Culture and Society in Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how living in a small community means knowing your neighbors, their history, and all the aspects of their lives. In particular, it looks at how there has always been a division of 'they' and 'we' within the cultural determinants of society. It shows how, in Bryson's "Lost Continent", he becomes the "other" in a world where acceptance is based on being a small town resident. It also examines how, in the short story, "The Country of the Blind", by H.G. Wells, difference is also what defines the relationship between a group and an individual.

From the Paper:

"As Bryson characterizes it: "It was inconceivable that a nation so firmly attached to small-town ideals, so dedicated in its fantasies to small-town notions, could not have somewhere built one perfect place--a place of harmony and industry, a place without shopping malls and oceanic parking lots, without factories and drive-in churches, without Kwick-Kraps and Jiffi-Shits and commercial squalor from one end to the other" (39). This is the place Bryson names "Amalgam." It is a combination, amalgamation of the attributes of small town perfection. It is too cute and wonderful to be real. Like Sun Valley, Idaho (and the western movie set), it has built a facade of what is believed to be the epitome of what it is supposed to be. It is too real to be true; too innocent to harbor the sin and corruption or, at least, too lost to discriminate between what is and isn't a part of the observable culture."

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• Comparison Essay # 109759 : "Modern Society in Literature"

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