Queering Melville
Herman Melville explored the art of carefully placed sexual innuendo, implied romance, and extended metaphor across multiple queer-coded texts throughout his 19th-century literary career. Typee, Billy Budd, and Moby Dick are all examples of notable work by Melville that feature queer-coded protagonists and clearly defined same-sex romantic subplots.
Gender? I Hardly Know Her Exploring the Hyperreality of Gender and Sexual Identities
At first glance, gender and sexuality have little to do with Jean Bauldrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, with the irreversible collapse of the true, real, and referential. But Judith Butler, over the course of several essays, establishes that both constructs do, in fact, perfectly embody Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal.
Painting with Words – The Illusive Art of Representation Appearance and Reality From the Perspective of Visual and Literary Art in Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle
Still life with a Bridle navigates the stories conveyed by art and other artifacts from the Dutch Golden Age. Herbert records his “artistic journey”, with the keen eye of a historian, weaving in poetic “descriptions of places and artefacts of interest to him” (Slodczyk 127). The text ties many accurate facts loosely to reality, forming a collage of fact and fiction, both imaginative and informative.
Loving Her Was Red: The Dichotomy of Love and Desire According To Sappho and Taylor Swift
Love is complicated, and the Greek poet Sappho knew this all too well. The lyrical beauty of Sappho’s poetry, and its intensely personal depiction of love and desire, led to acclaim from many of her contemporaries. In many ways, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is Sappho’s modern analogue.
Destined Distance Between Melville, Tommo, and the Typee
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life promises an account of Native life impartial to European bias: “the unvarnished truth” (Melville 2). Herman Melville, an American author, composes an exaggerated version of his own experience living amongst a group of islanders.
Atmospheric Prisons and Incomplete Epiphanies in The Matrix and Jane Austen’s Emma
When sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski wrote and directed the 1999 film, The Matrix, it was highly improbable they had Jane Austen’s novel Emma in mind. The Matrix takes place in a dystopian future where sentient machines have taken over all facets of society.
Heroes and Heroism in Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen
Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, and coloured by John Higgins, Watchmen is one of the most influential modern superhero comics. Watchmen followed in the wake of serious and widely acclaimed comics like Maus by Art Spiegelman, exploring darker themes than previous comics of the Gold and Silver Ages.
Austen’s Emma: Self-Knowledge and Growth
Satirically critiquing her characters’ behaviours and the English society in which they—and she—live, Jane Austen sketches a vivid portrait of her characters, their flaws, and the confines under which they operate in Emma.
The Danger of the Unclassifiable Form: Hybridity, Rulership, and Knowledge within Cavendish’s Blazing World
by Kailey Bernard Margaret Cavendish’s science-fiction novel The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World can be read as evidence that a ruling class which places value on the perceivable world will struggle to remain in power. Cavendish’s Empress favours empiricism, and desires a complete understanding of the material world; however, the […]
The Restrictive Power of Schools and Streets in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
In hopes of educating his teenage son on the everyday struggles black people experience, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of his own personal life experiences in his memoir Between the World and Me. Presenting his revelatory experiences from childhood and adulthood, Coates struggles to understand how the destruction of black people is justified by the divide between the perceived races of black and white.