Essays on Voice

The use of one’s voice is one of the most powerful weapons humans possess. Yet, too often it is not used to its full potential, and rather, is overlooked, used to harm, or silenced altogether. Voices are shaped over many years and experiences, and they...

“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning is a Victorian poem that demonstrates the power of voice. This poem is narrated by the Duke of Ferrara who uses his voice to gain control of those around him. He even speaks for his deceased wife, only explaining...

Introduction The human voice is remarkable instrument as voice is work as the unique identification for each individual. A speaker can evoke a wide range of emotion and mental images by slight changes of vocal timbre, loudness, or subtle nuances in inflections. A person’s voice...

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is encouraged to develop her own personality throughout the book, and she is forced into constant movement down roads after being abandoned by her grandmother and her three husbands. This movement allows her the...

In Narrow Road to the Deep North, Japanese poet Basho expresses himself masterfully through the traditional forms of haibun, covering themes of nature, folklore, faith, and journeys both physical and spiritual. All these stories and sentiments are contained within a haibun—a short piece of prose...

“On or about December 1910 human nature changed. All human relations shifted…and when human relations change there is at the same time change in religion, politics, and literature”; thus, Modernism was born (Woolf qtd in Galens 175). Modernism was a movement that pursued a truthful...

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is in many ways a ‘la piéce bien faite’ (translated as ‘well-made play’), which consists of a four point structure: an exposition; a complication and a climax followed by a denouement. Certainly, the exposition can be identified as...

Aura is a novel that explores the corporeality of aging, the eternal nature of desire and the struggle against mortality. What strikes the reader from the outset is the second person narrative in the present tense, a stylistic choice that is known to have a...

Throughout The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Cartwright presents the character of Mari Hoff as irresponsible and vulgar, especially through his use of colloquial language. Scene Seven certainly supports this view, but also introduces her vulnerability: a trait that the audience must understand before...

Voice, specifically one in first-person perspective, often reveals a character’s connection to his/her experiences in a text- but it is the variations in a voice that determines the character’s identity in these texts. Literary texts that discuss violence in childhood often involve exploration of these...

It is a good thing that women religious writers, especially Marguerite Porete, did not listen to this scripture and spoke up in church. While all women mystics are quite different from each other, they all share the common idea of the conviction, that there was...

Christina Rossetti’s poems were viewed as moral pieces, especially in comparison to her brother Dante’s sensual and even sexual poetry. However, Rossetti’s poetry is demonstrative of the Victorian mindset in that, it is not simply dutiful and preaching. Rossetti’s poems, like the Victorians, are full...

Many people loves to sing whether they have those angelic-lovely voice or unexplainable, extraordinary, out this world, unpleasant voice. Some used to sing in karaoke then even the lyrics are on the screen still the way they sing that song is horrible. While some people...

As two key figureheads in what is now deemed the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen served as voices for a previously voiceless population. Their poetry speaks of the enduring struggles of being an African American, and the effort required to merely survive in...

Child labor is a major problem in the modern world. People have tried to resolve it for generations, but despite their efforts, children are still being taken into slavery and servitude against the law. We can’t put an official end to it, but if everyone...

However much of its text might be preoccupied with ‘realist’ visuals, Nikolai Gogol’s ‘poem of Russia,’ Dead Souls is still rife with extra-narrative commentary and digressions, in keeping with Gogol’s established style and his stated intentions for the novel as a morally-edifying work. Within the...

A faithful civil rights activist, singer, musician, pianist, and author was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. She was a musical icon that inspired so many in a time of struggle. She made the world respect and see her as a strong...

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer uses three different narrative voices to bring life to his story. The first and most prominent, as well as the one used to narrate the ongoings of the present day, is that of Oskar Schell. The other two,...

Above the vocal cords is a set of membranes and cartilage that make the shape of a funnel. When you bring that cartilage in and wrap the shape of the funnel to be even more horn-like, you get twang. The sound is less breathy, more...

Jane Austen’s Lady Susan novel is one of her most decadent Victorian novels which challenges mainstream morality through its protagonist Lady Susan herself. As the epistolary novel proceeds, the written exchanges among the character demonstrate indignation at Lady Susan’s contrariness: her flirtation, extramarital affair, machinations,...

Abstract Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus is discussed here as a dialogic novel, with a focus on multiple consciousness and the multi-voiced perspective of the characters, and the interpretation of the characters and the novel based on the ensuing consciousnesses. Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and...

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, class inequality becomes a major theme from the beginning of the book, especially in light of the possibility of a marriage between Mary Barton and Harry Carson. While Mary saw Mr. Carson as an escape from her lower class...

Roddy Doyle’s novel ‘Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha’, set in 1960’s Dublin, in the fictional suburb of Barrytown, is narrated in first person by Paddy, a 10 year old boy. Doyle effectively crafts the text to reassemble Paddy’s thoughts by manipulating the novel’s non-linear structure...