Jonathan Franzen - the Discomfort Zone Essay Example for Free

Jonathan Franzen the Discomfort Zone Essay A personal History analysts of one mans identity by V Jonathan Franzens The Discomfort Zone is essentially a collection of Franzens essays published in The New Yorker that deal with problems, life time experiences, both social and emotional aspect of the authors life. This essay will focus mainly on Franzens effectual attempt to create a self portrait and at the same time make it legible and comprehensive in a way that anyone could cope with the problems and experiences he had during his maturation. The book contains six essays : House for Sale, Two Ponies, Then Joy Breaks Through, Centrally Located, The Foreing Language and My Bird Problem which are written in an autobiographical, chronological way that enables the reader to follow his life from childhood, adolescence to his maturation. In the firts section of the book, entitled House for Sale, Jonathan returns to his family home in St. Louis after his mothers death, in attempt to sell the house wher he spent most of his life. Here is where Franzen shows his witty and humorous mind, regardless of how serious and grevious the situtaion is : I went through the house and stripped the family photos out of every room. Id been looking forward to do this almost as much as to my drink. My mother had been too attached to the formality of her living room and dining room to clutter them with snaphots, but elsewhere each wndowsill and each table-top was an eddy in which inexpensively framed photos had accumulated. (4) He compares his mothers house to a novel which she continuously reorganized and rearranged throughout the years. When talking about his mothers lifetime struggle to keep everything inside and outside the house in order, he feels the melancholy nd dissatisfaction with the way things ended. On one hand he wanted the house to be sold and even disliked it , but on the other, as he says : ? Id outgrown the novel Id once been so happy to live in, and how little I even cared about the final sale price. (25) Franzen also managed to fit some of his political an social ideas and opinions in this section. He talks about the social situation in America during his childhood which was shaped by the idea that the middle working class would always feel the debt to its society. He revises both liberal and conservative political concept of the time eing and puts himself in the ?middle: heavy, skinlike, pulp smelling masses that reglued themselves to my fathers work boots, there was nothing but my family and house and church and school and work. (15) In Two Ponies we follow the life of Jonathan as a 10 year old boy and his reflections on both family life and current social situations around him. The opening part of this section actually provides a hint about the relationships inside the Franzen family. He was growing up alongside his two brothers, Tom and Bob, whom he appreciated and respected infinitely. According to Jonathan, Tom is a true representative of the social epidemic of that era, a rebellious adolescent who ran away from home in a search for his own identity: ? Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not ot go to college, ingesting every substance they could get.. For a while, the parents were so frightened and so ashamed that each family, especilly mine, quarantined itself and suffered by itself Toms bed, neatly made, was the bed of a kid carried off by the epidemic. (32) In spite of being a child, Jonathan is able to provide comfort to his mother in times she felt sadness and shame because of Toms leaving. He is therefore unconciously building up his emotional strength and at the same time bonding with his mother like never before. The insatiable obsession with Charles M. Schulzs ?Peanut Treasury is peculiar at times. As he lives a life of an extremely excellent student, he almost always and at all occasions compares his neighborhood, school, friends, family with the ?Peanuts. In his fantasy and in his dreams he became a part of that comic strip. In The Washington Post review Birds on the Brain A novelist exposes his life as a nerd, Bob Ivry wrote : ?ln that unsettled season, Franzen sought solace in a private, intense relationship with Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang. The grownup Franzen can see why his pre-teen mint-me would identify so obsessively, and the reason is no less heartbreaking for its ordinariness: Nobody grows up, or apart, in a comic strip. Charlie Brown represents an on going inspiration for Franzen. The world as he knew it was shaped by the ideas from the very character. Many of his school activities esemble a lot to the stories in ?Peanut Treasury, such as the spelling bee, where he actually found out he was very much competitive and enjoyed exposing his great knowledge and his ?geek spirit to others. Our brains are like cartoonists and cartoons are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts. (40) Jonathan loves comic books and cartoons just as much as any other child his age, but unlike others, in search of another, better reality, he ?sticks around a lot more than others, weirdly up till end of his adolescent years. It is in this section that Franzen mentiones the ?C omfort Zone , the thermostat mother and him. Then Joy Breaks Through is one of the interesting parts of the book where Jonathan is in his adolescent years and is resisting the common teenage temptations. Jonathan joins a group of young people called ?Fellowship which was sponsored by the First Congregational Church. During a weekend retreat with the ?Fellowship the children are engaged in different activities typicall for such camping trips, but are also allured by various temptations (drugs, alcohol,sex etc) which are obviously forbidden. However, all Jonathan concernes about is how to avoid ?Social Death and not having to face the embarasement in case someone found his mothers letter where she addressed him as ?Dearest Jonathan.

Critical Theory of Communication in Organizations Essay -- business Co

Critical Theory of Communication in Organizations The critical theory of communication developed by Stanley Deetz was designed to explore ways to insure the organizations’ health while increasing the representation of diverse human interests. He does this first by showing that corporations have become political as well as economic institutions. Deetz then employs advances in communication theory to point out how communication practices within a corporation can distort decision making. Finally, he outlines how workplaces can become more productive and democratic through communication reforms. Humanists feel that meanings are in people not words. Deetz accepts this but goes another step and wants to know whose meanings are in people. The companies meanings, the CEO’s meanings, the perception the companies give as their meanings, this is what Deetz is looking for. When people use slang in big business, they begin to put corporate values in to play. According to EM Griffin, this theory is critical in that he wants to critique the assumption that â€Å"what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.† Furthermore, Deetz feels that most people fall into the norm that is presented to them from corporate America. Companies in today’s society are appearing more democratic. They appear as more focused on the worker, the consumer, and society than their monetary needs. Is this to say that they are not concerned with money? No. The bottom line for the company is cash. However, the latest strategy is perception. How the company is perceived, makes a huge difference in how society interprets them. This theory will help us understand consent practices in the workplace. Corporations tend to make critical decisions for the public, regardless of if they know or not. The four criteria Deetz uses to discuss ways that public and corporate decisions can be made are: strategy, consent, involvement, and participation. These four points are how I am going to evaluate his theory. In the first criteria, strategy, Deetz describes the problem to be managerialism, which he defines as â€Å"a kind of systematic logic, a set of routine practices, and ideology†. Managers have one thing on their mind: control. Some employees will conform to the ways of their bosses, however some will reform against them. Deetz uses an example of stockholder... ...heory that has many truths to it, that most corporate employees would take as a surprise. They do not want to know that this is the reality of their world. What kind of person would want to know that they are being controlled by the people that give them the opportunity to make a living? Most people already realize it. Although most people do not have much of a choice in the matter, I think that most would continue with what they are doing. What is the difference between working at PriceWaterHouseCoopers and Chili’s restaurant, besides the major salary difference. I work at Chili’s, a large corporation with so many rules that you would think I was making more than $2.83 an hour (excluding tips). They dictate the way I communicate to customers, the way I dress and the style of my attire and how I look. They don’t give the impression that work comes before family, but they do expect me to pay them for the meals I eat while at work. Overall, Stanley Deetz has made many good points in evaluating how a corporation is organized. If only people would break away from the corporation, but this is the way we made it, the way our world is run, and it will never be the same again.

Challenges of Scholarly Writing

Writing is a means of expressing oneself through words and even a method of sharing information about different fields of study. Many have enjoyed and appreciated various forms literature that have transformed readers to another place or make them feel that they are someone else. The benefits of writing are endless. More so, it has become an integral part of a person's life and an inevitable component of the society. For without it, the world today would be bland and monotonous. Since we were toddlers we were trained to read and write so that in our adult years, we will be equipped with a tool that can advance our status in the society which can either be for personal or professional purposes. For me, writing has been an arduous but rewarding part of my life. At first, I was a little apprehensive about writing because it requires the writer to know a lot about sentence constructions, proper usage of punctuations and others. It seemed that writing was a tedious task that demanded time and effort in order to produce high-quality outputs. But after numerous writing exercises and trials, I was able to get used to with the rules and guidelines involved in writing. Because of this, I was able to be exposed to various forms of writing such as creative, technical and scholarly writing. Among the three, creative writing is the easiest and most enjoyable because it gives freedom to the writer to write about anything under the sun. It is like typing on the keyboard or scribbling on a piece paper everything that pops in your head. Meanwhile, technical writing demands technical knowledge about a certain subject which makes it harder than creative and scholarly writing. However, scholarly writing is a different story because it is arduous to write but the end results are beneficial and helpful particularly to the academe. During my days as a student, I was bombarded with a lot of scholarly papers which helped us to learn more about the courses that we took in college. There were days that ideas just came flowing in your mind that helped me finished my research or writing papers in a short amount of time. But there are also moments when you can not seem to extract any good thoughts from your brain even if you spend hours and hours researching, reading and brainstorming. This type of incident is famously known as writer’s block wherein the writer experiences a short-term inability to start or continue the writing process which is frequently caused by the lack of drive and creativity. Also, another writing obstacle is the generation of ideas or thoughts. The most difficult part of writing is the beginning and the conclusion phase. As a writer, I found it hard to organize and develop properly my views and perceptions about a certain subject matter. Even though there is a lot of information, sometimes it is difficult to synthesize all of them to make coherent and logical paragraphs. Aside from this, writers particularly students also go through many obstacles in scholarly writing such as poor structure of writing composition, incorrect usage of grammar and words, citations and plagiarism. When these factors remained unnoticed, the likelihood of generating a solid writing material would be impossible. The key to producing a well-structured scholarly paper is that the thesis statement must be direct and concise. Also, it should be supported by strong arguments at the body of the paper and followed by a conclusion that summarizes the main points and answers the thesis statement. More so, grammar and language used should be appropriate to the topic to make the paper credible and smooth-flowing. However, the most important factor to consider in writing is using proper citations to avoid plagiarism. In writing, it is inevitable to borrow ideas from other writers or previous studies. In order to avoid committing a professional misconduct, writers should cite all sources that they have used in their scholarly papers as a sign of acknowledgment that the incorporated information were taken from other publications. As an alternative, it would be better if writers tried to create their own ideas instead of copying other people’s work thus their skills in writing and critical thinking would be further developed. There is no shortcut in making excellent scholarly papers. Writers must learn the basics of writing before they can be able to yield productive outputs. Moreover, there is no alternate for sitting down and jotting down your ideas on paper so writers should make the best out of writing and try to be honest and responsible .

Civil War The United States - 1079 Words

All of these differences, combined, led to a fractured United States. The country could not reconcile due to these heavy feelings about slavery. Because of that, it was inevitable that the American Civil War would occur. During the Civil War, both sides believed that they were right and had God’s blessing to fight for their causes – emancipation or the right to secede due to slavery. Indeed, it seemed to be that war was the only possible solution during the 1860s. The Oneida Association believed that only through a civil war could the issue of slavery finally be settled. In their circular it is written, â€Å"Facts reveal the causes of our peril, and as distinctly exhibit the means of its permanent removal. Civil War is, indeed, the necessity†¦show more content†¦The outcome would ultimately decide which way the nation would develop – with or without slaves. In 1865, America received its answer with the victory of the Union. Despite the end of the Civil War, the Northern and Southern Baptists remained segregated. Very little actions were taken to mend the rift which was caused by the moral issue of slavery. This division remained in place throughout the nineteenth century and the majority of the twentieth century. Again, these two came into contention during the Civil Rights movement. The South, with anger over the Civil War, initiated Jim Crow Laws which legalized racial segregation. Blacks were, again, seen as lesser than their white counterparts. â€Å"The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated.† This idea of separation continued for many years with the notion being separate but equal. This was permitted due to the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Homer Plessy, a black man, refused to give up his seat which was reserved strictly for the use of white people; he was consequently arrested for his actions. †Å"Judge John H. Ferguson upheld the law and the case†¦ slowly moved up to the Supreme Court. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court, with only one dissenting vote, ruled that