Category: literary analysis

In my first grade class, students were required to write in a journal for one hour each day. Of course, being so young, most of us made up adventure stories instead of writing a diary entry. My teacher noticed this and began “publishing” our books for us. Once a student finished a story she particularly liked, […]

Introduction As readers, it is important that we are mindful of the goal of reading: understanding. In order to reach understanding, we must first be mindful of what we are reading and why. Who is presenting the text to us and what do we expect to take away from it? Each person comes to a […]

Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park reveals the nature of casual racism in the United States and our need for a comprehensive understanding of it. Like Bev, a white housewife living in the 1950s, we tend to view racism in a rather single-minded way. We recognize that racism exists and, hopefully, we want to stop it, but […]

A lot of thought went into the set, especially when it’s a home.  How a family decorates tells me a lot about them, especially the photos they display and the paintings they hang on the walls. In Clybourne Park, we were trying to show that a space is a space; the political climate around a space […]

Poems allow the reader to discover and to challenge her emotions and her understandings. Both a poem’s words and its visual structure reveal new truths and understandings to the reader. In “Myth” by Natasha Trethewey, the poem’s form serves as a both a map and a vehicle for the reader’s understanding of the transition from one stage of […]

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat but watched the other faces. (Lines 40-45). Li-Young Lee’s poem “Persimmons” sheds light on the amount of stress immigrants face because they are expected to assimilate to American […]

While reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” I was struck by the subjugation of female characters. I remembered Judith Butler’s essay “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” in which the author muses, “What is it that claims us at such moments such that we are not masters of ourselves? To what are we […]

The description of sound leads the reader through Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” just as seamlessly as the plot does. The narrator describes sounds throughout the story, which dramatizes the narrative and allows the reader to fully immerse herself in it. In the exposition, the narrator describes a “soundless day” […]