A View From A Bridge Coursework Essay Example for Free

A View From A Bridge Coursework Essay Explore the dramatic use of Alfieri in A view from the Bridge. What is his dramatic significance in the play? Arthur Miller was an American playwright, essayist and author. He was born in New York City on October 17th 1915. He lived with his mother and father, who were Jewish, in New York City. His father was a womens clothing manufacturer while his mother was a schoolteacher. The family were rich until the stock market crash of 1929 when they lost most of their money. They were then forced to move into Brooklyn, a very poor district where a lot of legal and illegal immigrants lived and where a lot of crime would happen. Miller used to do a variety of jobs so that his parents could afford to send him to college. In 1947 Miller wrote his first play, All My Sons which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Two of his most well-known plays are The Crucible and Death of a Salesman. The play I will be covering is called A view from the Bridge which was written in 1955. The idea behind it was influenced by a story Miller heard while he was working on the docks. A view from the Bridge is set in Brooklyn, following the life of the main character Eddie Carbone who was the husband to Beatrice and uncle to Catherine. When Beatrices cousins, Rodolfo and Marco, arrived in Brooklyn as illegal immigrants from Italy; this was when the trouble started. The other main character was Alfieri; he was a narrator, telling the story of Eddie Carbones life. The reason for the play having the name A view from the Bridge was because it contained the good and the bad. Eddie was jealous of Rodolfo and Catherine as he was trying to sabotage their ideas of marriage whilst Catherine and Rodolfo wanted to get married because they loved each other. Alfieri was standing on the bridge looking over, watching the argument flare out until its disastrous conclusion, ending in death. Miller started the play with Alfieri, the narrator. This was because of Alfieris importance. Theoretically, Alfieri was telling a story that had already happened to the audience. It was important to let the audience know that this story was a circular plot. Alfieri started the play with his first soliloquy. He was walking to his office when he saw a couple of long shore men. You wouldnt have known it but something amusing has just happened. See how uneasily they nod to me? Thats because I am a lawyer were only thought of in connection with disasters and theyd rather not get too close. Here Alfieri showed that he was observant because he realized what had happened even though nobody else did. He also told the audience who he was; he was a lawyer so this must mean that he was a very intelligent man. Additionally, he commented on how people treated him because of his job. You only go to lawyers if something bad has happened e. g. murder or family rows. The long shore men nodded to him uneasily which suggests that they distrusted him. A lawyer means the law Here Alfieri has introduced the first main theme in the play: Law. I am inclined to notice the ruins of in things, perhaps because I was born in Italy. Alfieri told the audience that he was observant. He noticed the bad things that maybe others cold not see. He said it was because he was born in Italy. From this we can assume that Italy was a very poor place which meant that Alfieri was used to seeing the bad things because of his life in Italy, which also means that life in Brooklyn was similar to yet better than Italy, so many more Italians would already be in Brooklyn or wanting to move to there. Frankie Yale himself was cut precisely in half by a machine gun on the corner of Union Street Alfieri was mentioning past events, this sentence also builds tension, it explained that Brooklyn was a very poor district where crime was not unusual. He then went on to say: Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men. This suggests that a lot of dishonest men were rightfully killed; however, the killers were dishonest themselves so the killers had no right to kill the other person. Justice is very important here. This sentence brings in the second main theme to the play: Justice. The whole play is going to be revolving around the idea of law and justice. This is the slum that faces the bay on the seaward side of Brooklyn Bridge. This is the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world Now we settle for half, and I like it better. I no longer keep a pistol in my filling cabinet. Here Alfieri was setting the scene, describing how horrible Brooklyn was, it was the lowest of the low, it was making New York look like a bad place, the use of personification is very effective because it referred to Brooklyn as the throat of New York where all the atrocious things in the world happened. Alfieri settled for half, as when he first arrived in Brooklyn, there was a lot of crime, but now there was only half of what it used to be, which was an improvement. And my practice is entirely unromantic people in this neighborhood lack elegance and glamour and yet every year there is still a case, and as the parties tell me what the trouble is, the flat air in my office suddenly washes in with the green scent of the sea, the dust in this air is blown away Alfieri had mentioned that usually his job was boring and mundane where nothing exciting happened. He had to deal with petty family complaints. However, he did get cases which were quite unlike his normal day to day complaints. As he mentioned this fact we could see that the play was going to involve one of those unusual complaints.

Racism In Animated Films Essay -- Movies Film Disney

Racism in Animated Films While Disney animated films are the ideal family movies, it is undisclosed to many that such racism is being portrayed. "Rarely do we ask about the origins and intentions of the messages we encounter through mass media; sometimes we forget that [producers] have origins or intentions at all" (Lipsitz 5). The social inequality found in such popular culture can be due to several reasons. According to David Croteau and William Hoynes in Racial Crossroads, media content can be the reflection of producers, audience preference, or society in general (Croteau and Hoynes 352). In their films or other such media, producers often reflect on personal experiences. In other words, they may "draw on their own family lives for story inspiration" (Croteau and Hoynes 352). With the majority of producers being White males, especially when films were first being made and even up to this day, films reflect how they view life. "The creators of popular cultureÂ… see themselves merely creating sig ns and symbols appropriate to their audiences and to themselves" (Lipsitz 13). Disney producers simply reflect their own views on life in some manner or the views of the majority which so happens to be the White race. The white supremacy we find in the media is not reality, nor is the portrayal of various races. For the bulk of Disney's animated films, if minorities are not the villains or those of lower class and perhaps less importance, there are none being represented in the movie at all. It is classic for the hero to be a white male whereas other characters such as evil villains are of a minority race. In the happy ever after movies where the princess in distress is rescued by the handsome strong prince or male figure... ... In so saying, it is very possible for animated films to contribute to the racism lingering still in the world today. The segregation of people is never going to end completely when film producers find it necessary to separate races instead of treating all as equals. When producers depict reality, the idea of White supremacy and race separation, I assume, will diminish greatly. Works Cited Cox, Starr. "Deconstructing the Mouse: Disney and Racism." . 19 November 2005. Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. "Social Inequality and Media Representation." Racial Crossroads. Ed. Yolanda Flores Niemann. Dubuque: Prentice Hall, 2005: 349-379. Lipsitz, George. "Popular Culture: This Ain't No Sideshow." Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 3-20. Maio, Kathy. "Women, Race & Culture in Disney's movies." The New Internationalist. . 19 June 1999.

Psychoanalytic Analysis Essay

Richard, 44 years old, was referred by his doctor who felt that he had a major drinking problem. Initially, Richard resisted seeing himself as a problem drinker and preferred the idea that he was depressed. Richard exhibits impulsive binge behavior, engages in frantic efforts to avoid feelings of loneliness, shows a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships, displays inappropriate anger, and manifests extreme mood swings. Nevertheless, it appears that Richard has no significant medical problems or medical history. Richards’s mother died when he was 10 and his father sent him to a private boarding school, feeling that he could not manage to bring up his son by himself. Richard felt that he was abandoned by both of his parents ? by his mother who died and left him and by his father, just when he had most needed his love, companionship and support. He has had three marriages, each of which ended when his wife left. Typically, each woman grew tired of his continual drinking binges and all that went with his alcoholism: getting fired from job after job, not being a father to his children, being abusive both verbally and physically to her and being extremely dependent on her. Consequently, Richard thinks that he did not have what it takes to keep a wife and eventually grew increasingly bitter towards women since they all left him when he needed them the most. In the aspect of his work, he feels a great deal of anger towards his former boss who fired him. He complains that when he was broke his boss took his job away from him and didn’t offer him support. Thus, in his eyes, important men always let him down including male friends who broke contact because of his drinking. Diagnosis (based on the criteria of manifestations), Psychodynamic Analysis, Use of Free Associations, Theoretical Treatment and Conclusion Based on the manifestations presented on the overview of Richard’s case, we can classify him to belong in the group of Psychiatric Disorders known as Personality Disorders. Personality Disorders are â€Å"pervasive chronic psychological disorders† characterized by an individual’s unique psychological traits and inability to form or maintain interpersonal relationships that revolve around the sphere of family, friends, and work environments ((MentalHelp. net, 2001). Richard’s salient manifestations are further classified into the Borderline type of Personality Disorder. Dombeck (2001), in his article â€Å"Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms† enlisted the following symptoms, which are usually seen in persons with this state: †¢ â€Å"Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation †¢ Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self †¢ Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e. g. , spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating) †¢ Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior †¢ Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e. g. , intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days) A chronic feelings of emptiness †¢ Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e. g. , frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights) transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms† (Criteria summarized from: American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fourth edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. ). Hence, as we can see in the aforementioned clinical manifestations, Richard can truly belong in this type of disorder.  A question may be generated in our minds as to the factors that can trigger the occurrence and aggravation of this disorder in an individual. In line with this, we can device the Psychodynamic approach, which will lead us to trace and analyze the advent of this condition to a person. According to Ballas (2006), one of the root causes or risk factors of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is abandonment issues in childhood. As we can observe, we can directly relate this factor to Richard’s case since he perceived her mother’s death and his father’s decision to send him to the boarding school as abandonment. This issue has affected him in these ways: when his mother died, there was somewhat a feeling of loss as any individual could have when a loved one passes away. However, this feeling was aggravated by the decision of his father. Instead of comforting him, sending him away was the remedy because his father in turn had doubts if he can bring up his son properly. The decision of father was not helpful to the grieving Richard who absolutely by that time needed the support system to help him make it through. Further, this may have caused a significant anxiety, which can prompt the Richard’s disorder. Hence, this disorder as anxiety-related. As defined by Gale (1998), anxiety is an unconscious strategy in which an individual would want to avoid a negative stimulus in view of the fact that it causes a somewhat threat on his or her ego integrity. This must have played a role in Richard’s condition. In this way, defense mechanisms are the way to unleash their feeling within. Defense mechanism is defined and expounded as a psychological mechanism to lessen tension and to protect the ego from potential threat. Defense mechanisms can help an individual cope with anxiety or it can also be harmful. The defense mechanisms that we will be dealing with are still based on the definitions on the same article. As we can evaluate Richard’s symptoms, we can clearly discern the defense mechanisms that he used. Denial was one of them. It was characterized by his resistance to the fact that the doctor said that he has a major drinking problem. Denial was his attempt to eliminate the threatening information that he was confronted. Projection was also used in the aspect of his unsuccessful marriages. It was characterized by blaming his wives who left him to cover up the feeling of inadequacy as a husband to them. In other words, he projected his mistakes to other people. He also used displacement as a defense mechanism, as revealed by his an abusive husband and father. On the other hand, he exhibited five of the criteria for the disorder: impulsive binge behavior, frantic efforts to avoid feelings of loneliness, inappropriate anger, pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships and extreme mood swings. The use of free association is helpful in this case as it can help to connect the details of the Richard’s thoughts and experiences. According to Chiriac (translation by Cristea, 2008), in her article â€Å"About the Free Associations Method†, free associations are useful in a way that â€Å"thoughts are autonomously activated by chance verbal associations, influence conscious psychic life in a frequently dramatic manner and the task of psychoanalysis is to bring such complexes to the surface of conscious mind and eventually integrate them into the patient’s life†. Thus, Richard’s thought may have been unveiled and interpreted by the doctor with the use of this method. Levin (2001) shared some important details in the treatment of BPD in her article in MentalHealth. et. She said that the treatment of choice for BPD, as with most personality disorders, is Psychotherapy. Further, it must be noted that making contract with the individuals with suicidal attempts is essential and must be taken as an initial action. Medications may be prescribed. However, there are still controversies on this matter. She also emphasized that the therapists or the clinicians must be firm in handling this individuals because BPD patients are difficult to deal with. As she recommended, the most successful and effective comprehensive approach to date has been Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy. This psychotherapy seeks to teach the client how to learn to better take control of their lives, their emotions, and themselves through self-knowledge, emotion regulation, and cognitive restructuring and is often conducted within a group setting. In addition, hospitalization will also be of great help since it provides a highly-structured environment necessary for the individual’s independence. As with this disorder, medications are not specifically prescribed. Nevertheless, some medications such as antidepressant and anti-anxiety agents may be necessary to alleviate associated symptoms. Hence, Levin (2001) also emphasized the importance of self-help and support groups for patient’s suffering from this disorder. Therefore, a sufficient understanding of the case has been achieved by those aforementioned points that have been discussed. We have traced how Richard has gotten his condition through a careful analysis of the objective manifestations, which have been presented in the overview of this study. We can associate how the events in Richard’s childhood contributed to the intrapsychic conflicts and anxiety that had developed in him in the course of time. We have utilized some defense mechanism that he used in order to protect his ego from anxiety-provoking stimuli. In this way, we knew how his past had greatly affected his interpersonal relationships, which include that of his previous wives and even on his children. Moreover, the symptoms that he manifested were useful in order for us to identify the disorder that he is into and so we knew that he has five of the necessary criteria to classify him in the Borderline type of Personality Disorders. On the hand, the use of free association method is valuable to recognize the underlying details behind Richard’s disorder. Finally, we learned how psychotherapy is necessary to treat his psychiatric condition, how support-system plays a vital role in achieving proper treatment goal and how hospitalization is necessary to facilitate structured environment for Richard. Thus, we learned how the living environment can truly impact a person’s psychological aspect, or should we say his integrity as a holistic being, throughout his lifetime.

Natural Language - Definition and Examples

A natural language is a human language, such as English or Standard Mandarin, as opposed to a  constructed language, an artificial language, a machine language, or the language of formal logic. Also called  ordinary language. The theory of universal grammar proposes that all natural languages have certain underlying rules that shape and limit the structure of the specific grammar for any given language.Natural language processing (also known as computational linguistics) is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective, with a focus on the interactions between natural (human) languages and computers. Observations The term natural language is used in opposition to the terms formal language and artificial language, but the important difference is that natural languages are not actually constructed as artificial languages and they do not actually appear as formal languages. But they are considered and studied as though they were formal languages in principle. Behind the complex and the seemingly chaotic surface of natural languages there are--according to this way of thinking--rules and principles that determine their constitution and functions. . . .(Sà ¶ren Stenlund, Language and Philosophical Problems. Routledge, 1990)Essential Concepts- All languages are systematic. They are governed by a set of interrelated systems that include phonology, graphics (usually), morphology, syntax, lexicon, and semantics.- All natural languages are conventional and arbitrary. They obey rules, such as assigning a particular word to a particular thing or concept. But there is no reason that this particular word was originally assigned to this particular thing or concept.- All natural languages are redundant, meaning that the information in a sentence is signaled in more than one way.- All natural languages change. There are various ways a language can change and various reasons for this change.(C. M. Millward and Mary Hayes, A Biography of the English Language, 3rd ed. Wadsworth, 2011)Creativity and EfficiencyThe apparent fact that the number of utterances in  a natural language is  unbounded is one of its more widely remarked upon properties and a core tenet of modern linguistic theory. The classic argument for creativity uses the idea that one can continually add further adjuncts to sentences to establish that there can be no longest sentence and therefore no finite number of sentences (see Chomsky, 1957). . . .This conventional argument for the creativity of natural language is overly strained: who has actually heard a 500-word sentence? In contrast, anyone who studies [natural lang uage] generation has available a far more reasonable and commonsense account of creativity, namely that one continually uses new utterances because one is continually faced with new situations . . .. The counterbalance to creativity is the efficiency of language (Barwise Perry, 1983): the fact that many utterances do reoccur countless times (e.g., Where did you go for dinner last night?).(David D. McDonald, et al., Factors Contributing to Efficiency in Natural Language Generation.  Natural Language Generation, ed. by  Gerard Kempen. Kluwer, 1987)Natural ImprecisionNatural language is the embodiment of human cognition and human intelligence. It is very evident that natural language includes an abundance of vague and indefinite phrases and statements that correspond to imprecision in the underlying cognitive concepts. Terms such as tall, short, hot, and well are extremely difficult to translate into knowledge representation, as required for the reasoning systems under discussion. Without such precision, symbolic manipulation within the computer is bleak, to say the least. However, without the richness of meaning inherent in such phrases, human communication would be severely limited, and it is therefore incumbent on us (to attempt) to include such facility within reasoning systems . . ..(Jay Friedenberg and Gordon Silverman, Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Study of Mind. SAGE, 2006) See also CommunicationWhat Is Language?