Stephanie Trinidad

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!!