Break this World's Shell

    One of my favorite aspects of Black Swan Green is the role of “magic” in the story, where magic is anything out of the ordinary. It occurs most frequently in nature, as seen in chapters 1, 4, and 10, but can also occur outside it, as seen in Chapters 6 and 11.    To set a very loose definition, let magic be when the “mundane” world and the world through the eyes of the child diverge. There’s this trope in media where you can see things that exist, but that aren’t viewed as real by adults, when you are young, but that you can no longer see when you are older, and I feel like that’s sort of what I think of when I talk about magic in the book. We can consider “magic” in Black Swan Green as being a heterocosmic intrusion into otherwise realistic fiction. However, we can also consider the act of writing to generally be reflective of a heterocosmic intrusion, because one invents a reality with one’s words.     Note for people who weren’...

Over the course of Fun Home, Alison’s artistic and literary values, and her relationship to truth and objectivity, are influenced by her relationship with her father. When Alison is younger, she is aesthetically oppositional to him, and values truth in contrast to his interest in façades, but as she grows older, and she becomes closer with her father, she embraces subjectivity more, and their shared interest in literature overall to pull them together, although it also pushes them apart. When Alison was very young, she diametrically opposed to her father’s artistic values, perhaps in part because they increased her choreload. On page 15 in particular, she describes herself as “utilitarian to his aesthete” above a panel where, as a young child, she complains about the difficulty of dusting a particularly ornate chair to her largely apathetic father. It is likely due to this that she “developed a contempt for useless ornament,” finding that “If anything, they obscured function… They...

  One of my favorite scenes in The Bell Jar , by Sylvia Plath, is when Buddy and Esther meet again, once Esther is in remission from her crushing, reality-distorting depressive breakdown. Prior to Esther’s ultimate test of readiness to return to society, it probes the extent of her recovery and character development. Esther has sorted out her feelings for Buddy, feeling happy to only feel a sort of “amiable boredom” (p238) towards him. She does not need him in any way, but she doesn’t hate him either. She has moved on—this is an active improvement in their relationship before their breakdown, when he brought up many conflicting emotions in her, by virtue of her feeling betrayed by him but unable to properly break up with him. This demonstrates that her healing from her illness has actually extended to bettering her life in broader ways, with Dr Nolan helping her feel more comfortable with her own sexuality by getting her access to birth control.    The prior gender ro...

  EDIT 2: I made more The Catcher in the Rye... things... on my other blog.   Venn Diagram Crossover with DNA (2007), a play I studied and performed in my previous school before I transferred.   EDIT: In retrorespect, I should probably apologize to Mr. Mitchell for doing this topic despite my relative ignorance of counterculture.  In The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger, the protagonist Holden Caulfield spends much of the book in a state of alienation from his surrounding culture, and believing, as teenagers are wont to do, that he is the only person to ever feel this way (something Mr Antolini specifically calls him out on when trying to convince him to put effort into his studies). This alienation from the mainstream is a defining feature of alt cultures such as punk, goth, and emo. I don’t know so much about goth culture, but I know a smattering about punks and emos, so they will be the main focus of this post.  Having considered the matter, I pers...

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 Note: this is not my Libra post, this is part of something that I wrote for American History Through Popular Culture (heavily recommended btw) that I thought was relevant to the concept of History as Fiction. Malcolm X follows the titular character from his beginnings as the teenage hustler Detroit Red and, while dipping strategically into his childhood in flashback sequences, follows him as his career leads him to a years-long prison sentence. In prison, Malcolm Little meets Baines, a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), who encourages Little to educate himself, and to recognize and dismantle the destructive influence of the white-dominant culture around him by becoming part of the sect. Malcolm is swayed, and converts to the Nation of Islam’s beliefs. Although this largely not mentioned in the film, it is important to note that the Nation of Islam’s beliefs differed from those of mainstream Sunni Islam during the timeframe of the movie. After his release from prison six years af...