Question

In an essay of 500 to 700 words, please address how the following artifacts/documents advocate for a specific view of the individual in society: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Civil Disobedience, and The Unknown Citizen. In doing so, you should place each artifact/document in its proper era/civilization, explain its context (ie, the ideas and events that shaped it) and message.

Answer 1

In 1517,the painter Bosch attempted to depict the whole of human experience from life to afterlife in three related canvases. The first on the left is meant to represent Paradise; the last on the right is hell. And in the center lies The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Bosch never dated his paintings, which makes makes art historians' jobs a little trickier. Some posit that he began The Garden of Earthly Delights in 1490,when he would have been about 40 years old. But the piece has been estimated to have been completedsomewhere between 1510 and 1515.

The Garden of Earthly Delights first entered the historical record in 1517,when Italian chronicler Antonio de Beats probablynoted seeing it in a brussels palace that belonged to counts of Nassau. He didn't note the critical reception of the piece,but the fact that reproductions were made, including a painting and a tapestry, suggests Bosch's bawdy and bizarre take on damnation found in an audience.

The Garden of Earthly Delights earned Bosh a place as a pioneering surrealist. Surrealism didn't spring on to the scene until the 1920s with the rise of Bosh-admirer Salvador Dali,but Bosh's jarring juxtapositions and head scratching symbols have caused some modern critics to call him the world's first surrealist, 400 yaers before Dali.

The Equiano's Interesting Narrative is Olaudah Equiano's autobiography.It was first published in 1789 in London. The narratiev is argued to represent a variety of styles,such as a slavery narrative,travel narrative and spiritual narrative. This narrative describes Equiano's time spent in enslavement,and documents his attempts at becomingg an independant man through his study of the Bible,and his eventual success in gaining his own freedom and in business thereafter.

This narrative begins with Equiano's kidnpping by slave traders. Equiano traveled extensively with his master,the captain of a British tarding vessel. and was allowed to own minor trade exchanges. In 1766, he used his savings to purchase his freedom. He obtained a job working for a scientist in England,while also traveling as an abolitionist and public speaker.

Thoreau's civil disobedience espouses the need to prioritize one's conscience over the dictates of the law . It cricizes American social institutions and policies,most prominently slavery and the Mexican - American war. Thoreau draws on his own experiences and explains why he refused to pay taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican war. Thoreau argues that thera re two laws: the laws of men and the higher laws of god and humanity.If the laws of men are unjust,then one has every right to disobey them. Thoreau further argues that the United Staes fits his criteria for an unjust government,given its support of slavery and its paractice of aggressive war.

"The Unknown Citizen" was written by the British poet W.H Auden ,not long and he mved to America in 1939.The poem is a kind of satirical eleegy written in praise of a man who has recently died and who lived what the goverment has deemed an exemplary life. On the other hand,the poem implicitly critiques the standardisation of modern life, suggesting that peoplerisks losing sight what it means to be an individual when they focus exlusively on the same statussymbols and markers of acheivement (like having the right jobb,the right no.of kids,the right car,and so forth)

The Unknown Citizen is both satirical and disturbing, written by Auden to highlight the role of the individual and the increasingly faceless bureaucracy taht can arise in anycountry, with any type of government,be it left-wing or right-wing.