Stephanie Trinidad

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 ...