In Thomas Gray’s poem, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” he shares a story about a cat named Selima while also teaching a lesson to readers. Even though the poem is amusing, it is written and...
Her beauty defied comparison. Her joy in life’s simplest pleasures endeared her to all who knew her. Her insatiable curiosity drove her to constantly explore, examine, and engage in the world around her. All these qualities make her loss seem all the more tragic. She...
Poetry
Romantic Era
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In his article On Reading Romantic Poetry, L. J. Swingle identifies the Romantic poet’s tendency to “think into the human heart” by using rustic description to explore “the naked dignity of man”. This analysis certainly holds true for William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Thomas Gray’s...
Harry T. Moore, in the afterword to William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, says, “Much of the criticism of Silas Lapham has been directed at the love-story subplot” (345). Critics of Howells are quick to point out the Romantic elements in this otherwise...
In the stichic passage from William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, the speaker, who represents Wordsworth himself, encounters unfamiliar aspects of the natural world. The passage is a bildungsroman in verse, a coming-of-age poem that chronicles the psychological growth of the speaker. In the passage,...
Writing on nineteenth-century London poetry, William Sharpe comments that ‘Regardless of shared reference to sublimity, fog, of Babylonian blindness, each poet’s London is different. Each time we read ‘London’ we have to begin again.’ For poets in the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, London...
Author Philip K. Dick once said, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” The theme of the source of madness is explored in all three stories that form Paul Auster’s novel The New York Trilogy. The three relatively short detective stories...
Dorothy Wordsworth, a poet, diarist, and sister of the esteemed Romantic poet William Wordsworth, remains an underappreciated figure in literary history. Despite her integral role within the Romantic literary community, her work was largely kept private during her lifetime, with only a handful of her...
In October 1937, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina—one of Latin America’s most brutal dictators—directly ordered the execution of all Haitians then living in the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. People suspected of being Haitian were asked to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley (“perejil”). If the suspect failed...
In Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, the concept of entropy is intricately woven into the narrative through the experiences of the protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Entropy, in this context, can be defined as both a measure of the efficiency of a system in...
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...
In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, standard hierarchical structures are abandoned in a setting of postmodern cultural chaos. The use of fragmented pop culture contributes to many aspects of the book, namely the sense of combined freedom in the search for meaning. Moreover,...
A recurring theme that can be found in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the conception that chaos has a tremendous effect on society. Pynchon engages in a dualistic method of literary technique to engender the realization of the effect that chaos...
America used to be known as the land of opportunity. That was before the wars and the advent of technology. For post-modern authors, modernity and prosperity has turned America into a disappointment. Barthelme’s Snow White and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 share similar ideas...
Postmodernism
Short Story
Snow White
The Crying of Lot 49
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...
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,...