Stephanie Trinidad

            Kitty Fane, a young wife of bacteriologist Walter Fane finds herself in a world where her former life as a debutante in upper-middle class England isn’t sufficient. In a land where the cholera epidemic runs rampant and children are orphaned by the disease. W Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil , follows her story, as a young wife who is caught in an affair with another man, betrayed by her lover, and is suddenly thrusted into a world filled with disease and death. What make’s Maugham’s novel interesting is that it isn’t about the affair but about the growth of the character who suddenly realizes that her life isn’t a closed world filled with parties and becoming the wife of a respectable man. Kitty’s growth within the novel is about how the world around her shapes who she becomes once she’s away from the life that she had known. The Church and the disease within the town made her realize that life wasn’t only ab...

            The role of women in novels is one that always changes as the world itself changes, histories are altered, women are liberated, and the past comes to light as a time that had once oppressed women. Chinua Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease both center on male characters and women are in the background pushing the story along and changing the lives of the male protagonist. As an answer to Achebe’s novels Chimamanda Adichie wrote the short story “The Headstrong Historian”, unlike the male protagonist of Achebe’s Africa Adichie’s story is centered on a female character from the same Ibo village from Things Fall Apart . All of the female characters in these three stories live in a patriarchal society that is created from traditions and religious influences. Though they influence the male characters and have strong personalities they’re still tied down to the male heirs, husbands, and sons.

When pop music hit the airways in the mid-twentieth it changed everything around the world. Music expressed the feelings of the masses, it gave a voice to the voiceless, and gave artist the power to influence the world. One way that music has become a major influence for the people of the United States and Britain was that it gave a voice to those who worked. Whether they were restaurant workers, office workers, women, or men music voiced their problems to the world and made it known that the hardships they faced were faced by everyone who didn’t live in the top tier of society. The theme of work for many musicians was a personal battle for others they saw how hard those around them worked to make a meager salary. How many would turn to a life of crime in order to feed their families. For women music and the workplace was a double edged sword at time because many of them still had to deal with gender roles that would place them under a man. If a woman was a musician there was in...

Video games have long lived a life as being just a recreational tool for people to get away from the hassles of everyday life. People sit at home in front of a console and play for hours and in some cases days without stopping. Yet the thought of video games as a tool for literary theory is still new for many people. Most believe that games don’t have stories and perpetuate violence to younger generations, the characters are two dimensional, and the story just isn’t a substantial literary device. There is often a misconception that for something to be a work of literature it must be written in a book and studied in classrooms. Within the past few years the gaming industry has introduced many video games that have had long storylines that parallel many novels that have been written throughout the years.   Many of these games are also being adapted to film just as many books have. So has the industry of literature as a medium for entertainment expanded to include video games? ...

Proud Moments!

This is an Edgar Allan Poe presentation done for my American Literature Class

            If there is something that New York City is well known for it is the fact that people will gather there to celebrate or use it as a stop to a bigger journey. The central area of their journey is in midtown and the center of the city, Grand Central Station. It’s where business men go through on their way to work, and where immigrants stop to meet someone who will help them on their journey in their new world. What makes this place integral to the city is that no matter who a person is or where they’re from in this one building everyone is equal because they’re all on their way to their destination. Yet during the early years of the station the crowds and people who came and went were no different from those who live in the 21 st century, except that they would face a great many hardships that aren’t known in the modern world. What does looking back one hundred years tell a person in the 21 st Century about New Yo...

            A person’s feelings can be expressed through many different forms and in many different ways. The Renaissance artist and writers were no different in this aspect but there was a silent war going on between the two sides. One side of the argument comes from Leonardo da Vinci who believed that it was better to express the feelings and emotions of the time in art, using colors to capture people and nature. The other side of the argument came from William Shakespeare who used words to express the situations and feelings of the time and whether art and nature can be altered. Lastly there was also those like Michelangelo who both wrote poetry, painted, and sculpted the nature of life but also understood the true significance of life, nature, art and poetry. Was there one form that was superior to the other? Or did these men not understand the significance of all the forms of art whether drawn, sculpted or written and ho...

            Psychoanalysis is one of the most well-known critical approaches in literature, it shows the literary critic the mental state of not only the main character, but the author as well. In the book Critical Theory Today , Lois Tyson describes psychoanalytic criticism as “The notion that human beings are motivated even driven by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware – that is, unconscious.” (Tyson, 12) This theoretical approach was created by Sigmund Freud from his theories on the unconscious mind and that people repress the things they don’t want to remember and that they go through several stages when they trying to repress memories. Almost as if a person is dealing with the five stages of grief, the stages of repression follow a similar pattern these stages include selective “perception, selective memory, denial, avoidance, displacement, and projection.” (15) These stages come from what a ...