruption of external societal influences.
Coppola: LiT 1 (The connection)
Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” explores contemporary praxis of globalisation and post-modernism in an age where mindscapes of the individual interact dissonantly with these contexts in a state of perpetual change. Coppola establishes this framework through the characters of Bob and Charlotte, isolated amongst the globalised, hyper-capitalised milieu of alien Tokyo – responders’ first view of Bob is framed by a close-up shot of a glass taxi window as he is driven to a hotel juxtaposes leading lines’ visual separation with the hyper-reality of globalised advertisements created by the frenetic lights of urbanisation to establish for responders globalisation’s isolating impact on Bob’s mindscape. A similar parallel is established with Charlotte’s venture into Tokyo. Her commute is framed through shaky, unstable camera positions to underline her sense of being “lost” from a sense of purpose and loneliness, other commuters blurred out in the foreground of a train station (a site of transport as a liminal space, focusing the theme of transience from the familiar to unfamiliar) to establish for responders her deattachment from the social landscape around her – her arrival at the Heianjingu shrine is similarly framed by alienation, foreignness most prominent in her position as the cultural and spiritual Other who intrusively observes the community gathering at the Heianjingu shrine. About the experience later, Charlotte comments crying that she “just didn’t feel anything (..) I don’t know”, reflecting deattachment from traditional spiritual awakening in the presence of religious awakening in dislocation from the foreign culture presented. These collective impressions of alienation and interior emptiness form common ground for Bob and Charlotte to foster a personal connection.
Coppola: LiT 2 (Why it’s important)
Globalised contexts influence identity, but because of the cultural hybridity of modernity self-actualisation of identity is hard to achieve – Coppola ultimately suggests for responders that intimacy in human experience is essential to curate genuine human relationships against forging identity and interior world based on shifting contexts in perpetual change. Connection with global landscapes driving change attentive on globalised consumerism and entertainment have reduced Bob’s sense of identity to only being real when contextualised through being the “Johnny Carson” of Japan as a media icon; disillusioned with current life, and feels that his life is fading, furthermore he comments to Charlotte on his trip that he is “taking a break from [his] wife and forgetting his son’s birthday [to get] paid two million dollars to endorse whiskey” contrasts human relationships with the overwhelming presence of the global (media and advertisement/entertainment as a symbol of it) to highlight Bob’s alienation from spiritual and social experience. This deattachment from context, and therefore from a sense of self, is narratively distinguished in the spatial and temporal disorientation that both Bob and Charlotte feel from the empty attractions of Tokyo, and find fleeting yet irrevocable connections. Their conversation in the bedroom scene is framed by an overhead shot depicting Bob and Charlotte lying on the hotel bed, their images reflected in the open pane windows. The reflective motif highlights the introspective nature of their psychological states. Bob’s fatherly advice draws on his own years of experience to suggest that ‘the more you know who you are and what you want the less things upset you’, revealing that their relationship does not ‘fix’ or ‘answer’ their existential dilemma. Bob and Charlotte’s unknown final words to each other are private from the globalised environment around them, inferring for responders that intimacy in human experience is an essential panacea to curate genuine human relationships against forging a sense of identity based on context.
Mrs Thompsons: Social conflict
In challenging concerns of an “American identity” in contemporary post-9/11 contexts, David Foster Wallace inadvertently wrestles with a social conflict between individual conformity versus consciousness in search for identity in The View From Mrs. Thompson’s. Visiting his home of Bloomington, Illinois, Wallace’s paralytic awareness of the collective’s hyper-sensitization to mass catastrophes leads him to title the attacks as ‘the Horror’; when Wallace inquires as to the purpose of the flags embellishing the suburbs all in patriotic image, his neighbour affirms the illogical orthodoxy Wallace observes, the neighbor unable to directly acknowledge a tragedy he displays blind support to in social conformity but psychological incongruity. This conflict of conscious interest reflexively consumes Wallace’s internal world as he grimly hunts for an doppelgänger of the American identity as unified in the Horror; penultimately, a convenience store proprietor suggests ‘gently’ that Wallace utilise ‘construction paper and “Magical Markers” to construct his flag, a thematic zeitgeist of the paradoxical paper-thin beliefs Wallace finds himself caught between. Behaviours wrestling between individual conformity versus consciousness, Wallace’s comprehending of this sociological conflict is framed within his investigation for the concept of the American identity.
Mrs Thompsons: Cultural conflict
Witnessing his and others’ dissonance of social consciousness weaponized into an aggregate, Wallace further challenges the American identity through calling on its inevitable descent through the cultural conflict of collective conformity versus consciousness. Haunting Wallace’s pilgrimage throughout Bloomington is the American critical consciousness as deadened by its own conformity to the hyper-corporatization of culture, and by extension, the juxtaposition of mass tragedy and entertainment; a lady Wallace overhears thinking the catastrophe disturbingly as “like that Independence Day, til then after a while they started to notice it was the same movie on all the channels”. Idly commenting that ‘re: Bloomington and the Horror is that reality – any felt sense of a larger world – is televisual’, Wallace portrays the dynamic as so intrinsic that ideological terrors are existentially incompatible unless contextualized through the contemporary glamours of American pop culture; the second person is utilised by Wallace to place us in the minds of these viewers’ individual consciousness, attempting to cognize the fullness and violence of this tragedy, clashes inconsistently with the beliefs of the conformity and ends praying ‘silently and fervently’ that President Bush is ‘far smarter [..] than you believe, not just some [..] nexus of interests dressed up in a suit, but a statesman of courage, and probity, and … and it’s good, this is good to pray this way’. Wallace then switches to the first person again to tragically contextualize the discord of these clashing dualities, remarking that ‘innocent people can be hard to be around’ in one of the last paragraphs of the piece.
