Emotional Intelligence

In David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, "This is Water," he develops his thesis through making very relevant and relatable examples. Ones that everyone in our modern world could relate to. This is comparable to the likes of Alice Munro's style of writing. To understand this comparison, both concepts need to be trickled down to their intentions and impacts.


In the commencement speech, Wallace reminds his audience of graduates the purpose of education. "I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliche about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think."

This awareness allows for the generation of a greater emotional intellect, although emotional intelligence can't be measured with a score, it is instead assessed by the ability to empathize with the human experience. Wallace expresses his opinions by immersing his audience through a detailed experience, one that was explored enough for his audience to be taken on a trip once hearing it, he then introduces the idea of a having a choice, which is very eye-opening for people who are in fact not self-aware.

His thesis entails that education is about experience and awareness. By which he displays through the stylistic choice of taking his audience through the experience before providing them with his argument and coming full circle to the concept of "this is water." Literature such as this, literature that is deeply immersed in the human experience, is something that is actually relevant and relatable to audiences no matter their sociocultural contexts. This is where a bridge between the commencement speech can draw to Munro's short stories.

Literary fiction can develop empathy and emotional intelligence, this is heavily emphasized in the New York Times article "For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov." The "theory of mind" explores the concept of what humans read can influence their social and emotional skills. Experts were able to experiment and conclude that people can be primed for empathy and other social skills. "Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people's lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person's position- lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yea, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives".

In Munro's fiction, along with many other literary fictions, nothing is arbitrary. Word choice, characterization, figurative language, everything down to the smallest of details are written with intention. The display of shared humanity transcends contexts and allows readers to develop emotional responses to the stories at hand. Humans learn to strengthen their emotional intelligence through the means of their emotional experiences, and these literary fictions allow their audience to undergo experiences that they otherwise would never undergo. Readers have to participate which allows for this emotional growth to occur. Through increasing our attention and education systems attention to such literary fiction, humans can increasingly develop emotionally which at times can be argued more important than developing academically. These audiences, with greater social skills and empathy, are able to competently assess their surroundings and themselves. Which takes us back to Wallace's thesis from his commencement speech, the real value of education being just that.

This is water.

Summer Holiday Blogpost # 2

Summer holiday and languages

At the beginning of the summer, I feared that this would happen again. Every single summer that I have ever encountered causes me to lose the ease of speaking in my second language, English, as I would if I were to be in school. This doesn't mean I lose fluency or sense of grammar, but instead, I lose the ability to quickly debate and encounter long-winded conversations that required a lot of academic terminologies.  Where finding the specific words that enhance my dialogue that I usually practice in school, becomes harder.
"For lack of a better term" Becomes my go-to-sentence when explaining, describing or analysing during those conversations. 
Now at first, I thought this meant that I was at a loss during my summer break, but the distance I get from the use of the English language as an academic medium allows a particular spark to rise and causes me to become more interested in reading. I was always a bookworm growing up, always jumping from one story to the other, however since starting my tenth year in school and analyses began to get increasingly complex, I tend to gain a distaste for reading for pleasure. This is because once I'm in what I like to call the analytical IB Language and Literature zone, it becomes difficult for me to read without questioning everything and ACTS analysing everything. Whether it be the author's intentions with character and plot development, or trying to gain context of the story and so on and so forth. Not to mention my increasingly high standards in reading where I can't read stories that I take as underdeveloped or be lacking (whether it lacks substance, character arcs, plot development, etc.). 
Yet in the summer, I get to step out of my IB Language and Literature zone after a few weeks of relaxing I can finally begin to read for the sake of reading. I was able to explore scripts, novels, and the short stories. This is something that always takes me back to what I like to describe as the equivalent of comfort food. Reading for pleasure is like comfort food; all sorts of positive vibrations.
August 1st, marks the day I stepped back into my IB Language and Literature zone and began to finally read the inevitable Alice Munro (long) short stories. 

Social Media and Dialect

"Where are you from?"

"England is my city."

"Litty!" 

This was a conversation that I had overheard one day on a tour of the town of Dubrovnik, Croatia. When I first heard it my immediate reaction was a cringing of sorts, but not for the reason that a person who lacked interest in social media would; I didn't cringe at the person's ignorance of geography and proper wording. Instead, I cringed at the mere reference to Jake Paul (we all know that the vlog squad was the real gems that came out of Vine anyways).  However after a few days of reflection, what really stirred my thoughts was the fact that in this circumstance a non-native English speaker completely understood the consensus of this viral in-joke, "meme" if you will, that an English person made. The world is becoming susceptible to the international dialect that has come along with social media. 

Looking back on history, dialects occur predominantly due to geographical location, and for the most part, specific in-jokes and slang that occur within distinct dialects tend to go over the heads of those who didn't share the same dialect. This is no longer the case.
Through social media applications and websites such as Tumblr, Vine, YouTube, twitter, Instagram, etc. people all over the world have been developing slang terms that are used and understood globally. I first began noticing these things in early 2014 when the Vine app was at it's prime and therefore so were slang words and catch phrases such as:

"Do it for the vine."

"Hit the Quan."

"Zaymmm.."

These social media outlets have developed so far and have been able to access countries worldwide to the extent that a so called "social media dialect" has been developed. Using these terms with majorly any millennial and/or anyone from generation Z internationally that has had access to these social media apps would allow you to understand the extent by which this dialect has developed and unified these generations. Recently, a degree in Memes has surfaced which also makes it possible to comprehend these extents. 

And I would like to end this blog post off by saying, "Bye, Felicia!" 

Thesis Statement 3.0

Write a thesis statement and three topic statements to address the following prompt: The personal history of an author can have a significant influence on the way meaning is constructed in his/her writing. Comment on specific instances of such influence in Things Fall Apart.


Thesis statement:


 Chinua Achebe's personal history heavily influences the fabrication of his writing, as his critical perspectives on the the history of Igbo culture and Christianity intertwines with his personal influences; by which becomes evident in Things Fall Apart as is sculpts how he portrays culture and religion to his targeted audience through the use of secondary characters, subplots, and cultural traditions. 

Topic sentence 1: In reference to to his personal culture, Achebe employs foil characters from both cultures in order portray an authentic depiction of reality. 

Topic sentence 2: 

Topic sentence 3: 

Thesis Statement 2.0

Prompt: With reference to Things Fall Apart, discuss how an understanding of gender influences how the text may be understood.

Thesis Statement: In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the audience's understanding of gender heavily influences how the text is understood due to the cultural and contextual significance of gender within the novel, by which significantly differs from the expected treatment of gender that the targetted audience of western readers is accustomed to. 

Thesis Statement

Prompt: 

With reference to Things Fall Apart, show how subplots or secondary characters contribute to the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the work as a whole. 

Thesis Statement:

In the novel, Things Fall Apart, Achebe develops the plot by expanding on the Nigerian cultural and contextual significance through secondary characters such as Unoka, Nwoye, and Ikmenfuna; by which informs the targetted audience about British Imperialism and the impact it had on the contextual formation established within the plot.

Okonkwo, A Tragic Hero

Aristotle defines a tragic hero to be a character instilled into a story with the intention of evoking the audience with a sense of pity and fear. A tragic hero is considered to be a character that has been tackled with misfortune through an "error of judgement" that eventually spirals into their downfall. Now, considering the cultural context of Chinua Achebe, why would he choose to characterise Okonkwo using the tragic hero archetype?

Initially, Okonkwo is characterised with his hamartia being his fear of failure and his fear of weakness. These two tragic flaws are driven by Okonkwo's fear of ending up like his unsuccessful father. With that, he begins to strive for success and masking his fragility with a hypermasculinity and a facade that lacks emotion. These traits can also be deemed as his hubris, and are introduced to the audience early in the story when Okonkwo beat his wife during Peace week. These flaws drive the protagonist of Things Fall Apart to make numerous mistakes that drive the audiences through the plotline; starting with his involvement in killing Ikmenfuna all the way through the end of the story in which the character commits suicide. 

Making the protagonist a tragic hero, with a fate that is considered shameful in the stories cultural context, Achebe pushes the significance of the entire story. If, as an audience, we were introduced to this story through a traditional hero, we would not become exposed to the conflicts that shape the story and its historical context. Things Fall Apart was written to challenge the single story stereotype that English literature upheld at the time. To correctly prevail this, the author could not present to us his culture as a small single story, because simply it is not. The history of the Igbo tribe and the issues they had faced could not be put into simple terms in order to be entirely comprehended. The complex character of Okonkwo is put through many situations due to his tragic hero status; through those situations, western literature is introduced to the Igbo people through their reactions to all those situations individually. Allowing us to understand the culture in depth and through a variety of situations. Thus diminishing any possibility of a single story. 

By portraying Okonkwo as a tragic hero, Achebe constructs a gateway in which allows the intended audience (English literates) to be introduced to the Igbo people from various perspectives that if Okonkwo wasn't a tragic hero wouldn't be possible.