...Living With Strangers Sometimes it can be a leap in the dark to move from a small city to a big city. You start somewhere new; an unknown place filled with new experiences, challenges and strangers. It can be overwhelming at first, and it might as well take some time to grow accustomed to the new culture and what the city has to offer. The situation can especially be difficult to someone who comes from a city, where one is used to live in closely encircling. As an example of this kind of situation is Siri Hustvedt’s essay ‘Living with Strangers’, which is written in 2002 Hustvedt describes in her essay her move from rural Minnesota to New York City in 1978 and how suddenly norms and rules change for her. In Minnesota it is the custom to greet everyone you meet on the road, even though you do not know the person. If you pass someone in silence, you will be considered as discourteous and it can lead to accusations of snobbery. This is the worst and rudest possible thing you can do and it gets compared as a sin in the egalitarian state. A good place to start is the title of the essay ‘Living With Strangers’, because it sums up the thesis in the text and Hustvedt’s point with the text. The title refers to a major problem in every city - whether it is a big or small one, and it is because the society that we live in now has changed and is still changing. The late modern society is characterized by the fact, that we no longer are bound by old traditions and habits. We are instead...
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...Essay “Living with Strangers” Minnesota and New York are two thoroughly diverse cities, but still there are exceptions of this belief - they both, like every other city in the world, have their own tacit norms and proprieties. Cultures and societies have through time build ethics, which people outside the given group or civilization won’t understand. It can be everything from simply greeting each other, from rural Minnesota where “hi” slip of people’s tongues like honey to New York where its normal to live side by side with strangers, and addressing others on the street will make you seem ridiculous. This huge culture gap is what inspired Siri Hustvedt to write her anecdote “Living with Strangers”. The text is an essay, which is characterized by several things. It’s a non-fictional text, which means its about something real, and relates to this in an unbiased way. It is a very subjective style, written from a personal point of view, where the writer used own experience and reflections: “When I moved to New York in 1978, I quickly discovered what it meant to live among hordes of strangers…”. You can tell the text is personal by the fact that “I” is used a lot. The way of writing will seem very convincing to the ready. Hustvedt uses the ethos argument and therefore seems truthful and upstanding as a writer about this particular topic. The title represents the main topic quite well, as it refers to a very common paradox in urban societies - we have been to the moon...
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...In a city full of prospective strangers, consistently active streets and sidewalks create a safer urban environment and a more comfortable as well as secure neighborhood. As said by Jane Jacobs “there must be eyes upon the street”(Jacobs 35). In her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Jacobs dives deeper into the concept of eyes upon the street as she describes those eyes as “natural proprietors”(35), speaking of their importance in relation to the sidewalk and the safety of an urban community. In the text Jacobs points out how cities are reflections of their streets and sidewalk, thus “if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear.”(30). Ever since we are...
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...The Gods of Hospitality in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey In Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, much is made of hospitality as a recurring theme. In Ancient Greece the gods demand it. The nature and extent to which society today follows in that tradition has changed in form only, but not in substance. Food, shelter and protection of strangers from cultural norms of today, as the people of Ancient Greece were more inclined to take in strangers worn weary by travel. In the Iliad, the reader sees that in times of war, hospitality is provided to even the enemy. Housing strangers in one’s home was very common then, as many weary travelers trod by foot or sailed by boat to reach far-off destinations, making stops along the way. Moreover, since the Greeks believed the gods walked the earth amongst them, then turning down a travelers request, could mean rejecting a god masked from view. The Greeks took no chances in this regard; and with only a few exceptions, Homer’s literary characters comply with this religious doctrine and cultural norm. Hospitality in Ancient Greece, as portrayed by Homer, accounts, in part, for their longstanding world dominance and aligns itself in many ways with the Christianity enjoyed by many peace-loving nations of today. The guest-host relationship in both The Iliad and The Odyssey remain constant, the differences between the two dependent only on the differing circumstances posed by each tale (Biggs, Joseph, Schrodt & Dustan, n.d.) Today, America’s...
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...“Living With Strangers” Many people think that urban life in big cities means a happy life, with no worries and just pure happiness. But what is happiness? And what makes us think that urban life is pure happiness? In the essay “Living With Strangers” by Siri Hustvedt, we hear about a woman's move from the countryside of Minnesota, to the Big Apple in New York City. Her move is described with many comparisons with her previous life and experiences, and a lot of humor, which underlines her situation and her attitude to urban life. In the following essay I am going to analyze and comment on Siri Hustvedt’s essay “Living With Strangers”. Part of my essay will focus on the genre, the attitude to urban living and the contrasts between Siri’s life in Minnesota and her new life in New York City. As said, the essay is based on Siri Hustvedt’s own life and experiences. Siri Hustvedt grew up in Minnesota, where everybody knows and greets each other. Now she lives in New York City where nobody seems to care about each other, and where greeting strangers would be “impractical and unsound”. This is a big change for her, and she uses an overwhelming amount of detailed descriptions to describe her situation in the Big Apple. She uses many personal experiences and examples, which characterizes the essay genre. Furthermore, she is very reflective, descriptive, subjective and very personal in her way of writing the essay. “It didn’t take long for me to absorb the unwritten code of survival...
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...Ashley Collins Mrs. Buckley World Literature 24 November 2014 Living in a Meaningless World In his existential novel The Stranger, Albert Camus portrays his existential theme of the absurdity of the universe through the main character, Monsieur Meursault’s actions and his apparent lack of all human emotion. However, in this novel the reader will find that Meursault is oblivious to the absurd that Camus has falsified, but nonetheless Meursault is affected by the absurd. Camus explores this theme in order to explicate the importance of certain existential realities throughout his novel. For example, Meursault is always seeking logic in an illogical world; in addition, he sees no meaning in any of his interactions or relationships with the...
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...of the city. They become something of value only when people start to use them to conduct daily business and extracurricular activities. As I have observed in Wedgewood Drive, Lansdale during the early hours of the morning the streets are deserted except for a few people getting up to go to the mosque for prayer. As the day progresses the local residents start to make use of the streets and conduct their activities and that is when Jacobs’ solution to city safety and peace are brought forth. Jane Jacobs suggests that solution for sidewalk and city safety. In her book she states that “public peace…is not kept primarily by the police. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves” (Jacobs 32). In short, Jacobs says that the people themselves take charge of their own safety. The more people there, the more sets of eyes there are. The more eyes there are patrolling the...
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...November 29th, 2013 Strangers and how we perceive them. I was appalled by the sight of a young girl, malnourished, dirty, in torn cloths crying and begging for money on Ahmedabad Street in India. Just as I reached for my purse to give her some money, my host, Dr. Dalal pushed me aside, gestured me inside our parked car, locked the doors and exclaimed “I should have warned you! Haven’t you seen the movie “Slumdog Millionaire?” I was left shaking, words cannot describe the horror I felt for not helping out a poor desolate child. How could this helpless child be a victim of an organized crime of self-made beggars? To answer this question would be an essay in itself, however, I describe this, as one of many etched incidences in my life to illustrate that I misrecognized the beggar and was influenced by someone else’s preconceived stereotype image of “other, a stranger described as a beggar” that was different then us. The notion of “other and misrecognition” is described in Toni Morrison’s essay “Strangers” (1998) when she explores this concept by depicting a stranger as an image of a bizarre fisherwomen dressed in men’s clothing; while Brent Staples portrays his own image as a stranger and depicts how he is perceived as a threat to others in his essay “Black Men and Public Space” (1986). Although both Morrison and Staples offer differing accounts of their experiences and feelings, they both share the same vision, the correlation between “how we see strangers” versus “how we are...
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...B ‘Living With Strangers’ An enforced closeness that exclusively belongs to boyfriends and family is something you cannot run from when being on the sidewalk in New York City. So is this the definition of the so-called living with strangers? Siri Hustvedt is an American author who in 2002 wrote the personal essay ‘Living With Strangers’. She simply raises the pros and cons of living together in the big city of New York – in a very non-simplistic way. With personal experiences and thoughts throughout the whole essay, she holds on to the reader’s attention from the very first line. I will mainly focus on the choice of genre, together with the linguistic instruments that Siri Hustvedt uses in her essay. There are a lot of basics that feature the characteristics of a personal essay. The personal essay is often focused on a belief or an insight about life. It combines elements as the narrative’s former experiences or relationships and raises questions about open answers. Only this genre permits Siri to be subjective on a topic where the essay still has a professional level of seriousness, while the intimate connection between sender and receiver creates a certain sense of ethos that helps Siri convincing her audience. This genre also gives Hustvedt the space to express her experiences in a way to convince us of her impression of “Living With Strangers”. Although, there is not a precise view being shared as the personal essay’s main argument: Instead it is more a meticulous reflection...
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...thrilling tale, Beowulf, a mighty warrior, defeats both a demon and a dragon in the service of others. While many today display reserve in their abnegation towards others, sacrifice hold just as much honor today as it did in Beowulf’s time. Modern opinions of who one should die for differ significantly from Beowulf’s. First, he saved a kingdom of complete stranger, risking death in the process. Additionally, as his final act, Beowulf slayed a dragon, giving it’s gold to his subjects to help them prosper. In stark contrast, most people today have only a few close friends and relatives who they would suffer for. Most deem sacrifice for a stranger abnormal, meant only for the most saint-like among us. Why do so many of us withhold our selflessness when Beowulf...
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...dreams, craving her secret life…” Why are we afraid of admitting that we are day-dreamers? Why are we unwilling to accept that there’s a little bit of ‘Alice’ or ‘Walter Mitty’ in each of us? Do we fear what people would think of us; how they would laugh behind our backs; or is it simply the pre-conceived notion that “Nobody would understand”? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to real world! A world where one feels lost among 6.8 billion faces; and finds solace when he just whiles away hours staring at the ceiling fan, ‘pretending’ to sleep. In the real world, things couldn’t get more ‘realistic’ than this… Or could they? “Life is a long-long road and we are but travelers.” And like good travelers who are faithful to their voyage, we must journey on; in search of a niche where we would ‘fit in’, a niche that is symbolic of our ‘selves’. Why aren’t we told to enrich our voyage with experiences as enthralling as the adventures of Alice in Wonderland? Perhaps that is the reason why we fade into a world of our own every now and then. Because the outside world has nothing to offer (or so it may seem…), we seek our “Some place far away…” within ourselves… There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude… The strangest thing is that in spite of having encountered both these emotions, none of us have the acumen of explaining the difference between the two. What we do not realize is that in this ‘space’ that we have created, there is no...
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...Applicable CCM concepts and theories from The Terminal 1.High context vs low context in communication Daily communication includes verbal communication and nonverbal communication. Verbal communication is more common in low-context culture while nonverbal communication is more common in high-context culture. Edward Hall raised the concept of high context and low context in the book beyond culture. Context is the the commons and background knowledge that needs to be known and shared before effective communication between people. The more shared background knowledge is, the more commons there are. In detail, in communication in high-context culture, most of the information exists in the physical environment, or internalized in the individual body, and rarely exists in the encoding of the transmission of information. In communication in the low-context culture, a good amount of information exists in languages with clear encoding. For example: Navorski can only speak very limited English and have big problems communicating with Americans, which can be seen from the communication process in the beginning of the movie when Thurman and Frank Dixon asked him questions and he always gave an irrelevant answer. At the beginning, he could only use body gestures to communicate. However, North American is low-context culture while Bulgaria I suppose belongs to high context culture. Americans would feel it difficult to decode Bulgarian’s encoding, while language barrier makes Bulgarian’s...
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...taught about the danger of strangers. They learn at an early age that they should not talk to strangers. This practice is known as “Stranger Danger.” This fear of strangers has stemmed into parents wanting to have more control over their children, and trying to avoid having bad things happen to them. Naturally, no parent wants to see harm come to their children. As a result of being overprotected, children are becoming more and more sheltered. Children are often reliant on their parents until a much older age than what used to be considered the norm. In this paper, I will examine how “Stranger Danger” and its effects on childrens’ independence can be researched. I will examine the methods of research available. By examining the available types of research, I will further explore the types that best pertain to finding the answers to my question of whether or not “Stranger Danger” has caused us to shelter our children too much. Research Methods Existing Sources The first method of research is the use of existing sources. Many sources of information exist. The internet is a very useful tool in finding information that pertains to this theory. When using Google to search for the term “Stranger Danger,” one is presented with a wide array of choices. I chose to look for credible websites that could provide relevant information. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children issued a press release stating their view on “Stranger Danger”. Nancy McBride, the...
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...Living with strangers Living with Strangers is an essay written by Siri Hustvedt, and in it she discusses the difference between life in the big city and life in the countryside. More precisely, she discusses the difference in social rules and her opinion on it. Siri begins by briefly describing to the reader how one was expected to behave where she grew up. Whenever you encountered someone on the road, whether you knew them or not, you should always greet them. If you didn’t, you would be considered both rude and a snob, which was pretty much the worst thing you could be in that part of rural Minnesota. When Siri moved to New York City in 1978 and she was met by a world vastly different from what she knew, and quickly learned that the social code of conduct was quite different as well. Greeting everyone you meet simply isn’t practical in downtown New York, as you are confronted with hordes of people every time you leave the apartment. On the subway, you are forced into such close contact with strangers that you can smell their hair oil, perfume and sweat, a level of intimacy reserved for lovers and family in rural Minnesota. Another phenomenon of big city life, or coping technique as she calls it, is that whenever something odd happens in the public space, you simply pretend it isn’t happening. She presents several examples of strange people doing strange things, and every single spectator simply minding their own business. To give any kind of response is viewed as...
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...Living With Strangers Moving to a new place can be hard. You exchange your old surroundings with completely new ones, you have to change old habits, and you need to go out and explore new places and meet new people. This progress can be hard for some people and it will take a long time to get used to your new surroundings. Siri Hustvedt talks about this in “Living With Strangers” from 2002. In the essay Siri Hustvedt describes her experience when she moved from Minnesota to New York In 1978. The fact that it was brought in The New York Times might indicate that her essay presents the reality of the people of New York. The essay also appears like it was written to people who already have some knowledge about New York as an example she writes: “… was traveling uptown on the Second Avenue bus. At Twenty-Fourth Street …” (line 23-24 page 6). This would mean nothing to people who don’t know anything about the streets of New York and their bus system. During her essay Hustvedt reflects on the difference between her new home New York and her old home in Minnesota. She especially points out the fact, that in Minnesota everybody used to say “hi” to everybody, even people you didn’t know. Not even was it seen as being rude, but you could actually be looked at as a snob, which was the worst thing you could be looked at, but in New York it’s an entirely different story. Here it’s totally impossible to say hi to everybody, and nobody cares if you say hi to them because people don’t even...
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