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 […]
essays
“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” […]