Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Review of Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce Essay Example

Review of Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce Essay Perhaps no other writer in American history was more uniquely qualified to compose fiction about the American Civil War as Ambrose Bierce.   Naturally disposed toward gritty realism adn journalistic observation,but given to flights of poetic ecstacy, Bierce   served in the Civil War as a soldier, enlisting out of his home in Warsaw, Indiana, (Gale, 2001, p. 51) and wen on to attain the rank of Lieutenant by the wars close. Along the way, he faced combat, being trapped behind enemy lines,   and whose unit which participated in the battle of Shiloh [] suffered the greatest number of casualties of all Union regiments involved on 6–7 April (Gale, 2001, p. 51).   Bierce later wrote extensively about his experiences and the fiction he generated stands as some of the most interesting and innovative writing made during the early post-war years.The stories collected in Ambrose Bierces Civil War Stories were originally published in 1909 as part of the two volume set The Collecte d Works of Ambrose Bierce. The sixteen works of fiction collected in Civil War Stories span a range of genres from memoir, as in What I Saw of Shiloh, to allegory as in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, to what   might be described as adventure/travelogue, as in Four Days in Dixie. The stories in the book are placed in what appears to be a random, but   is most likely a thematic, order; however, there are no designations for one type of story as opposed to another, no sub-headings or section breaks. The stories are presented without editorial commentary or embellishment.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Unlike the facts-only historical writings that study the Civil War, Bierces writings are flavored with poetic description, biting sarcasm, colorful characters, and well-made plots. The conflicts of the large war are made at a personal level through his descriptive writings. In the case of a story like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge the death-knell of the South is prese nted as the death of a single man and the moral of the story is that to dream is sometimes to belive in a fallacy which will result in death.In other stories like What I Saw of Shiloh, the reader learns what it was like in a real Civil War battlefield, with grim and shocking descriptions of the battlefields and the dead.   His description of a mortally wounded Federal sergeant is both grotesque and blackly humorous. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this his brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known that one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain. (Bierce, 1994, p. 10) The above quote shows how Bierce combined sarcasm with realistic detail in order to both horrify his readers and let them see certain realities of war which would contradict the glamorous attitudes that were often used to recruit soldiers and convince citizens to make war. Bierces themes in Civil War Sto ries often make use of pitting the fantasy of war against the reality of war.Using his life experience as a background enabled Bierce to create fiction that would ring as reality for the readers of his time and throughout to the present day.   Perhaps no story better than his most famous Civil War story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge demonstrates that Bierce wanted to discourage the glamorization of war.   However, all of the tales in Civil War Stories could be considered as showing the reality of war better than the fantasy of war. Where historical studies make use of statistics and dates, Ambrose Bierces fiction makes ample use of anecdotal evidence, and is often sheer fiction without even the pretext of being factually true. Instead, Bierce tries to express the essence of war through the immediate impact for better or worse on the individual person who experiences war. Also within the context of the lived-experience, Bierce is able to show the loss of innocence in a young person, as he does so well in Four Days in Dixie bit also the romanticization of youth and innocence even in the midst of the horrors of war, as he does in What I Saw of Shiloh.The humorous aspect of Bierces writings also gives the memoir and fictional visions of the Civil War an authentic, real-life feeling, reminding modern readers that the people who fought and died in the Civil War or had their lives completely upturned by the war   were people and not just anonymous casualties. By personalizing the war, Bierce may be offering his readers the chance to decide for themselves just how romantic war is and whether or not participating in a war   is morally or even logistically advisable.   A shift in Bierces narrative tone also shows this same encroaching cynicism:It is interesting to compare Bierces description of Chickamauga, written in 1898, with his   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   account of Shiloh, which was begun as early as 1875 [] The trembling indignation , the   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   flashes of poetry, that make Shiloh a fine bit of writing, are absent from Chickamauga. In   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   the latter piece he merely set down the facts with yawning indifference.   (McWilliams,   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   1929, p. 51)In A Horseman in the Sky Bierce offers one of the most climactic and sensational plot-twists in the book, which indicates just how hard it is to establish fiction from memoir in these stories. Of course the situation described in the story that a son would shoot his own father probably happened during the Civil War but Bierces version of it is certainly fictional and dramatized in order to leave the reader with a specific impact and meaning. The most illustrative aspect of Civil War Stories is not pictures, per se, but the dramatic mental images generated by Bierces writings.   Most readers will walk away from Civil War Stories with a   deeper and more immediate grasp of the Civil War as it impacted those who participated in it and were touched by it on a personal level. This provides an excellent counterpart to the big picture   view that is gained by reading strictly non-fiction studies of the Civil War.

Friday, April 3, 2020

Rock Roots Essays - African-American Music, Music Of Cuba

Rock Roots Rock Roots: Africa and Cuba - a synthesis between 2 traditions & 2 continents to form rock - rock is the unique tribute to the power of integration - upon closer inspection, rock appears to be a purely African addition to the western musical institution - Afro-Cuban + black music of Mississippi and Louisiana share common ancestry: in the early 19th C. the Haitan revolution sent the islands plantation owners packing. Many managed to escape with their African slaves , whose origins were primarily from Yoruba + Fon, modern Nigeria, Congo and Guinea. Most of these slaves ended up in either Cuba, found in the Oriente province or in the southern United States, pricipally in LA but also spreading into MS. - from Africa, these black slaves brought a strong oral music tradition of storytelling, recreation, work and tragedy. - used the call-and-response method (eg. Ray Charles Whatd I Say) - ask the Cubans where their music comes from and many point to the mountanous, jungle-lush Oriente province in the fart south of Cuba - the heartland of where the islands African religeous + musical survivals are. - during the 19th C. African rythmic structures filtered out of the Orientes countryside into the popular dance halls of its capital, Santiago-de-Cuba. From there the new music - African polyrythms underlying spanish guitar styles and stanza forms all using the call-and-response - spread to Havana. This style is called son. - when a Cuban is asked if this son business was anything like a-wop-bop-a-lu- bop-a-lop-bam-boom, the Cuban will counter, or like boogie (John Lee Hooker) - what is known as clave music in Cuba is the same as the Bo Diddley Beat - by the 1920's Havana was rocking to sons bass-heavy riffs - the most characteristic bas pattern was a 3-note figure, identical to the bass parts on mid-50's rocknroll hits like Elvis Lawdy Muiss Clawdy and Fats Dominos Bluberry Hill - only in Cuban + black American music do you find a heavy emphasis on the back- beat, the 2+4. Everything else, from calypso to to samba to reggae, is accented on the 1 + 3. The reitoration of Am. Music toward the 1 - acenting the first beat of every measure - is a recent development, stemming from the funk and soul of the 60s/ 70s. -* Afro/Cuban trditions reveal the fundamental riffs, licks, bass-figures and drum rythms that made RnR -* Mississippi Delta the home of rock -* the same way that Cuba is the MS Delta of the Americas. - The MS delta gave birth to a great # of performers who made a name for themselves in their hometowns and later after they moved to Chicago, New Orleans + Memphis. Among them are: Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Elmore James + John Lee Hooker [*SHOW BLUES BROTHERS*] - the blues from the delta created the driving force behind all of rock - although blacks + whites were were kept separate, a few pioneering musicians united in Americas urban centers (of Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans) + rural South. For them the barriers of racism were artificial. [*SLIDE OF DANCE HALL] - Chuck Berry performed at white dance halls, and took a white rockabilly song, Ida Red and molded it into Mabelline - Elvis emulated black bluesmen who performed in his hometown of Memphis. He acted + sung like a black man, challenging the forces of racism w/his every move, literally [*SHOW SLIDE OF ELVIS / RACISM POSTER*] - success of Elvis helped pave the way for black bluesmen + artists alike who otherwise wouldnt have been welcome in mainstream America - blacks gave Rock its rhythm and whites gave it its musical form/ package/ looks Music Essays