Freedom, one of the hallmarks of selfhood, is governed by emotional and bodily autonomy. In this essay, I will define autonomy according to a person’s self-determination and agency. That is to say, the process by which a person controls his life and the specific actions he uses to control his life, despite the inherent vulnerability […]
Month: May 2016
Art for Art’s Sake: An Intentional Fallacy
The debate over an artist’s responsibility and the function of a work of art brought forth a controversial artistic movement called Art for Art’s Sake, or L’art pour l’art. Many critics believed that true works of art included a moral message and that without it, the best an artist could hope to create was a […]
Reception Theory in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
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 […]
The Chafing Dish and the White Man’s Burden in Clybourne Park
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 […]
Frames in Clybourne Park (Davidson Production)
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 […]
Transition in Natasha Trethewey’s “Myth”
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 […]
Persimmons vs. “Chinese Apple”
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 […]
“That’s Unusual for a Girl”: Gender as Disability in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”
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 […]
Cadence in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
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” […]