Conflict Happens

In this post I will be responding to three questions posed about how conflict within the writen language can be both discovered and used to an artists' advantage.



Question 1) I recently had a misunderstanding with one of my coworkers. We were disscussing our college expierieces and he felt that the most important part of college life was the partying and having fun. I, on the other hand felt that work and school should come before the partys. We went back and forth for a while on the issue, getting nowhere, when I realized that we were not going to come to an agreement, because we do not share the same history and experiences. In this situation level 3 of Kaufer's system was in action.

Level three happens when two people "possess conflicitng evidence" (Kaufer 58) on the issue at hand. It became clear to me that we had this issue when my coworker mentioned that his older brother, who had a very active party life in college, was a recent graduate. The stories which his brother had told him made the party life seem like the best way to spend college. I, on the other hand grew up with a parent who was not able to go to college and is now struggling because of it. I have seen how difficult it is for someone to raise a family on a lower income and want to do well in college so that I will be better off.

Although our disagreement was not solved through this understanding, we were able to move on knowing that we came from very different backgrounds.



Question 2) In his article "An End to History", Mario Savio discusses his work in both Mississippi and the campus of Berkley. He works to better understand and break down the strict rules placed on students and lower class citizens. One way that he does this is by alluding to Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World". This piece which is set many years in our future is about how the human race has been changed or reprogrammed to become better than ever. Those in power have come up with a process of conditioning people in order to get them to fit into a certian group and perform certian tasks. This world sets up very strict rules and barriers that citizens are severely punished for if broken. Although Huxley's novel is fiction Savio uses it to compare to the struggle which he sees by the more repressed groups in society (mainly lower class citizens of Mississippi and students at Berkley) for more rights and a stronger voice within the community. He uses Huxley's work to show the horrible things that can come from the government having the power to quiet citizens.
By alluding to "Brave New World" Savio also presents the idea that it is the citizens responsibility to fight against repression if they are to keep any sort of voice at all. In the novel, people are created and conditioned without a second thought. They are raised to close their minds to anything other than what has always been presented to them. Savio urges his readers to work against discrimination and refuse to blend in.

Question 4) Bullard works in the stasis of cause within his article in order to make his point clear using historical facts. This is only one of many approaches he could have taken in the piece. This route was most likely the best way to express his views without making his piece seem completely elementary. If he were to work in the stasis of fact or value he would have a few problems. If he were to do this he may run into disagreements with his audience. Looking back to Kaufer's 5 levels of conflict it can be seen that fact and value can be very shady areas to work in. Bullard, as well as Wells and Savio, had no idea of knowing exactly who their audience was going to be while writing. Without having this information they would have surely run into differences in value and fact.
Every person has slightly different values so by working mainly from the value stasis each writer would have cast out many readers. This is the same for the stasis of fact. A fact to one person may not be the same for another. If the writer chooses to write purely from their own factual knowledge some readers may not accept it, because they do not agree that it is truely a fact. By working with historical happenings each author did not need to work around these issues. It is possible to dispute historical facts, but they are more concreate than both values and facts. By using history each author made their piece accessable and acceptable to a much wider audience.