Nian Liu

Summary March 24th,

In class we had presentations today and Alyson presented the story Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities to the class. After a brief presentation we learn from Alyson that there were parallels between the story of Monk Eastman with the movie Gangs of New York. We then get into the topic of how Borges "fictionalizes," themes when he writes about real people. Diviani adds that, "Monk Eastman was a real man." Thus helping us understand the comparison between the story of Monk Eastman and the movie Gangs of New York. They both are similiar because both the author of the book and director of the movie romanticizes the historical facts on the gangs of New York and they do this by adding texture and imagination to the specific scenes and events in that time period. We also talked about the figure of a gangster, where they were seen as "petty theives and robbers. Along with these descriptions were the transactions from this image of robber/theif/low life to a this fighting hero in the army. Monk Eastman never changed his behavior in what he was doing but had only changed occupations and everybody's perspectives on his criminal behaviors changed from shame to valor. Diviani said that this was, "Criminal behavior reversed, the anti-hero or heroism with inequity." This made me think about how we look up to both the best gangsters or the best soldier with this idleness, that he is this great unstoppable being. Its kind of scary and thats why we praise these figures in our society. Next we moved on to the story "Hakim, the masked dyer of merv". Diviani taught us about "Prophet Religion", and that many have named themselves as prophets and descendents of god. We stumble upon the topic of orientalism and how it represents the cultures of the East. It is said in Edward Said's book called Orientalism that there is bias, prejudice, against oriental cultures from the western culture. Everything is made mystical, and exaggerations are formed. We compared it to the Persian king in the movie 300, and I totally agree, because when we picture any Eastern character's, for instance a Chinese man from China, we imagine a man with chicky eyes and a bamboo hat. We learn today that people who don't understand other cultures, often exaggerate the authentic figure or perspective of the actual oriental culture. This prejudice, mystification, and orientalism was brought up due to the western colonization in the 1970's which pumped fuel to Said's ideas.