Ben Tylecote

    1. For Herbert Marcuse, ‘the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction’ (‘The New Forms of Control’, p. 9). Explain Marcuse’s argument and consider its relevance to one or more of the texts you have studied on the module.     Marcuse’s argument   Marcuse tells us that the world we live in is not as free as we think. He argues we feel ‘needs’ for things we don’t ‘need’. Such needs perpetuate the toil, aggressiveness, misery and injustice that come with work. In effect these false needs make us work more in order to be able to attain them, trapping us in a form of ‘servitude’, in work.   Our true human needs have been preconditioned, they are genetic. Our human needs are our historical needs. Our true needs are those which we have needed through history to survive: nourishment, clothing, lodging etc. All others are ‘false needs’.  Needs imposed by society, by society’s masters. The fact ...

    Pragmatic analysis of Earnest Hemingway’s protagonists in his short story Hills Like White Elephants   The study of Pragmatics is a valuable perspective from which to analyse Earnest Hemingway’s work, which is frequently compared to an iceberg. Pragmatics is the study of “invisible” meaning, or how we recognize what is meant even when it is not actually said or written (Yule 2022). In his written acceptance speech for the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature, Earnest Hemingway clearly states his intent to “write and not speak” what he has to say (Robertson 2014). Driven by dialogue, his short story Hills Like White Elephants presents the relationship between a couple discussing abortion (although Hemmingway and his characters never explicitly say this) with uncooperative techniques that highlight issues and ultimately cognitive dissonance woven through their relationship and accentuated by the weaving river Ebro where the story is set. From my analysis I would expect to se...

  Narrative Analysis of a Passage from Chapter 20 of Jane Austen’s Persuasion The delay in Persuasion agrees with Garcia’s perspective that “it is the palpable quality of waiting… that interests Austen most.”(Garcia, 2018) Austen knows “we enjoy the suspense in delaying a denouement.”(Brooks quoted Bennet and Royle 2016, 57) She utilises, what we now recognise as Bremond’s model of structure (‘deficiency, improvement, satisfaction, degradation and back again,’) to engage the reader (Bremond 1970 quoted Jahn 2021) through their “waiting”. ‘Improvement’ I will argue, often comes with language. Whilst initially the ‘deficiency’ takes the form of physical distance between her love interests. Immediately we are told there is a “vacant space at hand.” The delicate adjective “vacant” with its negative connotations of emptiness or unuse suggest such a “space” is an issue, a “situation” that needs to be resolved. In the same first sentence that Anne notices this “space” it is revealed that ...