Sample article and book critical reviews

sample critical review

Nonetheless, Cooley made the first successful attempts to explain how new communications media alter behavior and culture. Years later, empirical researchers returned to Cooley's concept of the primary group to help demonstrate the mediations between modern communication and the individual. They found that the social context of family and friends, play group and peer group, belied the once widely held model of modern media somehow directly and brutally assaulting the passive individual. Today this complex interaction is by no means perfectly understood, but Cooley made the first serious efforts to fathom it. His writing combined an understanding gained from long experience as a journalist and press agent, a thorough grounding in the philosophy of James and Dewey, and an immersion in the works of European social theorists, especially German thinkers.

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Clearly, then, many different means are available for achieving the subgoal of mathematical literacy. This abundance of means for achieving mathematical literacy is all the more striking in view of the relatively small porportion of sociologists, be they graduate students or professionals, who are literate in mathematics. It is now a full decade since Sibley's account of these deplorable facts, yet the general level of mathematical literacy among sociologists, especially among beginning graduate students, seems hardly to have risen at all. There is thus no lack of socially structured access to the means of mathematical literacy.

sample article critique

Only two of the white-authored novels deal with proverty as the black-authored novels do. One is Smedley Daughter of Earth in which the effects of having no money are visited upon Marie's family. In Arnow The Dollmaker, too, it is the farm and independence that Gertie's money could buy and the desire for material things that sends Clovis off in search of a factory job. The results of poverty and the freedom money can bring are clearly presented in both novels. In most of the other white-authored novels, however, money is usually ignored because the heroine has enough of it. If it is developed as an issue, money is usually presented within the framework Virginia Woolf's thoughts provide.

sample article critiques

The final mark of freedom is work, work that is freely undertaken for a good reason and that is purposeful. When Simone de Beauvoir comments upon this kind of work, she states, "To paint, to write, to engage in politics--these are not merely 'sublimations;' here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes." This is work, not a job. The work brings freedom in taking one outside of oneself, in giving a meaningful purpose because the work itself matters. The kind of work that the heroines in the feminist novel undertake varies, but the work is always similar in one respect. It matters in itself to the heroine performing it. For some, their work is political, like Miriam's, Martha Quest's, Marie Rogers', and Mary's in How She Died. Others have an artistic leaning, like Lutie Johnson, Edna Pontellier, and Isadora Wing.

sample book critique

Mary's work in The Grass is Singing would seem stultifying to many but not to her because she loves the work she does. Her loving it makes the work important. The loving of it is the reason it is chosen. Because she does not love the work she selects, Anna's choice at the end of The Golden Notebook is a failure. A marriage welfare center, the Labour Party, and classes for delinquent children might be meaningful in an objective sense. They are not for Anna because she does not want them. She loves writing and uses the other jobs to escape her work of writing, so she fails. The meaning comes from the joy of the work and the effort put into it, not from the conscious willing of the work to be meaningful.

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Finally, some of the heroines are great at what they do; some are not. There is no failure in not being great, though, as Terry asserts in How She Died. The greatness demanded in one's work is parallel to the self-interest demanded in capitalism. The amount of talent the heroines in the feminist novel exhibit is not as important as the joy and fulfillment they get from their work. Miriam is brilliant and exceptional; Edna is not; both care very much about their work. Work cannot save the heroine, but it is always connected with her freedom.

sample critique

That freedom, as Jill in Braided Lives describes it, "is a daily necessity like water, and we love most loyally and longest those who allow us at least occasionally to vanish and wander the curious night. To them we always return from the eight deaths before the last." 128 The freedom that emerges for some of these heroines is not, of course, free license. This is one of the reasons that work is so strongly connected with this liberty. It is the opposite of that described by de Beauvoir when she comments, "Montherlant has chosen a liberty without object, that is to say, he prefers an illusion of autonomy to the authentic liberty that takes action in the world; it is this detachment and freedom from responsibility that he means to defend."

sample critique article

To the extent that an ideology is partly a response to a fear, the feminist canon as it is presented in these novels is partly a response to this vision of the modern world. Because of the sophistication of this viewpoint, an important part of the feminist canon resides paradoxically in its suspicion of ideology. This feminist hostility toward ideology includes two basic assumptions that must be understood. First, since the modern period is epitomized by ideology, everyone feels pushed toward aligning with one even though no ideology can encompass all of an individual's ideals and values. Anna provides a perfect example in The Golden Notebook when she explains why she joined the Communist Party.

sample critique essay

Of import to an understanding of the feminist novel is the inherent dichotomy which exists between Orwell 1984 and Huxley Brave New World. In general, 1984 is more applicable to Russia than the United States, and its world calls forth the rebel. On the other hand, Brave New World, in general is more applicable to the United States than to some other countries, and its world calls forth the passive victim. It is Huxley's portrayal, minus his reactionary attitudes, that most fully describes the modern world as the feminist novel sees it. This is partly so because the feminist novels discussed here are written by Western, English-speaking women.

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… The world they picture is epitomized by the sedated human mannequin seated in front of the wall screen in Fahrenheit 451. It is a brave new world focused beyond freedom and dignity, a world that will not end with a bang but with a muted whimper. The terror of this world is that it produces a need on the part of its people for mindlessness, unthinking peace and security, and complete dependence. In effect, it produces the most prominent psychosis of the twentieth century--the need to escape from freedom. Huxley's brand of primitivism is not an adequate alternative to this world.