François Mauriac

Jean Baudrillard The Hyper-realism of Simulation In Baudrillard's essay “The Hyper-realism of Simulation (originally published in 1976), He stresses that the use of media, signs, and symbols has overloaded our culture to the point that “reality itself, as something separable from signs of it …vanished in the information-saturated, media-dominated contemporary world” (J.Baudrillard, 2006). Mass Media i.e television, photography, and advertising have shaped and our human interaction and…

Have you ever wondered what it is like to live in a conceited dystopian society where any possession of books is illegal? Well, in a dystopian society like Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury, it is a community where firemen have to burn books for a living. People are not allowed to peruse books but only allowed to scan through training manuals for their jobs. When people who are against the government read the books, they will either get arrested and have a death penalty, or they either can…

After much contemplation, I think I would use thought-provoking to describe ‘Invisible City’. The interviews, anecdotes and footages in the documentary film gave me a trip down memory lane of old Singapore in the 1950s. However, at the same time the past was shovelled, more questions began to arise. Then, I wondered about the Singapore I know. As a product of our education system, I grew up only learning one clean and neat singular linear history of Singapore. The textbooks told me the…

President John F. Kennedy once said “conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” The concept of conformity and individuality is clearly illustrated in the novel, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Like most dystopian societies, Fahrenheit 451 contains a damaged society in which the people watch excessive amounts of television on wall size sets, listen to music on seashell radio sets, and drive extremely fast, not afraid to hit animals or people. The masses never think…

Comparative Essay of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 I have chosen to write a comparative essay on the two dystopian fictions, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984, that we read this year. The two novels are somewhat different yet they have similar messages of the scary course that our society is heading in and our need to not become mindless bystanders that allow it to happen. I find it easy to parallel the writings and I will present the differences and similarities between the two…

Burning the Blind: Silent Screams In Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) many different literary elements were used in his writing to express his overall message for the book. Bradbury illustrates a futuristic community in which everybody is told what to do. Firefighters, which include Montag, are forced to burn every book in sight by the government. Montag had a very unusual encounter with a young girl who opened his eyes to the world in front of him. Rebelling against the government,…

There are many different ways a literary element creates the meaning of the text. In this case it is in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this book, the main character, Guy Montag suffers through many conflicts in his dystopian society. Conflict is a big literary element that creates the meaning of the text. In the first section of this novel Montag meets a peculiar neighbor. Her name is Clarisse McLean. She is the one who introduces him to the past. Because of this he starts to…

As author George Saunders said in “Thank You, Esther Forbes” on page 62, “By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.” In this simple, yet elegant sentence I would elaborate its meaning as, The more vocabulary you have at your disposal the more vividly you can describe the world around you. Let me give you an example; If you and a 5th grader see an apple on a chair, the one with the more broad vocabulary would…

Human beings are naturally curious. We are made to create and solve problems. In Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, the protagonist; Guy Montag, lives in a dystopic society where firemen burn every piece of evidence of the past which include books, houses, and in rare cases people. Montag is a fireman, a feared member in the government, who finds life boring and unpleasant not knowing what’s inside the books he burns. The government educates how citizens act by tv parlors throughout each house…

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow…