This occurrence is primarily due to the fact that one of the central tenets of feminism involves analyzing the exploitation of power in terms of its effect upon women. For the most part, a study about terrorism and intelligence relating to this fact has little to do with gender. However, "feminist research also embraces many of the tenets of postmodern critiques as a challenge to current society" (Author, date, p. 25-26). Those critiques, of course, revolve around relationships of power and the marginalization of people due to these relationships. In that respect, feminism possesses a finite amount of validity for its application to intelligence measures for counterterrorism protection efforts, in a similar capacity as postmodernism. However, the principle circumscription of the feminist perspective pertains to its innate preoccupation with gender.
In many ways, the validity of employing critical theory to the study of intelligence, counterterrorism and protection is limited for…...

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References

I CAN't DO THIS WITHOUT the NAME and AUTHOR of THIS BOOK

Postmodernism
Discovering Postmodernism in Advertising

For the sake of this task, an advertisement from a company called Patagonia will be used. Patagonia is a company that provides an array of sporting and outdoor equipment, along with a huge variety of sports and active apparel. Patagonia is an American company that has been in business for more than three decades. This is a company that began as a very small company that provided supplies for rock climbers that branched into a franchise that supplies equipment and apparel for many sports and outdoor activities. In addition to providing equipment and apparel, Patagonia is a company that supports environmentalism and "going green" before it was the trend that it is today. Patagonia is committed to environmental awareness, protection, and support in every stage of production, including after the consumer has purchased a product from their company.

Postmodernism is a term that came into circulation in the…...

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References:

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Morris, Martin. "Interpretability and social power, or, why postmodern advertising works." Media, Culture, & Society, 27(2005): 697 -- 718.

Stern, Barbara, B. "Textual Analysis in Advertising Research: Construction and Deconstruction of Meanings." Journal of Advertising, 25(1996): 61-74

Postmodernism is a nebulous and often poorly defined term. There is nothing genuinely concrete that separates the cultural icons that are labeled as postmodern from those that are not. Satire, cynicism, sarcasm, and other common features of postmodern sensibility are nothing new. The best way to understand the essence of postmodernism is to distinguish it from modernism, which was particularly enamored with science. Postmodernism is "largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality," (PBS). Postmodernism embraces concepts such as social construction and other contructivist theories that suggest that there may be no absolute objective reality. Eastern philosophy has championed constructivism for thousands of years, making postmodernism seem derivative. Postmodernism has the potential to seem nihilistic, which is why Frederick Nietzsche is credited as being one of the forerunners of postmodern theory (Aylesworth). There is no absolute truth, religious path, or ethic, according to…...

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Works Cited

Aylesworth, G. "Postmodernism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2005. Retrieved online:  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ 

Keep, Christopher, McLaughlin, Tim, and Parmar, Robin. "Defining Postmodernism." Retrieved online:  http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0242.html 

PBS. "Postmodernism." Retrieved online:  http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html 

Salberg, Daniel, Stewart, Robert, Wesley, Karla, and Weiss, Shannon. "Postmodernism and its Critics." University of Alabama Department of Anthropology. Retrieved online:  http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Postmodernism%20and%20Its%20Critics

In the third section of the book Babette is cheating on Jack, hoping to gain access to a drug (Dylar) that treats people who fear dying. Clearly DeLillo is playing off of society's fear of death. Eventually Jack kills the man Babette was having liaisons with.
hite Noise was published in 1985, which makes DeLillo something of a clairvoyant because the author reflects on "…the way the mediations of television map the realm of desire in the space of the supermarket and the shopping mall" -- and today's Home Shopping Network offers exactly "…the intertwined spheres of desire that DeLillo's novel so suggestively connects" (Duvall, 2003, 188). Beyond those links, Duvall references critic Paul Cantor who believes hite Noise is in a very real way "…concerned with showing parallels between German fascism and contemporary American culture" (188).

Critic Mark Conroy believes that Jack Gladney's life is coming apart -- and has…...

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Works Cited

Best, Steven, and Kellner, Douglas. The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the third Millennium. New York: Guilford Press.

Caton, Lou F. "Romanticism and the Postmodern Novel: Three Scenes from Don DeLillo's

White Noise." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 143, Detroit:

Gale Group (2001): Retrieved from Literature Resource Center.

The scene is interrupted by the laughter of a woman, Willy's mistress, which only Willy could hear. When Willy approaches his mistress, he engages in another daydream. This is how discontinuity is illustrated in the Death of a Salesman. In this manner of storytelling, many questions arise as to how the story really goes. This renders some confusion to a reader since the plot jumps around. This manner of storytelling is different from the traditional way of storytelling wherein the story is told in a fluid, continuous manner. Arthur Miller ignored the standard rule of form when it comes to telling a story. This manner of storytelling is also characteristic of postmodern literature where confusion and incoherence is celebrated.
Another element of Death of a Salesman that adheres to the postmodern movement is its focus on Willy Loman's story. By focusing on Willy Loman alone, Death of a Salesman disregards…...

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Reference

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

His never-ending desire for Judy Green represents the feeling of sorrow, incompleteness, and pessimism that is often a major staple of later modernist writers in American literature. In this, Fitzgerald shows how not even success in achieving the American Dream can guarantee a happy ending, and in the end suffering is always present even in all rings of American society.
Postmodernism was born out of this complex environment. James Baldwin's

"Sonny's Blues" embodies this more postmodern style and tone. Postmodernism really highlight the struggles within contemporary society, especially being faced by minority groups that constantly have to deal with the oppression of the white majority. Yet, it is this sense of suffering that is often a crucial element to building a stronger character with much deeper insight and successes. Throughout the story, Sonny deals with immense suffering. He has been in jail given up on by his family, and lived a…...

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Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." Web.  http://www.scribd.com/doc/7086554/Sonnys-Blues-by-James-Baldwin

Postmodernism
Post Modernism and Individualism and Responsibility

Introduction and Postmodern Definition

Understanding the postmodern paradigm is a little like looking in to a bowl of spaghetti, and without using any utensils, trying to determine how many individual pieces of spaghetti are present, and what is their average length. The postmodern thought process which now dominates our culture is inter-twining, complex philosophy which is the combination of failed modern thought, along with the new demands of individuals who seek to find personal meaning in an increasingly high speed, individualized, yet meaningless and impersonal digital world.

The term postmodernism has its original understanding in architecture, and art. The postmodern artist grew tired of the traditional means which were accepted as means to produce and express art. The artist evolved to the view that all values and boundaries are baseless, that nothing is knowable or can be communicated beyond the experience of life itself. Extreme postmodern artists…...

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Bibliography

Adler PA, Adler P. 1999. Transience and the postmodern self: the geographic mobility of resort workers. Sociol. Q. 40:31-58

Baumeister RF. 1998. The self. See Gilbert et al. 1998, pp. 680-740

Callero, Peter. 2003. The Sociology of the Self. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 29.

Foucault M. 1994. Two lectures. In Culture, Power, History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. NB Dirks, G Eley, SB Ortner, pp. 200-21. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press Gergen KJ. 1999. An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage

Postmodernism is a philosophy and an aesthetic that has become increasingly popular in both mass culture and academia alike. It is characterized in its style by pastiche, self-referential humor, and often parodies the art form it is attempting to create. Writers in the postmodern genre are hyper-conscious about the fact that they are creating something, and deliberately 'show the seams' of their work, forcing the reader to question what is fiction and what is real. This highlights the constructed nature of the written word. But while postmodernism may be fairly obvious in art, to understand what postmodernism 'is,' philosophically speaking, the definition of modernism must be clarified, given that it was this philosophical movement to which postmodernism was reacting against.
First and foremost, modernism advocated the idea that there was the "existence of stable, coherent 'self', independent of culture and society" (Drake 2012). This self might feel alienated or unhappy, but…...

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References

Aylesworth, Gary. (2012). Postmodernism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Retrieved at:  http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/postmodernism 

Drake, Tom. (2012). Modernism vs. postmodernism. The University of Idaho. Retrieved at:

 http://www.class.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/modernism_vs_postmodernism.htm

Postmodernism
In order to understand the current themes in philosophy of postmodernism and post structuralism, it is important that we understand the structuralists themes, which dominated the philosophical thinking in the twentieth century and influenced many postmodernists and post-structuralists. In the early and mid 20th century there were a number of structural theories develop to explain human existence. In his study of language, the structural linguist Ferdinand aussaaure (1857-1913) proposed that "meaning" was to be found within the structure of a whole language and the system of language rather than in the analysis of individual words. He suggested that by studying language we will be able to understand how the human beings create meaning and how this process is connected to practice. For the Marxist, the truth of human existence could be understood by an analysis of economic structures. While the Psychoanalyst attempted to describe the structure of the psyche in…...

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Sources:

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Powell, Jim. Derrida for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1997.

Klages, Mary. Structuralism/Poststructuralism, 2001 at  http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/1997derridaA.html 

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, Trans. By Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon, 1977.

Starting with the names of the characters and continuing with many of the events in the novel, he is ironically picturing a consumer society that needs to rely on certainties in order to secure its present and avoid alienation, which is why the entire conspiracy theory is developed: to provide explanations.
The manner in which the novel is written provides a surrealistic picture which alludes to realities of the 1960s and, from this perspective, the book is very well-anchored in the present. Just a few examples are worth mentioning here. One of these is the allusion to the eatles, one of the anchor elements of the 1960s culture. One of the songs in the novel is called "I want to Kiss Your Feet," a play on the famous eatles song "I want to Hold Your Hand." Other references to the eatles are much more subtle: the Volkswagens remind of the…...

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Bibliography

1. Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to the Crying of Lot 49 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994)

2. Merrill, Robert, Scholl Peter a.. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos. Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1978

3. Pynchon, Thomas R. The Crying of Lot 49. Harper and Row, 1986.

4. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Miniature Bookshelf. 1969

Violence should best be seen in the context of an individual alienation caused, most likely, both by the apparent lack of moral norms and, at the same time, by the continuous development of the individual, in a constant quest for the absolute (and this can be the absolute feeling, the absolute perception, the absolute manifestations and sensations etc.).

ith the underlying belief that everything is permitted, the modern or the postmodern individual is willing to go along with all types of experiments that are likely to help in his quest for continuous development. The sexual fetish presented here is clearly abnormal, especially since it is not a remote sexual practice, but the individual permissiveness allows for this to happen. At the same time, it almost becomes a new normality for the group, a normality which is accepted as such (or rather not discussed) by the group. This new normality accepts all…...

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With the underlying belief that everything is permitted, the modern or the postmodern individual is willing to go along with all types of experiments that are likely to help in his quest for continuous development. The sexual fetish presented here is clearly abnormal, especially since it is not a remote sexual practice, but the individual permissiveness allows for this to happen. At the same time, it almost becomes a new normality for the group, a normality which is accepted as such (or rather not discussed) by the group. This new normality accepts all things that are seen as abnormalities by the other members of society. This could be a thesis that Ballard supports throughout the novel: the relativism of normality, the incapacity of accepting a basic set of clearly valid and generally accepted moral norms.

Further more, the novel seems to imply that the postmodern individual will eventually resume his existence to a single important objective during his lifetime: feeling good. In order to reach this objective, the postmodern man will resort to any type of instruments that will help him reach that particular stage of development. However, a society where the only primary objective of its members is to physically 'feel good' in any conditions and without any other values is definitely a corrupt and reduced society.

One word on the subject of celebrities in Ballard's book. Once more the author becomes a visionary, because the obsession with celebrity has increased exponentially from 1973 to the present day. In the book, the main character has an obsession with Elizabeth Taylor, dreaming of a crash into her car. The attempt fails at the end of the book, as he plunges over a bus instead. What is with this fascination with celebrities? It is born out of the consumer society that promotes such values, but also from the subconscious need of individuals to have some static coordinates around which one's life can rotate. The postmodern world is a consumer society, one in which celebrities can offer such false coordinates.

It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. (Borges 1)

This is very obviously an example of Borges stressing a universal emotional challenge to self, how so often the individual gets lost in the public image and fails to integrate the internal thoughts to public expectations. The work is in many ways an oral commentary on self-actualization.

hile "The Lottery in Babylon" is a commentary on civics and tradition, the self is lost in the evolution of how as individuals in a culture tend to divorce…...

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Works Cited

Borges, Jorge L. "The Lottery in Babylon" http://frot.org/borges/lottery.html

Borges, Jorge L. "Borges and I  http://spdbv.vital-it.ch/TheMolecularLevel/WelRed/Borges01.pdf 

Calvino, Italo, "If on a winter's night a traveler." New York: Harvest. 1982.

However, these themes were conveyed through non-traditional forms or structures, like Whitman and Dickinson's poetry. Apart from these two poets of the postmodernist tradition, other poets who have created works in the postmodernist form are DH Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, and WH Auden.
Looking into the poetry of DH Lawrence, particularly the poem "Intimates," readers witnessed the poet's contemplation of a seemingly mundane issue, yet a vital one in addressing the nature of humanity at present: self-centeredness and -indulgence. In it, Lawrence answered the age-old question to human problems, wherein the solution does not depend on another person, but actually must come from the person experiencing the problem. That is, humanity's problems were actually self-imposed ones, and they can only be resolved by the individual himself/herself. Lawrence's style is characteristic of postmodernism because there was no attempt to remain neither ambiguous nor mysterious in the poem; he only expressed…...

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Bibliography

Auden, W.H. E-text of "Who's Who." Available at  http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=8272&poem=69853 .

Jacoby, P. (1999). "Postmodernist Poetry: a Movement or an Indulgence?" Available at http://home.san.rr.com/prjacoby/bishop_plath_sexton.html.

Lawrence, DH E-text of "Intimates." Available at http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/dhlpoem.htm.

Lowell, R. E-text of "To Speak of Woe That Is In Marriage." Available at  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15282 .

Postmodernism is many things to many people, yet no single product or outcome of the postmodern era is representative of the entirety of the idea. Postmodernism was more than simply a collection of items, but rather an entire way of life shaped by the generational and worldwide shifts occurring in the world at the time. Postmodernism represents a period of time, with undefined borders, but certainly the height of Postmodernism began during the late 1960s and ended in popularity by the 1990s, with a new wave of intellectual thinking taking the center stage. (Essortment, 1) To define it roughly, postmodernism is about self-expression and creativity, the ability to take risks, as well as to break convention with the past. The mental constraints placed on the world due to the existential fear of nuclear destruction, as well as the impending doom of constant war due to the American troubles in Vietnam…...

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Works Cited

"Civil Rights Movement." - John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. Web. 09 Mar. 2012. .

"DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MODERN ART AND POSTMODERN ART." Difference between Modern Art and Postmodern Art by Francis Berry. Web. 09 Mar. 2012. .

Dorsten, Van. "Postmodernist Music." Fast 'n' Bulbous: Reviews, Rants & Lists Up The Wazoo. Web. 09 Mar. 2012. .

"Edutainment Andy Warhol - 1928-1987." Andy Warhol Biography. Web. 09 Mar. 2012. .

Postmodernism, either with or without the hyphen, has become a one of the most talked about concepts in the last decades. Postmodern is one of the most utilized terms these days, so defining it could prove useful: In a literal sense it means that which comes after the modern, and this is how the term is generally used. One of the most important issues is to correctly evaluate the diversity of postmodernism.
This problem revolves actually around the significance of the term 'modern', since it has very different meanings in art, literature, architecture and philosophy. The postmodern change has been identified as early as the late fifties to as late as the early seventies, but it was the changes in the 1960s that made cultural critics appreciate that we have entered a new historical period. The postmodernist shift has been associated with the full assault of consumer capitalism. Frederick Jameson said…...

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Reference:

1. Zuckert, Catherine "The postmodern problem." Perspectives on Political Science; Spring95, Vol. 24 Issue 2, p87

2. Wikipedia -- Article on Postmodernism

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

3. Weiss, Shannon, Wesley Karla, "Postmodernism and its Critics," Department of Anthropology College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama,  http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/pomo.htm

In this essay, I will explore the life, works, and impact of acclaimed author David Foster Wallace through an in-depth and detailed description of his writing style, themes, and personal struggles. To create a strong thesis statement on the topic of David Foster Wallace, it is essential to narrow down your focus and highlight a specific aspect of his life or work that you want to analyze or argue in your essay. Some potential angles could be examining how Wallace's use of language and footnotes shaped his unique writing style, delving into the themes of irony and sincerity in his works,....

Certainly! Here are a few lesser-known but interesting essay topics on Julian Barnes:

1. The role of photography and visual art in Barnes' work
2. The influence of classical literature and mythology in Barnes' writing
3. Barnes' exploration of memory and the nature of personal identity in his novels
4. The significance of music and musicians in Barnes' novels, such as in "The Noise of Time" and "The Sense of an Ending"
5. The portrayal of aging and mortality in Barnes' work, particularly in "Levels of Life" and "Nothing to Be Frightened Of"
6. Barnes' engagement with contemporary political and social issues in his novels, such....

Literary Essay Topic Ideas

1. The Power of Ambiguity: Archetypes and Symbols in Literature

Discuss the role of archetypes and symbols in creating ambiguity and depth in literature.
Analyze how archetypes, such as the hero's journey or the fallen woman, provide a framework for understanding human experiences.
Examine how symbols, like the color red or the imagery of water, enhance the meaning and complexity of literary works.

2. The Influence of Social Context on Literary Interpretation

Explore how the historical, cultural, and social context of a literary work influences its interpretation.
Discuss the impact of factors such as class, gender, ethnicity, and....