Newest Literature Essays

In the film Y Tu Mama Tambien, the characters Tenoch, Julio and Luisa represent Mexican economic classes and social stratification in distinct ways. A Marxist would argue that Tenoch, the more affluent male lead of the trio, represents a bourgeois...

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly draws links between sexism, racism and imperialism. Hwang’s play, which is loosely based on a scandal involving a French diplomat and his lover, a male Chinese opera singer, utilizes postcolonial ideas in order to...

An element of tension runs through both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The two narratives running parallel to each other throughout Maus, namely those of Art and his father Vladek, converge at the end of volume two in a shaky synthesis. The two...

Gregor Samsa’s unconscious can be explained through three important symbols prevalent in The Metamorphosis. According to the Freudian theoretical framework, these three symbols are personified in Samsa’s mother, father and sister. For Samsa, his...

Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz and released in 1942, exhibits qualities of both the Classical Hollywood Narrative and Art Cinema. These two film structures are the equivalent to formalism in literature, but also point to other frameworks...

In her novel, Push, Sapphire challenges the conventions of patriarchal literature through use of language, characterization and archetype, as well as deviations in the traditional, patriarchal novel structure. One of the major elements in Sapphire...

Throughout the book Flight by Sherman Alexie, the main character Zits is in search of where he belongs and why people have mistreated him throughout his life. In the midst of the action in the novel, Zits begins to experience character jumps,...

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass follows the format of a traditional slave narrative, characterizing the plight faced by a slave and his or her quest for freedom. Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada on the other hand, parodies...

Nabokov's Lolita is a unique book in that its narrator, under the 'pseudonym' of Humbert Humbert, often breaks the fourth wall to retroactively embellish his story. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," he addresses the reader on multiple occasions,...

Emily Dickinson's poem, “My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun,” explores grim themes found behind the romanticized perception of love. In the beginning of the work, Dickinson shows the headstrong and volatile nature of the speaker. A man chooses this...

In Raymond Carver's short story, “Cathedral,” the close-minded speaker is forced to spend a civil evening with a blind man. Initially, the narrator despises the blind community. However, after interacting and connecting with the blind man in the...

Problematizing the comfortably depicted notions of race is essential in the struggle for, not only racial equality but rather, the complete erasure of the racial binary. This entails an adoption of strategies stereotypically adhered to by a...

Mark Twain’s Pudd'nhead Wilson and Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars both problematize the concept of race by demonstrating to the reader that subscriptions to stereotypes warranted by skin color are ambiguous and consequently not at...

Inheriting the vices of both the black and white race, traditionally tragic mulatto characters have been comfortably depicted in much of abolitionist literature as intricately, and inextricably, conflicted individuals; miserable and without race “...

In “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nathanael composes a letter to his fiancée’s brother Lothar recalling the terror of the legendary Sandman who would steal the eyes of children who wouldn’t go to bed and feed them to his own children in the...

In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson exhibits an untraditional appreciation for the world around him. Concerned initially with the stars and the world around us, the grandeur of nature, Emerson then turns his attention onto how we perceive...

Fairy tales were handed down orally until the 18th century when the Romantics began to collect them together and write them down. The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, are the best-known recorders of European tales. In the classic fairy tale laws...

The novel Crime and Punishment is a lengthy debate on the topic of what constitutes crime and how it should be punished. Dostoevsky presents many differing opinions on the topic through the various characters. There is one central crime in the...

One of the major themes of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is the concept of justice, both earthly and divine. Dostoevsky investigates the differences between the two forms and examines several aspects of justice. The novel introduces...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” is a tale of opposites and upset expectations. The ideal of the country or rural life is met by the overpowering, even corrupted nature of city life. Robin, the protagonist, the...

In their respective writings, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass learn to operate and rebel in their own, personal political communities and are both ostracized by their political convictions. Douglass, a slave living in antebellum...

The theory of “othering” or alterity states that people attempt to define themselves not by who or what they are, but by who and what they are not. Defining oneself by means of othering, however, can be problematic as, by definition, doing so...

In both society and literature, fetishes and sexual fantasies constantly find themselves rooted in racial differences. The philosophical concept of the “other” is one that addresses the idea of fetishization, in that we find ourselves idealizing...

For roughly one hundred days in 1994, brutal killings took place in Rwanda by the hand of morally corrupted Hutu soldiers. An estimated one million lives were lost, almost wiping out the Tutsi race. The stories told by survivors like Immaculée...