Famed educational theorist and self-proclaimed “scholarship boy” Richard Rodriguez’s essay “The Achievement of Desire” tells the story of the author’s own intellectual upbringing and the difficulty he faced because of its implications[1]. He believed education to be a process of personal-reinvention, a process that left him thoroughly changed as a student and as a Mexican-American. […]
essays
Word Analysis: Vestige
The meaning of the word “vestige” in Clint Smith’s poem “We Are Black Boys in America” enhances the poem’s meaning when read as a double-entendre. Its first and perhaps most well-known definitions are “a trace of something that is disappearing or no longer exists” (Vestige 1), or “the smallest amount (meant to emphasize the absence […]
Word Analysis: Shade
While Caleb watches over his injured mother, he notes that it would not be “difficult to keep from sleeping” because “everything was painted in the shades of killers” (Scott). The word “shades” in particular is wrought with meaning. “Shade” often has to do with color, for example, when someone says “I like this shade of […]
The Kept: The Dynamics of Emotional Tension for the Individual and the Family
“Elspeth Howell was a sinner… Whenever she saw a church or her husband quoted verse or she touched the simple cross around her neck while she fetched her bags, her transgressions lay in the hollow of her chest, hard and heavy as stone. The multitude of her sins—anger, covetousness, thievery—created a tension in her body, […]
The Amputee’s Guide to Sex: A Study of Autonomy
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 […]
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 […]