Thursday, November 8, 2012

Mark Twain



These two stories were entertaining to say the least. I’m not sure how much I actually understood from them, but I’ll give it a try.
I really liked the Diaries of Adam and Eve. It was great to see another side to that story, and to hear it directly from the minds of Adam and Eve was great. This style of writing generally appeals to me. The Color Purple is one of my favorite novels, and it’s told very much like a diary; and letters are a major part of that book. Back to Adam and Eve though, my favorite parts of this story came from the miscommunication between the two. Eve’s curiosity leads her to be intrigued by Adam. She thought that he was just shy and that she was helping him when really he was avoiding her and thought she was an annoying creature. The two have their differences, but they love one another in the end. I think this story has quite a sweet ending. Maybe I’m being too simple, but the fact that they could find Eden in one another even after losing paradise made me smile. If there’s more commentary there about the way men and women communicate or if there’s a more religious context to the story, I’d be glad to hear about it in class.
Journalism in Tennessee definitely caught me off guard. The Narrator is just sitting there editing an article and gets maimed in a great many ways. I had to read it several times before I could really piece together what was happening. It was confusing at first, but then I found it hilarious. After I was done laughing I started thinking about how this story might be relevant to politics, especially considering the past election. The narrator wrote a rather straight-forward story that his editor hated due to his own personal bias, and that kind of thing is still quite apparent today. I didn’t take much time to really get into an analysis of this story, but I look forward to the discussion. Should be enlightening.

3 comments:

  1. I thought that Twain’s work was pretty comical also. Especially in comparison with some of the other works we have read this semester, you can definitely identify the satirical aspects of “Yellow Journalism.” I enjoyed reading them and though they all clearly had bits of Twain’s own ideologies in them, I thought they were also entertaining on face value.

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  2. In Adam and Eve, I especially loved the transformation of Adam throughout the story. At first, he wanted nothing but to be ride of Eve, yet as the story progressed and he took part in "knowledge," he began to realize that the only he needed was her. How quickly he falls for her and how devoted he becomes is touching, and a very good message by Twain indeed.

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  3. Haha I really like that you acknowledge from the start that you're unsure about how much you actually understood, that's both noble and hilarious. I'm in total agreement with you on the Diary, though...for someone to be presumptuous enough of a writer to assume the perspective of Adam and Eve and be able to pull it off, that does sound classically Twain to me. And, of course, as with everything else, he does it quite well. Who would've thought that such a humorous twang of Twain could be effectively applied to the book of Genesis?

    ~Jack Wright

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