Near the end of Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa finds herself at a crossroads after trying to unravel the mystery of W.A.S.T.E., a conspiratorial underground postal system, without finding many tangible results. “It was now like walking among...
During the modernist era, artists gradually moved away from realism towards themes of illusion, consciousness, and imagination. In the visual arts, realism evolved into cubism and expressionism. This movement is paralleled in literature, as illusions and a feeling of flux replaced the realist themes of...
“There are still the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate, all hanging in there with what must seem a terrible vitality.” Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” The challenge posed to any reader of “serious” literature is ultimately one of observation,...
Before the telephone was invented, people wrote letters to each other to stay in touch. Soldiers would write letters to their wives and families conveying their love and, even today, people write letters to better communicate. Writing is a way of expressing yourself, a way...
Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, said, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” Defining one’s personal identity may coincide with this ancient Stoic principle, but what is not mentioned is the human transformation that must take...
Despite the fact that The Crying of Lot 49 is chock-full of the use of methods of communication, the only time when anything is actually communicated is when a few songs are sung by The Paranoids. Any letters mentioned in the novel are void of...
Just before the morning rush hour, she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red, downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible – knuckles black with eye-liner and mascara from where...
The traditional structure and approach to literature is challenged in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. For this idiosyncratic narrative, the main character is referred to as the reader, and the novel is told in the second person. Every other chapter...
In Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, we see how Calvino attempts to compare the reading of a novel to a man pursuing a woman. In this text, the reader takes on the role of a male protagonist attempting to read a...
World War II had a profound impact on American culture. Essentially every person in the country was affected in some way, but the war’s impact of African Americans was unique. Although African Americans were indeed Americans they were often treated like the enemy on the...
So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had...
In Godric, Frederick Buechner uses multiple characters who are at once medieval and modern to not only tell the uncommon tale of a flawed saint, but to depict through medieval text and setting his modern comments, appraisals, and beliefs about what is means to be...
The issue of class and its representations is consistently present in society, and pervades everyday life to a significant degree, especially when considering the social dynamics of the past century; as such, it is also very prominent in literature, where it can be portrayed in...
Compared to the poetry prior to the 20th century, the poetry of T.S. Eliot rings vibrant, unconventional and inventive. Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi” is typical of his style and illustrates how Eliot’s poetry changed the genre forever. In its compression of image and...
‘[T]he modern period […] begins really with the late nineteenth [century], when the sense of the passing of a major phase of English history was already in the air.’ Indeed, when we discuss ‘modern’ in terms of literature this tends to be a reference to...
In his essay ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, Clement Greenberg claims that avant-garde or modernist art is a tool to prevent the ordinary culture caused by consumerism. Also with in his essay Kitsch gained popularity. The reason of he avant-garde’s arising is to defend aesthetic standards from...
Although she had a “fairly isolated childhood” (Salwak, 3), Anne Tyler’s insights about family are remarkably accurate. In two of Tyler’s books, The Accidental Tourist and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, she tells the tales of two very different families. However, the believable emotional state...
Coco Fusco and Guillermo G?mez-Pe?a’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians is a bold experiment of a performance whose successes and failures stem from the same aspect of the show: its tendency to blur the lines between the audience and the performers. When Two Undiscovered Amerindians succeeds, its...
In both his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ and its accompanying prologue Samuel Taylor Coleridge presents two ideas: the variable nature of the imagination and the beauty of the foreign and exotic. Many scholars view the story behind the poem’s composition as not only one of the...