About Me and this Blog

 

My name is Joel Nelson. I like writing, designing games, and thinking about ways to improve the world. I live in Oregon and Alaska currently, and hobbies other than playing and designing games have been eclipsed by current events. I am currently a Junior at Grand Canyon University working on my English major. This blog, “Wisdom of the World,” was created to explore the wisdom of great authors from around the world. While it is a school project, I wanted to use this opportunity to find and express actual helpful things about living, useful information about the nature of humanity for myself and others to find. The project was interesting enough that I intend to continue it later on, if I can find the time.

Over the course of the 20th century, more and more easy means of communication developed around the world. Mass media, ranging from radio to television to the internet, blurred the boundaries between nationalities and countries and made it easier and easier to get news and communicate between nations. As a result of this, progressively more and more literature from around the world is in common circulation, and more of the best authors have had their works translated and put on the internet.

Literature written in the 20th century starts to represent this global shift in several ways. More people belong to several cultures or transition between cultures more over their lifetimes due to innovations in transportation. This causes the literature and stories they write to reflect multiple cultures, sometimes reflecting multiple sides of cultural conflicts and exploring themes which were much less prominent in the past.

Seeming to belong to several cultures or fall between several cultures also causes conflict within many writers in recent times. This causes conflicts within those authors large enough to direct their writings towards an exploration of this issue, and thus many pieces 20th century literature become less about one culture and more about an individual exploration of the problems a person encounters with the varying cultures around them.

This shift begins to mean that, while works are still grounded in the language and culture of their authors, many works could start be considered global literature, rather than the literature of one country. In regards to this kind of literature, “global” means simply that a work doesn’t rest within one culture, but examines culture itself or explores a relationship of conflict between cultures. Global literature comes from an increased connection of the various countries of the world to each other.

Despite this globalization, peoples’ heritage and culture always tend to matter a great deal to them, as any person cares about where they came from. Peoples who were treated poorly in the past recognize more than ever their deserved equality, people strive to fight prejudices and cultural biases, and many people hope to live in a way that honors their past while looking to improve their future. All together, these goals make the writings of these people very interesting to look through, as kernels of wisdom are discovered all around the world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz - Wisdom of an Urbanizing World

Image
  The world has changed so much over the last few centuries that if a person from even the 1800s were to suddenly be transported to the present, they would have almost no idea what they were looking at. There were a few advantages to living life in modern cities in the 1900s, but there were many who described these urban jungles as vile places that would drive people crazy. Octavio Paz , in his poem I Speak of the City , and Pablo Neruda, in his poem Walking Around , both explored this theme of how these modern cities are filled with terrible conditions that can lead people to despair and insanity.           Pablo Neruda’s Walking Around is the more jarring of the two. Neruda describes with a   manic energy how he’s tired of being a man, how he would love to do insane things like murdering a nun, scaring a notary, or running through the streets with a knife. Surrounding his own madness, Neruda vividly describes the city as a hideous and wretched place, noting things like sulphur-col
Read more

Richard Wright and Chinua Achebe - Wisdom at the Crossroads of Cultures

Image
  Increasingly, the cultures of different areas come into contact with each other, cross, and even merge. Major examples of this can be found in Africa’s interactions in recent centuries with other spreading societies, both in how Europeans influenced Africa and in how many Africans ended up oppressed and enslaved in America. Richard Wright  and Chinua Achebe   are two writers who explored the topics of racial and cultural clashing in America and Africa. Two of their stories, Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man and Achebe’s Chike’s School Days , both explore the theme that prejudice between cultures leads to conflict in youths. The Man Who Was Almost a Man examines this theme directly, following a young African American man named Dave whose inner conflict between his society’s view of blacks and his own need to feel like a man leads him to getting a hold of a gun. His motives are the most clear when he first feels the sense of power his gun gives him. “Could kill a man with a gun
Read more