"Through The Tunnel" by Doris Lessing

In his poem “Evening Hawk,” Robert Warren transforms the flight of a hawk during a sunset into a greater tale of the mankind’s history and the relentless cycle of time. Through a comparison of the hawk to a scythe that cuts through “stalks of Time,” a tone shift between the ominous appearance of [...]

In the graphic novel ‘Fun Home’ by Alison Bechdel, she talks about her family but more about her relationship with her father. She portrays her father as an emotionally disconnected man while still trying to understand his ways. Bechdel tells about how the two of them are completely opposite and [...]

Discrimination is a social issue that has burdened numerous cultural groups in North America for many years. “not an elegy for Mike Brown” by Danez Smith and “Three Trees” by Wanda Coleman are two poems that bring up social identity and what it’s like to be black through the use of [...]

In “The Selfish Giant” Oscar Wilde uses the characteristics of the Giant to portray aspects of the human condition including self- reliance, selfishness, and the inability to recognize sin, but he also shows how, just like the Giant, humankind can be saved from these transgressions. Today’s people [...]

The "Combray" section of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way is an extended meditation on an idyllic past. The book begins, though, not with recollections of Combray, but with a description of the narrator's half-asleep state, a state of consciousness where he does not know where, or even who, he is. The [...]

In “Suddenly Last Summer”, Tennessee Williams portrays the external and internal conflict through the emotional complex character, Catharine Holly. She must decide between telling the truth and lying, and between closure and family reputation/inheritance. It is hard to imagine that such a young [...]

Traditional qualities of a feminine women usually include a beautiful physique, a gentle, nurturing nature, and a degree of sexual reservation. Throughout literature and film, women that embrace typical ideas of femininity are also portrayed as members of the upper class and the elite, while women [...]

Literature did not begin being studied in classes in the 1920s. The first approach to appear was the traditional approach. This may be seen as the “old” historicism in contrast to the post-modern new historicism. Historical criticism is common in the traditional approach and is often biographical [...]

Often in literature a minor character that appears only briefly nevertheless has a significant effect on such aspects of a work as theme and the development of other characters. This is especially true in the case of Marmeladov, the alcoholic ex-clerk in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. A [...]