Stephanie Trinidad

Girls Will Change the World: The Evolution of the Modern Girl throughout Japanese Literature             The cultural evolution of young women in Japan is something that can be traced throughout its literature. Starting from the modern girl of the 1920’s to the hyper sexualized feminist roles of the late 1960’s all the way to the 21 st century girl who embodies a different world from their parents. The early 20 th century brought about a change in the young women of Japan with the influx of Western cultures and the rise of fashion that no longer restricted them to the same fashions as their mothers. The evolution of the role of women throughout the 20 th century has evolved from homemaker in a patriarchal society, where men dominate, to a working class educated young women. In Japan this change is seen through the evolution of the” Modern Girl,” which was coined in the early 20 th century to establish the cultural ...

Between Fiction and Reality The Lost Voices of the children of Easter 1916 Introduction It was April 24 th of 1916 when Dublin, Ireland became a warzone between two countries. One side was a small rebel group that wanted to gain control of Ireland, the other British troops who had control of the island nation. Britain for the most part of history has had control of a good part of the world and it has been said that “The sun never set on the British Empire because the sun sets in the West and the British Empire was in the East.” [1] The Easter Rebellion sparked a national outcry from the people of Ireland to free themselves from the rule of the British government and allow them to govern themselves. The Rising wasn’t conceived overnight; it was meticulously planned by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, so that it would take place throughout Ireland. A few setbacks had caused the Rising to be centered around two areas instead of a full scale rebellion....

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Breakout Stars Korean Artist, K-Pop, and the American Music Industry          The emergence of Korean culture in the United States isn’t something that is new. For years artist from South Korea have slowly become a part of American culture, such as Rain a K-Pop and R&B artist who starred in the movie Ninja Assassin and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People Who Shape Our World.” Bryan Walsh wrote in the 2006 article on Rain that, “ Rain is the face — and well-muscled torso — of pop globalism” (time.com). Although Rain didn’t debut with an English language album he was able to establish himself in the United States and bring over the Hallyu Wave to the Western World. In Choe Sang-Hun and Mark Russell’s article “Bringing K-Pop to the West” they describe what K-Pop means “ K-pop is part of a broader trend known as the Korean Wave and called ''hallyu'' in Korean. The Taiwanese were among the first to notic...

PSY: The Rise of a Korean Superstar             When the music video for Gangnam Style debuted on YouTube, PSY the artist behind the song wasn’t known to anyone outside of South Korea and its neighboring countries. Since its debut Gangnam Style has garnered over 2 billion views making it one of the most played songs in YouTube history. PSY’s global breakout success is still a mystery to people in his home country. Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang’s article “Gangnam Style’s U.S. Popularity has Koreans Puzzled, Gratified” Yang writes that “ the unlikely emergence of Park Jae-Song, the chubby, 34-year-old rapper known as PSY , as the face of K-pop, after the explosive success of his rollicking video for “ Gangnam Style ,” has been greeted by Koreans with a blinking neon “WTF” (blogs.wsj.com). Yet PSY has done something that was still a not yet achievable dream for Korean artist and that was to break out in a marke...

            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 ...

            The United States in the nineteenth century was still a new country struggling to show that becoming independent from England was the right path for them to take. While under the careful scrutiny of other world powers the United States needed to show the world that they were as powerful and as culturally renowned as the rest of the world. During this time, Reverend Sydney Smith said “under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture.” (Smith 6) Smith was telling the world that the United States policy on slavery was the same as the old governments of Europe, and therefore the United States didn’t share the same mentality as the new world order of freeing slaves. Even though Smith’s argument towards slavery was the same as how the rest of the world viewed the practice he had yet to realize how quickly the young country was ...

This is how I feel today (even though it's the first day of school), because as of today I am a published author!! So Yay!!

The theories of how a child develops throughout their childhood and into their years before they become adults is something that has been studied by many psychologist. It is a topic that fascinates many theorist because this is when a person learns and adapts the most during these years. One such theorist is Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky who developed a theory in which is based on who children learn from their community and their culture and how these are important factors in how a child develops. The Three major parts of the theory are the Zone of Proximal Development also known as the ZPD, the More Knowledgeable Other known as MKO, and Scaffolding. Each of these three are part of the theory work together in the development of the child’s mind and can be used in a classroom setting in order to further the education of the student.

Note: I feel like this is probably not my best paper but I'm posting it anyway.             Hamlet is considered one of the most flawed characters in English Literature. After the death of his father, and his mother remarrying immediately afterwards to of all people his Uncle Claudius, Hamlet is pushed towards the brink trying to deal with all of these sudden changes. All of these changes put together can create instability in Hamlet’s mind as his world is shaken by the sudden changes. When psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote T he Interpretation of Dreams he introduced the world to the ideas of the id , the ego and the superego in which encompass the way the mind is influenced by events from their younger years. Freud said that “the predominantly passionate, irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the id, or “it.” The ego, or “I,” was his term for the predominantly rational, logical, orderly, conscious par...

            The French Revolution is known as one of the greatest social movements of all time, as well as one of the most tragic. As France fought to change the order of the monarchy and change it into a possible democracy the world reacted in different ways. The United States which had just gained their independence from Great Britain saw the revolution as a direct strike against a monarch’s rule. For Great Britain the reactions to the revolution were mixed between those who were for the revolution and those who saw it as an attack on the sanctity of the rule of the monarchy. The escalating tensions between the people of France and the monarchy over a broken tax system and an economic crisis caused the Estates General to convene for the first time since 1614 to deal with the problems that were arising in France.   The artisans hungry from the lack of food wanted a way to fight for a chance at gaining ground against tho...