Section A: 1.1 The search in contemporary culture



Exploring the quest for meaning has shaped artistic creation in music, art and literature for centuries. The search continues to find expression in a variety of mediums in popular culture.

Look at the modern novel – particularly fiction of adolescence – and examples are in abundance; from The Catcher in the Rye to The Perks of Being A Wallflower – the world of the adolescent is characterised by hope, joy, pain and confusion (sometimes expressed as boredom). Recurring themes are wanting to be accepted, longing for relationships that aren’t purely instrumental, dissatisfaction with materialism, desire for justice and yearning to be authentic.

Excellent examples of ‘the search’ in contemporary culture also include the work of your Leaving Cert. English poets. W. B. Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium is a meditation on aging, death and legacy. Seamus Heaney’s The Tollund Man details ancient rites and contemporary atrocities, and in doing so deals with the experience of suffering. Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken is about purpose, personal choice and the formation of identity.


Past Exam Question
Profile how the human search for the meaning of life can be seen today in two of the following ways: Art, Literature, Music, Youth Culture

 Picasso’s Guernica (pictured above) explores the experience of suffering & the existence of good and evil and is considered a political and artistic masterpiece. It’s a powerful critique of violence that portrays the horror and suffering of war. It also shows the consequences of a search for meaning that seeks fulfilment in the desire for power.

The marking scheme for 2014 categorises film as a facet of youth culture, and gives the example of The Truman Show (great Plato’s cave allegory!). Comparative texts from English would be useful here – Unforgiven (good and evil), Brooklyn (purpose, happiness), Winter's Bone (suffering, goal and purpose), Les Miserables (suffering, inequality, formation of identity), all ask various questions of meaning.





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