The Book of the Dead The History of Plight Free Essay Example, 1750 words

â€Å"The Book of the Dead at once resembles and revises The Waste Land. The rituals of burial and their concomitant promises of rebirth set up the descent into the underworld, where Rukeyser locates redemptive and revolutionary possibilities. † (Thurston, 173) Rukeyser exploited the new strands of documentary culture and the event at the Bridge for its literary rebirth and the third nuance was the Communist Party’s Popular Front. Rukeyser transformed the tragedy into new political poetic in her The Book of the Dead. The poetry of Rukeyser was a new hope to reincarnate the new man, free of prejudices and discrimination. As mentioned above it was to be achieved within the system not stirring for revolution. A hope was pegged on democracy since it is the only system, if practiced within the norms of the true democratic spirit that can help to establish the ‘endurable world’. The suffering gained meanings because it did not go unnoticed. â€Å"But planted in our flesh these valleys stand, † (The Book of the Dead) The need was to make the down-trodden aware of its plight and then inculcate determination among the wretched of the earth to struggle for the egalitarian society. We will write a custom essay sample on The Book of the Dead: The History of Plight or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now The political poetry and to some the Literature of Resistance from 30s’ onward broaden its scope; not confining to anti-bourgeois literature but to take into account of all the artistic pursuits which were helpful to voice the plight and then to rekindle the spirit of struggle in the society. In The Book of the Dead the distorted modern notion of development is exposed. The greed is disguised as development which is launched at the cost of humans. Moreover, as it happened in colonized countries, the culture of the down trodden is projected as the great obstacle on the way of progress. The oppressors, of colonial era and now in corporate, have caused great sufferings on the pretext of development. The vision evoked in Absalom by the miners â€Å"highlighted helmet and the radium workers’ allows us to see both the positive and negative aspect of our myth identity†. (Thurston, 209) The myth of a technological advanced nation, who has crystal shell over the sky but by narrating the event that shell is broken. Sillen asked Rukeyser about the engineers in The Book of the Dead in her Radio interview that they were not natives of the town to be included in the poem. Rukeyser replied, â€Å"The engineers were the representative type of what I should call society in the abstract. They cared mainly about the mechanical beauty and efficiency of the things they were building, and not about the human life involved or any of the humanities. † (Radio Interview Muriel Rukeyser by Samuel Sillen.