Posts

Truth, Subjectvity, and Creative Values in Fun Home.

-
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...
1 comment
Read more

The Importance of Esther and Buddy’s final meeting in The Bell Jar

-
  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...
5 comments
Read more

Would Holden Benefit From Alt Culture? (Semi-)Serious Speculation over a Bizarre Question.

-
  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...
2 comments
Read more

Notice: All future posts are for the Coming of Age Novel

-
 Main text
Post a Comment
Read more

The AmHi Thru PopCul Bonus: Malcolm X Essay Draft Excerpt

-
 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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kennedy in Libra: Tracing a Silhouette's Outline

-
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy has only one real appearance in Libra, but despite that, he holds a powerful presence in the narrative. John was the first president to readily make good use of the medium of television to communicate with the public, often through his live press conferences, and accordingly in Libra much of the populace is presented as having opinions on him (“John F. Kennedy and the Press”).      A certain fraction of the women in the novel are portrayed as being attracted to Kennedy: for example, Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, a stripper at Jack Ruby’s nightclub, has a discussion with another stripper on which of the Kennedy brothers they would rather have sex with Similarly, Marina also fantasizes at one point that she is making love to Kennedy instead of Lee, the narration describing his presence floating  out of the radio and the television. Marina wonders what it must be like “To know you are the subject of a thousand longings.” (p. 324, DeLillo) Thi...
4 comments
Read more

Alice, Sarah, and Dana As Three Stills of a Life.

-
 Three women who all faced rape or the threat thereof on the plantation. Sarah lives through rape at the hands of Tom Weylin, and recounts her experiences to Dana. All of her children are sold off except for Carrie, who is disabled. Recalling this fact makes her display a “Quiet, almost frightening anger” (p76). Dana views Sarah as an Uncle Tom, or a Mammy, earlier in the book. The young Rufus calls her “Aunt Sarah” (p86) which Dana reflects on as being better than Mammy. Sarah is considerably more perceptive of the more vile aspects of Rufus’s personality than Dana is, at least at first.  Ironically, although Dana accuses Sarah of having been cowed into submission, she in turn is seen as being too white by Alice, who calls her “white [n-word],” in an outburst. Dana’s knowledge and what is perceived as preferential treatment by the whites also leads more generally to people disliking her (such as in Lisa’s case) or, later on, the assumption that Rufus is raping her. Although D...
3 comments
Read more