"HANDS" by Sherwood Anderson (Psychological Analysis)

            How can a story be about hands, but also about so many other things? Sherwood Anderson's 'Hands,' which is one vignette among many in his book ''Winesburg, Ohio,'' is definitely about hands, but it is also about truth, beauty, and the grotesque.

             In his Memoirs, Anderson tells about the first reactions to Winesburg, Ohio when it was published in 1919. He recalls that it was "widely condemned," described as "a sewer," and its author was called "sex-obsessed." He reports that a woman told him, "I read one of the stories and, after that, I would not touch it with my hands. With the tongs I carried it down into the cellar and put it in the furnace". Hands" was very likely the story referred to by this shocked lady, for the subject of homosexuality was one that most readers in the twenties thought unmentionable.

           Today, however, Anderson's treatment of Wing Biddlebaum's problem seems very delicate. The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands.' But how can that be? Sherwood Anderson's 'Hands' tells the story of Wing Biddlebaum and it is, indeed, a story of hands. We are introduced to Wing's hands in the same sentence wherein we are told his name. His hands and their nervous flitting remain central as we learn of the derision the people of Winesburg, Ohio, have for this neighbor of theirs. The name 'Wing' was actually given to him in mockery of the way his hands were always fluttering. We learn that Wing 'did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years,' which tells us of his isolation and loneliness, as does the eager anticipation with which he paces his front porch as the story opens, hoping George Willard will visit him. George seems to be the one person to whom Wing has any connection in the town. The story of friendship between Wing and George is also a story of hands--we learn that Wing's hands, just as his personality, are freed in the presence of young George. In George's company, Wing's hands 'came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.


               The old man, who is described as fat, frightened, and nervous, seems too ineffectual to be dangerous. His bald forehead — noticed because his nervous hands fiddle about arranging non-existent hair — suggests his loss of strength and virility. The central symbol of this powerful story is, of course, hands, an image that will be important in other stories in Winesburg.Consistently Anderson seems to suggest that hands are made for creative impulses, for communication. Whitman, one of Anderson's favorite authors, said, "What is more or less than a touch?".

             "Hands" haunts us because we recognize in Wing Biddlebaum our own helplessness and we see how thoughtlessly society can persecute what it does not understand. Perhaps we see ourselves in both Wing and in the society that has ruined his life. 


Analysis:

               Published in 1919, 'Hands' falls into the Modernist movement in literature. As many Modernist texts do, 'Hands' seeks to explore the existence of truth and our ability to access it. The story challenges readers to question things presented as truth, and to consider the process whereby we believe we learn true things.

               The text presents several 'facts' that are later called into question. The story is supposedly about a character named Wing Biddlebaum. However, we find out that his real name is Adolph Myers. Similarly, we are also told that Wing (Adolph) is 'a fat little old man' but later we learn 'he was but forty but looked sixty-five,' and thus he isn't old at all. With these reversals of information, the reader is left to wonder what other information presented in the story might be incorrect and whether it is possible to ever know for sure.

"ANOMALISA" by Charlie Kaufman (Fantastic analysis)

             Kaufman’s newest film Anomalisa made its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over the weekend, and we have rounded up the early buzz. The film is notable not only because Kaufman’s involvement but it is the auteur’s first stop-motion film. The story is about “a man crippled by the mundanity of his life”. Three weeks ago, Charlie Kaufman was pacing anxiously around a green room at the Palm Theater in Telluride. Just a few feet away, "Anomalisa," his first directing effort in seven years, screened for only the second time during the weekend festival. It was a big moment.

Here is the description of the film:

"Fasten your seatbelts. Michael Stone, spending the night in a Cincinnati hotel on business, is beset by a dramatic stream of insane and intense characters. Just before he spirals into desperation, he finds escape through a surprising, astonishingly tender erotic encounter. If the preceding description seems enigmatic, it’s because revealing anything more might spoil the intricate, tragicomic dreamscape created by Charlie Kaufman (SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK) and Duke Johnson (the Adult Swim series “Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole” and “Moral Orel”). ANOMALISA is animated, with wondrous stop motion; David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh and the gifted Tom Noonan do the voice honors, superbly; and Carter Burwell’s string-based score is perfect. We know Charlie Kaufman’s status as a visionary and one of the American filmmakers who really matters; we can now discover Duke Johnson as a major creative force."

              In “Anomalisa,” an inspirational speaker in crisis checks into Cincinnati’s (fictional) Al Fregoli hotel, named for a delusional condition in which paranoiacs believe that those around them are not who they appear to be, but a single tormentor hiding behind multiple disguises. That’s a helpful bit of trivia to consider before entering into Charlie Kaufman’s latest brainteaser, this one originally mounted (just twice) for composer Carter Burwell’s “Theater of the New Ear” sound-play experiment and rescued from obscurity by a team of imaginative producers who thought it might make an interesting stop-motion project — which it does, exceptional even, although it’s unclear just who they imagined might be the audience for such a cerebral cult offering.

                What follows is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and ultimately unforgettable. Kaufman has done it again, writing a deeply flawed male protagonist and a woman who seems so incredibly ideal despite (or perhaps due to) her imperfections, and he’s engineered it so that we fall in love: Michael’s gray and overcast, Lisa just wants to walk in the sun, and for as long as he can make the moment last, she’s the one. The anomaly. The Anomalisa. 

           

                Halfway through Anomalisa everything comes together - why there’s such a limited voice cast, why the stop motion puppets have visible seams on their faces, what the hell is going on at all - and I got goosebumps. I all but levitated out of my seat as I understood what Charlie Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson were doing with the film, and what had already been an incredibly personal, deeply human story became absolutely profound, sad and painfully true.

               At first it seems like the stop motion nature of the film is a gimmick; after all, most of the movie takes place in a hotel and is a series of scenes between people talking. You could make this movie with human beings, and with a fraction of the effort. Except that you can’t, and what seemed like a weird tic at first - all but the lead puppet has the same face, every character but the lead is voiced by Tom Noonan - becomes the central driving metaphor of everything. It’s perfectly Kaufmanesque in that it’s a surrealism that is completely in service of story, emotion and a powerful theme.

"Design" by Robert Frost (Deconstruction Analysis)

Design

by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?--

If design govern in a thing so small.

--- 1922

           "Design' is a poem of finding evil in innocence, a song of experience, though the voice is hardly that of Blake's child-like singer. On a small scale the first line, like the whole poem, builds up a joke in tone, rhythm, and image that grows into a 'joke' of another sort. In the poem, the joking discovery develops gradually through a series of contradictory pictures. 'A white heal-all' suggests purity and safety, though the color echoes the white of the swollen spider. In another side of the three lines, the speaker gives away his joke. First there is the very correct iambic on the line four in exactly ten syllables, every other one of which must be stressed.

           Assorted characters of death and blight...

           This statement takes on a cheerful sing-song quality, an effect increased in the next line by reversing the stress and omitting the short in 'Mixed ready'. The adding of unstressed syllables lightens the next line to soften the ugliness of what is being said:

Like the ingredients of a witches broth...

         

           How about design of darkness to appall?. Alliteration picks out salient impressions to give older theological and reverse twist- 'Design, yes- but for evil. The 'if' stands out oddly because of the reversal of stress and because of the pause for the loss of a syllable. In the poem first thirteen lines, Frost simply extends the logic of the traditional argument from design. Frost invokes just that tradition in the eleventh and twelfth lines of "Design".

           The implication for Frost, I think, is that the "design of darkness" or of nature or of God is the design made by the perceiver or by the poet. Only the human eye can make or find any design in the natural world. Though the narrator's role in the drama is intentionally and ironically minimized, it remains crucial in the two opening of the words of the poem: "I found". Like all revelation, all design "has been ours". The last line of "Design" suggests, for a temperament as willfull and feisty as Frost.

"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe (Postcolonialism Anlysis)

           "Things Fall Apart" is generally seen as Achebe's way of taking back from Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness. This novel focuses on the Igbo people in the years leading up to the arrival of the first Christian missionaries. The Igbo are the second largest group of people living in the southern Nigeria. They are socially and culturally diverse, consisting of many subgroups. Although they lived in scattered groups of villages, they all speak one language. It follows Okonkwo, a respected member of a tribe, as he build up his reputation. Basically we get to see the ins and outs of pre-colonized Africa and get a hint of what's to come when the missionaries show up.

            How does the writer do anything to question, "problematize", or revolutionize that dominant language so that we as readers are aware of the problems when it comes to writing and speaking the "master's language"?. The Chinua Achebe incorporates the language of the Igbo people into the story itself is often seen as his attempt to put a "native" language other than English.

            By naming sounds, things, people, places are all given to change over time and place. That's how we get different languages and cultures. Achebe shows us how invented language fundamentally. Many indigenous language are seldom spoken because of the influence of colonial power that comes in and forces a new language on the people on the other land. That's the reason why indigenous language starts to fade away. People starts to forget it and the whole generations will no longer speak the Igbo language because they're speaking English or some other language. Let's say, one day if we really decide to write a novel like "Things Fall Apart" as an author we ends up writing a story or a novel in English language and not in Igbo language. This means that the writer is forced to translate his or her culture in another language.

MARXIST ANALYSIS (My report together with Jenhel Mae T. Magno)

"The Virgin" by Kerima Polotan Tuvera (Feminist Analysis)

            Mijares, the main character of the story entitled "The Virgin", as a a writer and as a a woman revealed her desires through her metaphors and symbols in her writing. Despite her being responsible daughter of her family, she also wished to be loved by others, especially she was always been dreaming to have a man in her life. The following lines show her desire to have a man:

"But neither love nor glory stood behind her, only the lurking, empty shadows, and nine years gone, nine years.

In the room of her unburied dead, she held up her hands to the light, noting the thick, durable fingers, thinking in a mixture of shame and bitterness and guilt that they had never touched a man."

            There was also one scenario in the story that shows her romantic feelings and reveals the emotions of Miss Mijares about the carpenter. There was also a symbolic revelation about her desire of being loved. Moreover, Tuvera shows the inner struggle of a woman in the story. Miss Mijares struggle to stick the societal expectations of a woman and to hide her own self was exposed and reiterated. In the society, women are the ones responsible of taking care of the family. This was the case of Miss Mijares, when she was only one left to take care of his sick and old mother. She did all the responsibility that she forgot her own life. Miss Mijares in the story can be characterized as an old maid. At an age of 34, she hasn't still touch a man. Her description in the story and her life really fits her as the old maid who is still untouched.

            The three stages of a women's history, feminine stage, feminist stage, and female that can be identifiable to Miss Mijares' life. The feminist stage can be described as a stage involving protest against the minority rights.

            The last paragraph proves that in her heart, she has gone through the protesting stage and now, she's able to express her own self, her own feelings, and her own desires. It shows that she is now capable of going beyond her social roles as she reveals that she is ready to surrender her virginity. Her virginity is indeed a symbol of dignity; however, it is part of a woman's purpose is to have a man who will be able to consume that long preserved virginity.

            The short story depicts the success of a woman in overcoming the men's stereotypical world. The main character was able to defy the dictates of the society and was able to establish her own self in the quest of being a woman.

"Biag ni Lam-ang" (Archetypal Analysis)

           In the poetry "Biag ni Lam-ang" by no definite author, the story is about a boy who was very extraordinary. When the baby was born, he started to talk and told his mother he should be named Lam-ang. After 9 months of waiting for his father to return, he would go look for him. One night while travelling, he dreamed a group of Igorots celebrating his father's death. Lam-ang was furious and after that he returned to Nalbuan in triumph. He was bathed by women in the Amburayan river. All the fish died because of the dirt and bad odor of Lam-ang coming from his body.

          I felt that the heart of the section was in the epic story. The story entitled Biag ni Lam-ang, in my eyes is truly a story with epic proportions. The story was written with many underlying messages about the history of the Philippines. For example, there was a scene in the story in which Lam-ang took a journey to the mountains to battle the Igorots who murdered his father. The Igorots in this story appeared cruel and unmerciful. The detail of the deaths of the Igorots was very descriptive and brutal. It was so brutal that they seemed to have represented something extremely different. It seemed like the Igorots were actually the colonizers of the Philippines. This scene was my favorite of the story because there seemed to be a historical hidden meaning behind it. Also, the details were short but stunning. The rest of the story was amazing as the beginning. The many bumps or distractions along his life's journey were incredible. It was captivating to see him face a difficult situation and then overcome it.

         Lam-ang fell inlove with a young woman named Ines Kannoyan. He found the house of Ines Kannoyan and he also found out that her house was surrounded by many suitors. He had his rooster crow, which cause a nearby house to fall. He had also his dog bark and in an instant the fallen house. The rooster expressed the love of Lam-ang.

         After sometime, the headman reminded Lam-ang about their tradition that a newly married man had to catch a kind of fish called rarang. Magical in a part where his pets take some actions and something will happen. Story was interesting because there are some parts in the story that was impossible to happen in real life.