In the media, masculinity can often portray men to have a darker side, seemingly impeccable people who have key flaws that are only exposed in their persona when they face challenges and difficulties. One example of these types of men is the character Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon), from the film School Ties (1992) directed by Robert Mandel. Using narrative, symbolic and techical elements throughout the film, the audience is positioned to see Charlie Dillon, although spoiled and rich, as society’s perception
emotional reaction towards the irreversibility of time. It is a sentiment which is conservative in nature and is incontrovertibly flawed. Moreover, it poses great dangers as it challenges the post-Enlightenment idea of the progressive nature of time, seeing instead the present as inferior to an idealised past. This type of literature, perhaps reflective of nostalgia’s early days as a disease, tends to see the sentiment as something that should be scrutinised and approached cautiously. Yet, while nostalgia
The Dispossessed Following World War I, novels describing utopias gradually decreased in number, until the genre almost went extinct in mid-century, being replaced by dystopias like the famous Nineteen-Eighty-Four written by George Orwell. Later on, in the mid-seventies, fuelled by the upsurge of social reform that began in the late sixties and continued into the new decade, new utopias graced the scene, the most memorable ones being Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Samuel R. Delany's Triton, and
Woman: God’s second mistake? Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, who regarded ‘thirst for power’ as the sole driving force of all human actions, has many a one-liners to his credit. ‘Woman was God’s second mistake’, he declared. Unmindful of the reactionary scathing criticism and shrill abuses he invited for himself, especially from the ever-irritable feminist brigade. The fact and belief that God never ever commits a mistake, brings Nietzsche’s proclamation dashingly down into the dust bin