Literary Critique
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Why the Garcia Girls Should Be In The Norton Anthology
By Aodhán Ridenour When Ezra Pound said “Make it new” at the beginning of the twentieth century, hesparked a fire that needed two significant forces to flourish: experimentation and demographicchange. Julia Alverez’s novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents represents a log pile ofintersections with Pound’s famous statement. From the novel’s peculiar narrative constructionand direction, the counterculturalist undertones, to the intimate semi-autobiographical stories ofoutsider experience, Garcia Girls adheres to—and challenges—the somewhat ambiguousrulebook for inclusion in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. As the introduction ofNorton states, “The vitality of contemporary American literature, evident throughout the mostrecent selections in this volume, is fueled by two great engines, one artistic and…
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Drink Me
by Jianna Palladini In both The Mortal Immortal, by Mary Shelley, and Tristan and Iseult, the famous Celtic legend, characters learn the consequences of abusing magical potions that promise them what they imagined to be a long-desired love. Though written centuries apart, common themes can be found in both stories and in English literature in general, such as love, magic, and tragedy. Both narratives help audiences ponder the thought that, perhaps, an unfavorable reality is better than we interpret it to be, as meddling with destiny may lead to disaster. Magic potions, specifically, have been a common literary element throughout history. In Alice in Wonderland, Alice drinks the magical potions…
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The Blending of Cultures in Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich narrates the story of June Kashpaw through the lives of her immediate and extended family. In addition to telling June’s story, Love Medicine demonstrates how the traditional Chippewa way of living has survived in contemporary America. In Erdrich’s novel, June’s and the Chippewas’ story brings the reader into the lives of everybody June has affected. Modern versions of the traditional Chippewa trickster, Nanabozho, appear throughout Love Medicine to communicate how Native Americans, particularly the Chippewa tribe, created a synthesis of ideologies to survive in contemporary America, while still walking in beauty to some extent. The religious differences between the European Immigrants and Native Americans clashed…
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Walt Whitman’s Courageous Expression of Homosexual Love in “Leaves of Grass”
Homosexuality has been viewed as unnatural and immoral throughout history. When Walt Whitman first published his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, over a hundred years before the society even considered accepting homosexual behaviors, it included the “Calamus” sequence that describes his romance with another man. Reviewers called his poetry “obscene” and “that horrible sin not to be named among Christians’” (Schmidgall). His boss even fired him from his job as a clerk. Whitman admirably chose not to censor his poetry to fit society’s hateful ideologies as he expresses his beautiful relationship with another man. This bravery communicates a message of self-love and a sense of oneness between every person…
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Slade House: Embrace the Frustration
There comes a time in every reader’s life when you come across a book at precisely the right moment. That is the case with David Mitchell’s Slade House. A twisted blend of horror and sci-fi and detective fiction, Slade House challenges narrative conventions and plot structure in a way that entices you read the next chapter, and then the next one as you search for answers about this mysterious Slade House. In order to fully appreciate the story Mitchell is telling, it is necessary to throw all preconceived notions of what a novel is out the window. Otherwise you will set yourself up for disappointment, because Slade House doesn’t work…
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Inseparable Places in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the author Ransom Riggs employs a lot of symbolism in order to paint an effective portrait of the Jacob’s life. For our main character, Florida represents monotony and a life of normalcy. Through his environment and social factors, Jacob is unable to break out of his shell and is left yearning for something not so ordinary. The stories his grandfather Abe tells him about “peculiar children,” and his cryptic last words propel Jacob on a journey in search of answers about his grandfather’s past. In doing so, he enters a world far from anything he could have imagined. The interactions he has in…
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The Tragedy of a Life of Abandonment
Emerson believed in the happenings of our lives to take place in the metaphorical character of a circle, to which there is always an inevitable tie of sorts to which connects the ends and the beginnings of our experiences. We leave home to grow into new surroundings and out of old friends, we go to universities to grow into new understandings and out of old trivalent thought, we grow into new lovers and out of old comforts, we grow out of the places and the people that make them and we inevitably begin to grow into ourselves. Our lives are inherently made up of the collection of things in which…
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I Believe in Yesterday
Life is a funny thing. One day, you’re in school, not paying attention as your economics teacher drags on and on about the importance of taxes, and all you can think about is the minutes counting down to freedom while you doodle horrible scribbles in the top corner of your textbook. Then, suddenly, you’re at the hospital every day of the week, morning until night for three weeks with the worst cup of coffee in your hand and anxiety constantly creeping up on you to say hello. Life is like that sometimes; one day the smallest of things can escalate in a fashion that no one was expecting. It’s a…
