MORAL CRITICISM: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson

Summary:

In 1993, mountaineer Greg Mortenson attempted to climb K2, the world's second highest mountain, located in the Karakoram range of northernPakistan-administered Kashmir, as a way of honoring the memory of his deceased sister, Christa. As a memorial, he had planned to lay her amber necklace on the summit of K2. After more than 70 days on the mountain, Mortenson and three other climbers had their ascent interrupted by the need to complete a 75-hour life-saving rescue of a fifth climber. After getting lost during his descent, alone, he became weak and exhausted. Instead of arriving in Askole, where his porters awaited, he came across Korphe, a small village built on a shelf jutting out from a canyon. He was greeted and taken in by the chief elder, Haji Ali of Korphe.

To repay the remote community for their hospitality, Mortenson recounted in the book that he promised to build a school for the village. After difficulties in raising capital, Mortenson was introduced to Jean Hoerni, a Silicon Valley pioneer who donated the money that Mortenson needed for his school. In the last months of his life, Hoerni co-founded the Central Asia Institute, endowing the CAI to build schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

According to the book, Mortenson faced many daunting challenges in his quest to raise funds for the building of more than 55 schools in Taliban territory. Some of these challenges included death threats from Islamic mullahs, long periods of separation from his family, and being kidnapped by Taliban sympathizers.

Reflecting on the state of a post-9/11 world, Mortenson advocates in his books and during his speaking engagements that extremism in the region can be deterred through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Formerly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, schooling focused on boys. Because educated boys tend to move to the cities to find jobs, they seldom return. By contrast, educated girls tend to remain in the community and pass their enhanced knowledge to the next generation, thus, Mortenson suggests, educating girls has more of a lasting benefit for their community.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Cups_of_Tea#Summary)

My Criticism:

The book has lots of lessons that is needed for changing a person and the world. First it is not understandable yet as you scan again the book, it is very inspirational. It shows moral values that is very essential for having benefits in our society. The book rules because it is showing good deeds done by the character that is needed in becoming a better person. This book shows a story about moral values that our God wanted for us to do.

POST MODERNISM: Ada or Ador: A Family Chronicle (1969) by Vladimir Nabokov

Plot Summary:

Ada tells the life story of a man named Van Veen, and his lifelong love affair with his sister Ada. They meet when she is eleven (soon to be twelve) and he is fourteen, believing that they are cousins (more precisely: that their fathers are cousins and that their mothers are sisters), and begin a sexual affair. They later discover that Van's father is also Ada's and her mother is also his. The story follows the various interruptions and resumptions of their affair. Both are wealthy, educated, and intelligent. Van goes on to become a world-renowned psychologist, and the book itself takes the form of his memoirs, written when he is in his nineties, punctuated with his own and Ada's marginal notes, and in parts with notes by an unnamed editor, suggesting the manuscript is not complete.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_or_Ardor:_A_Family_Chronicle#Plot_summary)

My Criticism:

The novel is not that interesting because its theme is very usual and common known by people. The story line is not that well developed. The characters are believable as we can see in our social situation. The novel is somehow based on the experiences and memories of an individual. We can see now after modernization, people have changes and we can see lots of immorality.

TERRITORIALISM: Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O'Neill

Synopsis:

Widower Ephraim Cabot abandons his New England farm to his three sons, who hate him but share his greed. Eben, the youngest and brightest sibling, feels the farm is his birthright, as it originally belonged to his mother. He buys out his half-brothers' shares of the farm with money stolen from his father, and Peter and Simeon head off to California to seek their fortune. Later, Ephraim returns with a new wife, the beautiful and headstrong Abbie, who enters into an adulterous affair with Eben. Soon after, Abbie bears Eben's child, but lets Ephraim believe that the child is his, in the hopes of securing her future with the farm. The proud Ephraim is oblivious as his neighbors openly mock him as a cuckold. Madly in love with Eben and fearful it would become an obstacle to their relationship, Abbie kills the infant. An enraged and distraught Eben turns Abbie over to the sheriff, but not before admitting to himself the depths of his love for her and thus confessing his own role in the infanticide.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_Under_the_Elms#Synopsis)

My Criticism:

The playwright is about a conflict between the father and his son. The theme is about love because it is about the love quarrel between Abbie, Ephraim and his son Eben. The dominant tone of the playwright is serious, it talks about being faithful and loyal to the one you love. This play shows desire of the faithful and loyal love and desire for the continuous operation of Ephraim's farm.

STRUCTURALISM: WEST SIDE STORY (1961) by Arthur Laurents

Plot Summary:

On the west side of New York City, the Jets and the Sharks are white immigrant (primarily Eastern European) and Puerto Rican gangs respectively who hate each other and who battle each other for territory in their neighborhood. Their feud makes a small connection when at a gymnasium dance, Tony, one of the founders of the Jets but who is now inactive in the gang, and Maria, the recently arrived sister of the Sharks' leader Bernardo, spot each other across the crowded room and fall in love at first sight. For many of the male gang members, that connection is the last straw in their feud that leads to the decision to have a rumble to determine territory once and for all. Conversely, Anita, Bernardo's girlfriend, supports Maria's decision to romance whomever she wants, even a Jet. However, even Anita may be able to endure so much in her stance to support true love. As Maria and Tony try to meet each other clandestinely at any opportunity, Maria makes a request of him to foster peace between the Jets and Sharks, which inadvertently leads to a series of tragic events not only for the collective but personally for Maria and Tony.

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055614/plotsummary)

My Criticism:

The book is about lovers who are a member of two different gangs in west side of New York City. The genre of this book is romance. The style in writing the book is not using humor, the setting is essential and has connection to its title. The story is very usual as the television drama uses to show us most of the time. As stated earlier, there is love between a boy and a girl and differences of gangs they belong. The motif or pattern goes on by using the theme to narrate events about the result of their affair.

NEW HISTORICISM: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Synopsis:

The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" (p. 14)

Diamond realized the same question seemed to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin... dominate the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, after having thrown off colonial domination, still lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists." (p. 15)

The peoples of other continents (Sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to the societies' military and political advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last Ice Age. He proposes explanations to account for such disproportionate distributions of power and achievements.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Synopsis)

My Criticism:

The author may want to fill a gap in historical literature by examining a topic that other historians have neglected. The author believed that being free from natural calamities made people less prone to beliefs which are only from the product of the mind. The author also had based his work from earlier works of different famous author. This book is written with historical basis and that is about Eurasian society, culture and civilization.

AMERICAN PRAGMATISM: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Plot Summary:

The novel opens with a prologue relating a paragraph-long Dick and Jane tale in which none of Jane's family will agree to play with her until a friend comes along at last. The tale is then repeated two times, each time with less punctuation or fewer spaces between words, until finally all the words are squashed together.

The novel is alternately narrated in first-person by Claudia MacTeer and in third-person omniscient, focusing on various other characters. 9-year-old Claudia and her 10-year-old sister, Frieda, live in Lorain, Ohio with their parents, who take two other people into their home: Mr. Henry, a tenant, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house has been burned down by her wildly unstable father, who is widely gossiped about in the community. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl with a hard life, and whose parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually being told and reminded of what an "ugly" girl she is, thus fueling her desire to be white with blue eyes.

Pecola appears to have thoughts contrary to Claudia, who is given a white baby doll to play with and, though frequently told how lovely it is, despises and spitefully dismantles it. Unlike Pecola, Claudia resists the white racial standard in her society, is aggressive and determined, and has a strict but ultimately stable family. While living in the MacTeer household, Pecola experiences menarche, bringing up the first of the book's many themes of sexuality and adulthood. Likewise, ideas of beauty, particularly those relating to racial and class characteristics, are a major theme in this book.^[3]Insults or praises toward physical appearance are often given in racial terms. For example, a high yellow student named Maureen Peal is shownfavoritism at school. Claudia and Frieda initially feel a confusing mixture of both hatred and attraction toward Maureen. They finally befriend her after they all stumble upon Pecola being bullied by a group of boys and are able to dissolve the confrontation. However, Maureen herself immediately then insults Pecola regarding rumors about her father and the MacTeer girls furiously chase Maureen away in Pecola's defense.

Throughout the novel, it is revealed through flashbacks that not only Pecola but also her dysfunctional parents had a life as young people full of hatred and hardships. Her mother, Pauline, feels alive and happy only when she is working for a rich, white family who affectionately call her "Polly." Pecola's father, Cholly, is a drunk who was left to live with his aunt when he was young but later ran away to find his father, who ended up wanting nothing to do with him. Equally troubling to Cholly as a young man was his loss of virginity, interrupted by a pair of voyeuristic white men who humiliatingly forced Cholly to continue having sex in their presence, while jeering at him. By the time of the story's current setting, the adult Pauline and Cholly have by now both lost the tender and affectionate love they once had for each other in their youth.

Another motif is a contrast in the novel between the world shown through cinema and the one in which Pauline is a servant, as well as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society and the existence the main characters live in. Most chapters' titles are extracts from the Dick and Jane paragraph in the novel's prologue, presenting a white family that may be contrasted with Pecola's; perhaps to incite discomfort, the chapter titles contain much sudden repetition of words or phrases, many cut-off words, and no interword separations.

One day while Pecola is doing dishes, her intoxicated father rapes her. His motives are unclear, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. Cholly flees after the second time he rapes Pecola, leaving her pregnant. Claudia and Frieda are the only two in the community that hope for Pecola's child to survive. Consequently, they give up money they had been saving to buy and plant marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if the flowers bloom, Pecola's baby will live. The marigolds never bloom and Pecola's child, who is born prematurely, dies. Near the novel's end, a dialogue is presented between two sides of Pecola's own imagination, in which she indicates at strangely positive feelings about her rape by her father. In this internal conversation, Pecola speaks as though her wish has been granted: she believes that she now has blue eyes. Claudia, as narrator a final time, describes the recent phenomenon of Pecola's insanity and suggests that Cholly (who has since died) may have shown Pecola the only love he could by raping her. Claudia lastly laments on her belief that the whole community, herself included, have used Pecola as a sort of scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier and happier.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluest_Eye)

My Criticism:

The novel is very interesting to read especially to those people who admires something. This makes the reader continue living life with contentment even if there are times we dream to have something we want. The storyline is  well developed but confusingly resolved. The characters are believable because even today there are people who degrade or discriminate other. Pecola is very practical in living her life like normal people who admires something  yet other people doesn't understand her situation.