A Class of Their Own: Empowerment through literature in Coates’ Between the World and Me, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Shelly’s Frankenstein
Education offers empowerment. To know more about the world, the people in it, and how they respond to the hardship around them is to prepare for life as an independent adult.
Same Racists, Different Experiences: Comparing Race, Assimilation, and Identity through Literature
In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King writes that “somebody once told me that racism hurts everyone. Perhaps in the broader sense of community, this is true. All I know is that it seems to hurt some much more than others” (King 185).
Not Simply Black and White: Whiteness as a Matter of Belief in Coates’ Between the World and Me
Many Americans are blissfully ignorant, but Baldwin and Coates, as witnesses to the truth, use the power of words to expose American racism.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: How the Psychological Afflictions of Plath’s Esther Greenwood and Shakespeare’s Ophelia are products of binary worlds in The Bell Jar and Hamlet
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet were written hundreds of years apart, but certain characters in the two works seem to have their lives controlled by similar conditions.
Lucretius: The Risk and Rage of the Joys and Despairs of Love
[…] instead of providing a compelling argument for such casual, detached relationships, Lucretius only highlights his own misogyny and bitterness towards women, and ignores the potential losses inherent in the life strategy he is promoting.
The Karamazov Brothers and their Discontents: A Freudian Reading of Pain and Pleasure, Aggression and Confession in Dostoevsky’s Classic Novel
In these works, both authors show us what it is like to be human: how we are motivated by parts of ourselves we’d like to wish didn’t exist, and how most of us spend most of our lives struggling to figure out what the best way to live it is.
I’m Talking to You: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist garnered widespread acclaim as a daring attempt by Hamid to redefine the prevailing post-9/11 narrative to include the unheard, post-colonial voice while simultaneously silencing the neo-imperial voice.
The Reflection
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the characters of Victor and his creature parallel each other as they both face injustice and suffering and both resort to violent revenge.
I am Not Your Stepping Stone: An Analysis of Ethnocentric Bias in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
In a world shocked by the horror of death and calamity that came from 9/11, Mohsin Hamid allows us to listen to the voice of a Pakistani-American during this tumultuous time.
A Faux Confession
Changez’s inherently biased prose facilitates the effective communication of his history while simultaneously conveying more obscure issues of race and prejudice that resonate with relevance.