I’ve provided copies of some of the scholarly articles to use in the essay. I’ve also attached the instrutctions and example paragraphs. The writing doesn’t have to be super
advanced; just basic college level. In each body paragraph there should be a quote from a scholarly article and a quote from the book. You are to either agree with the scholarly
journal author/quote, disagree, or both and support your answer. If directions are not
clear, don’t hesiitate in sending me a message. Thank you!
Here are POSSIBLE pre-selected quotes from scholarly articles (only if you would like to use
them):
“The last part of Fahrenheit 451 traces out the consequences of Montag’s estrangement from his society. His physical flight expresses in terms of action a disengagement which has already taken place in his mind. Here
again Bradbury is following a generic pattern…Montag undergoes a rite of passage which involves the death of his old self (spuriously enacted on the TV by the authorities) and rebirth by water (the crossing of a river). Just as the city of Ilium is destroyed in an attempted putsch so Montag’s city is laid waste by atomic bombing out of which emerges a strange new beauty.” (Seed 238).
“Sometimes, the action of suppression by burning a single copy triggers a chain of events, so successful that the book (and its ideas) disappears from the face of the earth.”. (Hillerbrand 606)
“Montag’s superior Beatty explains its coming- into-being as a benign process of inevitable development, everything being justified on the utilitarian grounds of the majority’s happiness: ‘technology, mass exploitation and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God” (Seed 228).
The “publishers, exploiters, broadcasters” have great economic incentive to exploit this desire, and when we allow such pleasurably escapist mass exploitation to replace our thoughtful interest in the real world, we abnegate our intellectual and moral responsibilities as human beings” (McGiveron 6).
“It is thus telling that the extreme regime of censorship depicted in Fahrenheit 451 does not come from the top but from the bottom. The people instigate it. The government just goes with the flow. The phrase ‘political correctness’ had not entered our cultural lexicon when Fahrenheit 451 was written, but that is the sort of phenomenon Bradbury was writing about” (Smolla).
“The result of this process in Fahrenheit 451 is a consumer culture completely divorced from the political awareness. An aural refrain running through the novel is the din of passing bombers which has simply become background noise. This suggests a total separation of political action from everyday social life…. In other words the latter have become images within a culture dominated by television” (Seed).
“Bradbury seems to be insisting that while it may be possible to incinerate a book, killing the book will not kill its ideas. The life of the mind endures.”(Smolla 901).
“A fear of the power of ideas causes individuals to take the ultimate step of destruction. Those who burn books fear that, as in the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, once ideas are let free, they will be impossible to restrain” (Hillerbrand).
“The twenty-fourth century is just as saddled to the status quo, and Bradbury has been careful to point out the dangers of intellectual deadness” (Sisario 203).
“Indirectly (and inadvertently) book burning is a testimony to the power of ideas. Not only must the censured book be committed to the flames in a public ceremony by the common hangman, the powerful sway of ideas finds expression in the language used to describe the books to be destroyed, drowned, and committed to fire” (Hillerbrand 603).
As Montag becomes more fascinated with books and nearer to betrayal of his duties as a fireman, the hound becomes more suspicious of him. The hound is then symbolic of the relentless, heartless pursuit of the State” (Johnson 112).
“Bradbury employs several specific literary quotations to illustrate the shallowness of Guy’s world. By using references to literature, Bradbury carries through a basic irony in the book: he is using books to underscore his ideas about a world in which great books themselves have been banned” (Sisario).
“For when the overriding goal is to create social harmony or, worse yet, ‘social justice’ (a vague and highly debatable concept nonetheless embraced by many universities today), suppressing free speech and free thought is not likely to lag far behind. And getting the populace itself to support such an agenda becomes an important strategy. Thus, instead of terms such as conformity and mindlessness, the citizens in Fahrenheit 451–almost all of them, apparently–believe that happiness and harmony are what best characterize their society” (Patai).
“They burn books, because they do not wish to confront the words pregnant with ideas found in books” (Hillerbrand 594).
“We are currently at the bottom of an intellectual cycle. We must have faith and blindly hope for an upward swing of the cycle” (Sisario 202).
“…we rush past the precious physical and sensory moments that bring substance to our being; we struggle to find the quietude for genuine reflection, peace, and a life of the mind” (Smolla 896).
“While successful in the short run, the ideas to be eradicated, through the burning of books are, in the long run, not extinguished” (Hillerbrand 606).
“Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) goes one step farther. Not only is the protagonist Montag initially a robot too, he is also a member of the state apparatus which enforces such prescriptions by destroying the books
which might counteract the solicitations of the media. The regime of the novel masks its totalitarianism with a facade of material prosperity. Montag’s superior Beatty explains its coming-into-being as a benign process of inevitable development, everything being justified on the utilitarian grounds of the majority’s happiness” (Seed 228).
link to PDF of the novel Fahrenheit 451: https://jghsenglish.edublogs.org/files/2015/02/Fahrenheit-451.pdf
