Rhetorical Essay

The Great Gatsby's Relation to and Importance as a Work of Art by Iulia O. Basu described the reasons why The Great Gatsby could be considered part of classic Americana and the story it teaches could be used in every generation as rules to live by essentially. Basu tried to argue that the Great Gatsby isn’t just a book but it is a work of art and should be considered as that. The people I think Basu expected to be reading her work would probably be people that she would think had some knowledge of the great Gatsby and also knows some background to the book. I do think he is aware of the audience because he tries to make is points and reasoning very clear as if he knows of the readers. The subject that the author tries to make is that this book pretty much had everything. It had lies, scandal, wealth and all in the early 1920’s know to be the greatest time in American history and all those things came together to make a very compelling argument to make the Great Gatsby a work of art. Another way this could be called a work of art is actually the things the mansions in this book consisted of like “a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion”(the Great Gatsby) the use of this quote in Baus’s essay made imagery of what the mansions were like and the actual art and foreign culture expressed in the book. The way the author writes this essay is something that I have never seen before in the essay, and when I saw this I mean by the format he uses. In the introduction he doesn’t describe what he will be explaining in the whole essay like I’m accustom to but instead he just gets right into the essay without actually telling the reader what to look for or what to expect. The same goes for the paragraphs also, in the essays I have written and read it is known to just start a new subject or a new argument when u start a new paragraph but this wasn’t the case in this essay. In this essay there wasn’t much diction taking place. There were no new words or new meanings or anything of that sort. The author had a good amount of quotes from the Great Gatsby that helped him get his point across very well. But there was nothing else that hasn’t been used in every other essay I have read. This could be for the readers, he could just want to write straight text with no hidden messages to confuse his readers, he could just want to get his point and get the readers to understand what he is trying to do. The author didn’t really present himself in this text, he didn’t use to many words like me, I , or anything that could depict that he wanted to add himself in his piece and want his opinion to be known. From this essay over all I was amazed at how much this essay did not depict what we have been taught out entire lives. There was no hint of any cm, cd, cd ect. Or MLA format or anything like that. I like the way that there were essentially no rules for him and he did what he wanted to do. His writing really came out.

Technopoly

The excerpt from Technopoly by Neil Postman's had both radical ideas and some that I could really stand behind. His ideas such as “Money, not land was the key to wealth” for that era this was a revolutionary idea. Since before then the thinking was that if you had land you had power and essentially wealth to go along with it, this was the start to the idea of technopoly. The idea that if you had a society where there is free thinking and enlightenment rather than religious customs or a culture that has been set long ago on how things should be run. The more efficient you are with your work, the lower cost on making your product and this a cheaper price you can sell them for and that is how you could control wealth and society. There was an instance in the chapter where in the early 1900’s the train company requested to raise their charges because they could not pay their workers an adequate amount to keep the train company a float. But in the hearing they brought up Frederick Winslow Taylor’s idea of increasing the efficiently of society and the outcome was that there was no reason to raise the rates because they had the potential to be a very wealthy company. Taylor’s idea of efficiently saved this company and made his life very prosperous as well. This idea of Technopoly is the idea that technology has taken over the industries in America and the hand made personal touch has been replaces with machines. In reading this chapter I had a sense that this technopoly could not be reversed. Machines will only be more and more common and society will fall into the era of technology as being the sole creator if goods in American and the world.