Essays on Conformist

Synopsis

Franny and Zoey were written as two different stories, the first being a short story about Franny, a college student dissatisfied with the pretentious American society as epitomized by her boyfriend, Lane. He even pretends he does not remember the letter he was just reading before the train arrived. The events of the story take place at a French restaurant where Lane takes Franny during their date, and the conversation that ensues is indicative of just how the two are different. Lane talks incessantly about his school work and assumes that Franny does not understand some of the words ...

Business

The rapid economic development of China opened up a myriad range of opportunities along with equally numerous challenges for the international firms that were in pursuit of integrating themselves with the banking industry of China. Regardless of being founded upon a vast set of highly conventional and conformist guiding principles, the government of China was pretty successful in attracting considerable amount of foreign direct investment and garnering international interest for itself. However, while several emerging economies adopted several trends that many global banking pioneers had set in the industry, China on the contrary designed its own conformist standards and ...

Ken Kesey (1935 – 2001) published One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962 – a crucial point in American social history. The McCarthyism of the 1950’s was receding and Kesey’s novel seems, in retrospect to foreshadow or to anticipate the enormous social changes that were to come to in the 1960’s – from the Civil Rights movement to the explosion of rock music, from hippies to experimentation with drugs, from alternative lifestyles to Woodstock. Kesey had worked in a mental hospital while he was a student and was partly drawing on his own experiences of what he he saw and ...

John Updike’s story ‘A & P’ was first appeared in ‘The New Yorker’ on July 22, 1961. Even now, fifty years later, it still is, despite its extreme brevity, perhaps even because of it, his most frequently anthologized short story and, one might assume, one of his most appreciated and valued. It is a story in which plot, point of view and character are intermingled.

The plot is very simple. Three scantily clad young women arrive at the local A & P, and cause a stir because they are dressed for the beach. The other shoppers are shocked, but the ...

John Updike’s short story ‘A & P’ was first published in ‘The New Yorker’ on July 22, 1961. Even now, fifty years on, it still, despite its brevity, or perhaps because of it, his most frequently anthologized short story and, one would assume, one of his most widely enjoyed and read. This essay will analyze the popular appeal of ‘A &P’ and reach a justified conclusion about why it carries on being read so widely and with such apparent gusto and interest. The ways in which Updike writes the story are important, as is Updike’s presentation of ...