Newest Literature Essays

‘The Tale of Genji’ opens with the conflict generated by the Emperor’s preference for an unnamed consort. From its onset, it appears as if the tale treats its female characters as literary commodities - vessels of conflict, infatuations, and...

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry records the lives and moments of the urban, black folk of Chicago city. Brooks notes how, “if you wanted a poem, you only had to take a look out of your window” (Brooks, Report from Part One). She fervently believed in the...

Rachel Lears’ documentary film Knock Down the House creates an authentic portrait of four political candidates by offering intimate glimpses into their most vulnerable moments. The film follows the 2018 congressional campaigns of Alexandria...

The level of intimacy with which the documentary film The White Helmets illustrates the lives of its heroic subjects and their extraordinary work aims to eliminate the barrier that separates distant audiences worldwide. Directed by Orlando Von...

Reality and truths are vague and unclear in nature; hence, their faithful representation inherently requires ambiguity. T.S. Eliot utilises his ‘pioneer’ form in his poems Journey of The Magi, The Hollow Men, and Preludes, in the representation of...

The building blocks of global history is undeniably the history of immigration. From the movements of early humans outside of Africa to the Middle East to the migration of citizens from Europe to the United States in modern history, immigration...

The Pearl by John Steinbeck presents accounts that, when engaged in the milieu, may necessarily mean a complete contrapositive of the depicted situation. In The Pearl, Steinbeck uses the concept of irony to dissimulate benightedness and...

In Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Christopher Boone poses as an innocent eye. An innocent eye perspective means that the story is told through the eyes of a child or someone who is unable to comprehend the world...

Satellites, a 2008 play by Diana Son, examines the lives and relationships of Miles and Nina, a couple who struggle to connect with each other, with their friends, and with their new baby girl Hannah. This tension is developed in a myriad of ways,...

Everybody loves a good teen film, and the genre has a lot of competition. You’ve got John Hughes’ classics like "The Breakfast Club" and "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off". Nineties teen rom-coms like "Ten Things I Hate About You" and "She’s All That"....

The concept of loss is often viewed as a delicate yet intense matter where one is hit with an unexpected series of events that ultimately sparks emotion and panic. Jesmyn Ward delves into the concept of loss through her memoir, Men We Reaped,...

While Hector and Odysseus in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are seen as clear heroes, the Argonautica differs in its approach to Jason, as his relatively average abilities are matched by his typically anti-heroic habit of letting others do the...

In the graphic novel “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood”, written by Marjane Satrapi, Satrapi tells her story of her transition from childhood, through adolescence into adulthood. Through Satrapi’s personal story, she is able to educate the...

In Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, (1941) the cinematography utilizes deep focus shots to demonstrate the importance and power dynamic between the characters in the frame, while the heavily varied angles highlight one character at a time. The contrast...

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved deals heavily with the theme of trauma. The numerous traumas of the novel are explored mainly through instances of haunting, whether this be mental in the form of dissociation and recurring memories or physical...

Hitchcock’s Rope was based on a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton, which got its inspiration from the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Rope was produced by...

Virgil’s Aeneid shares parallel with The Iliad and The Odyssey, however, while the plot shares similarities to both of these poems, Aeneas in Virgil’s epic is vastly different in character and in action to Odysseus in The Odyssey. While there are...

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot follows two men, Vladimir and Estragon, through a series of largely uneventful and stagnated scenes. The two men constantly attempt to distance themselves from their dismal situation, creating a pattern of...

Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, is perpetually attempting to distance himself from his unhappy family situation. The description of a stage show by Malvolio the Magician in Act I provides intriguing insight into Tom’s...

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, is huddled with symbolism as the author explores the rivalry and conflict between romance and responsibility. The novel explores the lives of Newland and may who marry to mucilage their...

August Wilson’s “Fences,” a play published in 1985 but set in the 1950s, is one in a set of ten works by Wilson which all make an effort to examine the struggles of African Americans in different time periods. Wilson’s play is rife with symbolism,...

In 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin published an extraordinary science-fiction novel, entitled The Left Hand of Darkness, which earned the prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards and changed the scope of the science-fiction genre in and of itself. The novel...

The literary world of fantasy was forever altered by the fateful publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s extraordinary children’s novel, entitled The Hobbit, in 1937. Through his unique tapestry of a paternal narrator telling the story in a highly...

Through the knowledge that J.R.R. Tolkien’s widely beloved fantasy novel, The Hobbit, was originally an oral story meant to entertain his own young children, the story, structure, narration, and style of the book can be understood through a...