Other People's Lives

In "Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield, an elderly woman describes how she feels and what she sees as she visits Seaside Park on a Sunday afternoon for her weekly ritual. Miss Brill portrays a lonely, elderly English school teacher who would like a different reality from the one she lives in. Miss Brill attends Seaside Park as an escape from her reality and to feel as a part of society. Miss Brill time is only taken up by her trips to the park and her 5th grade students. Mansfield shows the reader how harmful criticism could be to someone who has not accepted reality. As a single woman, with no family nor kids, Miss Brill has created a different world in which she does not feel so alone, until she faces the reality of others. Miss…

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is a German Film Director who has worked on several short films before this movie. The Lives of Others is the first film that Donnersmarck had written, directed and won an oscar in 2006 for being the best foreign-language film. This film works in Germany, around 1984, while Germany was still split into 2 parts; East Germany and West Germany. The film depicts how the environment was like in Germany at this point of time and how one side is better than the other…

It was like any other day; basketball warm ups, a few sprints, rehydration, and everyone gathering around in a circle to start the game. This game wasn’t like every other game, we had a different coach sitting on the bench. We put our heads together and tried to play the game we love, but we looked like baby deer learning how to walk. We were so uncoordinated and confused. My team and I were left with so many question and such little reasoning. As we packed up our bags, you could feel the…

When an individual’s assumptions are challenged by significant discoveries, their lives are often transformed. This perspective is represented throughout Ernesto Che Guevara’s eclectic memoir, The Motorcycle Diaries, which details his arguably metamorphic journey through Latin America in the early 1950s and the diverse discoveries he makes, which are personal and political in their nature. Guevara’s varied and confronting encounters throughout his travels challenge his preconceived views of…

We all want certain things, and sometimes greedy people want more than others. Like just about everyone, I have been a greedy person, and have had greed. My greed is ordinary though it is my motivator to go to college, get a better job, and truly succeed in life. I believe greed is good and bad because it can bring out the worst in people, but others it truly drives them to just be successful, happy people. I hope to describe how greed is something that just about everyone has and what…

Jacob Riis was born on May 03, 1849, in Ribe, Denmark. Riis migrated to this country in 1870 on a steamship. . He arrived in New York City. Riis took on demanding jobs as an ironworker, farmer, and bricklayer. These jobs gave him a glimpse of the less fortunate side of America's economic system. However, it was not until he became a police reporter for the NYPD that he discovered the true suffering. Citizens living in extremely poor conditions. He felt compelled to find a way to expose this to…

There was never a rich baby left out on the streets, only those who came from an extremely poor mother. Most babies come from the East where their mothers were not married and had no name other than their own to bestow upon the baby. In most cases, mothers would only wrap the innocent babies in newspaper. In rare occasions, they were some found in a clean slip and a little message pinned onto their diaper. The messages would be a note for those who picked them up, thanking them and asking them…

Jacob Riis was a Danish born immigrant that arrived to the United States in 1870. As a police reporter, Riis used his interest in tenement life and knowledge of photography to attempt to bring about social change for the impoverished of New York. His crusade against poverty culminated in the publication of his work How the Other Half Lives, in which Riis presents a thorough analysis of the problems faced by the poor of New York as a result of urban expansion, rapid industrialization and…

The Introduction and the first chapter of the Riis’s book “How the Other Lives”, seem to vividly depict drastic changes in New York City’s demographic structure, which happened during the vast immigration wave of 1880’s. His photograph projections intrigued and shocked the opulent class, since it was not aware of the struggles of those underneath. Riis’s life’s work has only gained in relevance as the time was passing, since overcrowded tenements persisted in modified forms and shapes to this…

He isn’t—the concept of this mirror phase is simply more applicable in other stages of life, rather than just between 6-18 months. He actually touches on this broadness, though not in the same direct manner, saying that “[i]t suffices to understand the mirror stage […] as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term” (Lacan 76). He himself is defining this stage of development as a manner of identification. Mirriam-Webster defines that word as a “psychological orientation of…