Newest Literature Essays

Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians is a bold experiment of a performance whose successes and failures stem from the same aspect of the show: its tendency to blur the lines between the audience and the performers....

Societal dictum and etiquette are fluid concepts, changing and differing dependent largely on location, culture, time period, and other factors. With reference to carting a carriage of Peaches through rural Japan in the middle of a cold winter...

Rose, in the Midst of Changes

In the course of an enduring history of segregation in the United States, there 1950’s was one of the times when African Americans actively fought for equal rights. Many African American men, such as Martin Luther...

The United States of America is a country that, despite much of the relatively progress in race relations, remains gained by a history of prejudice. Even today, elements of our society have a significant impact on the life expectancy and mortality...

As Medieval (13th century) texts focused on the Viking Age settlement (9th-10th) of the islands of the North Atlantic, sagas can be analyzed as vital accounts of these cultures, both in the era depicted and in the time of composition. For example,...

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, Luo’s attempt to re-educate the Little Seamstress is indicative of his own participation in the class struggle. This protagonist projects his own desire to be a member of the more...

“High Tide in Tucson” by Barbara Kingsolver attempts to enlighten its readers to the harsh reality that results from leaving home and demonstrate how our animal-like qualities keep us going. Kingsolver writes to the people who have already moved...

Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle asserts that our attitudes—as well as the behaviors that stem from them—toward the implications of scientific innovation impact the decisions we make. In doing so, he provokes the reader to investigate the potential...

In The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin utilizes the unique power struggle between George Orr and Dr. Haber to assert that a single person is not capable of addressing all negative aspects of a society. Many individuals may argue that those who...

People have many motivations for working. For some it is more than just a paycheck, but also a fulfillment of something within themselves. Others are truly passionate about the jobs they choose and what they do. Some have the goal to simply get...

There is, perhaps, no other American author whose work has been so hotly debated than Herman Melville. The white whale at the center of his most famous work, a juxtaposition of gender in America, an odd scrivener, and his much discussed story of a...

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” details the end of a southern aristocratic family line in a gothic manner which is to be expected of Poe. While Poe’s writing most prominently focuses on gothic quality, it is...

The 19th century was a time of great development, especially so in the realm of knowledge and representation of disability in literature. Although physical disabilities receive the majority of the attention, mental illness does appear in many...

During the late 19th century, the Meiji era in Japan paved the way for the Japanese to drift from their traditional values into modernizing western values. The influence of western powers, had a significant impact of the traditional ideals of...

The modern idea of consent usually refers to sexual consent, something that the average adult is ideally intellectually capable of providing or withholding. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë weaves a feminist manifesto through a...

In Junot Diaz’s collection of short stories titled Drown, the male protagonists of the stories project their ideas about masculinity onto the women that they interact with. The resulting force is a toxic overcompensation that affects every daily...

Hannah Kent’s novel Burial Rites explores how the turbulent setting of 19th century Iceland in turn reflects the turmoil experienced by key characters in the narrative to a large extent. Kent’s juxtaposition of brutal, frosty winters with...

Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things features multiple urban spaces that have been altered by globalizing forces to engender a more invasive/invaded form of intimacy in the immigrant communities of London. This is best exemplified in the film when...

In her novel Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko subverts trends of the conventional Western narrative through her descriptions of time. Rather than telling the story of Tayo in a linear chronology, Silko instead creates a more authentic experience by...

In an essay entitled, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” African-American poet Langston Hughes discusses the importance of creating a black voice in a predominantly white America. Hughes strived to do this in his own work, as he used the...

Renowned as one of the creators of the American poetic voice, Emily Dickinson is famous for her unique poetic treatment of the dark subject matter of personal trauma. Although her poems are based on her own reactions to traumatic events, they are...

Throughout the text Cane by Jean Toomer, the author creates a paradoxical depiction of women because, although he at times criticizes the metonymization of women, he also participates in it. For example, the first half of the book relies almost...

Chekhov’s post-Sakhalin stories express the author’s view of death as a prismatic focal point for the human condition. Through dialogue, narratorial comment, and subtextual connections, Chekhov’s stories examine death from so many angles that it...

Merlin has existed as the quintessential imaginary magical figure for centuries. Recognizable by name before even the writing of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Merlin figure pervades art throughout time, featured in numerous books,...