2021-2022 Journal Issue

  By Adam Mah On October 7, 2014, American poet Claudia Rankine published her mixed-media book-length poem and series of lyric essays, Citizen: An American Lyric. Five months later, on March 15, 2015, American rapper Kendrick Lamar released his third studio album, To Pimp A Butterfly. Both works explore race-related trauma in the contemporary black […]

by Anna Pontin   Women who write about flowers have rarely been acknowledged as worthy participants in serious conversations. Despite winning a Pulitzer Prize, beloved poet Mary Oliver spent much of her career being dismissed by literary critics for devoting creative attention to her garden, the birds near her house, and her dogs–to whom she […]

  by Kyla Lien Flynn  April 25, 2021 In Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle, art encapsulates life. In Herbert’s essays and apocryphas, life and history are preserved through art, his writing on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and society showcasing the capability of art in immortalizing places, objects, people and memories. This essay will argue, […]

by Seo Park   Although women play pivotal roles in narratives surrounding love and relationships, as wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters, and sister, mainstream scholarship agrees that there is a strong tendency toward female characters being denied the agency freely given to male characters, which allow them to propel the narrative and make active choices. Female […]

    by Moira Young A Bird In The House by Margaret Laurence is a vibrant collection of short stories which builds on the complexities of fictional characters, while simultaneously utilizing animal symbolism, as a satire of the real relationships and people that they represent. The characters within A Bird In The House are complicated, […]

  by Maxine Kirsten Magtoto Herman Melville’s 19th-century novel, “Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life”, is a self-reflection on Western culture, as well as the Western moralities that dominated social culture during Melville’s time. Tommo, the protagonist, is shown throughout the text to both admire and fear islanders’ physical forms and open sexuality. Sexual rebellion […]

  by Calla Campbell   There is no denying the significance of the women who occupy the world of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It is a work distinguished by its complex, colourful, and memorable female characters. Written in the mid-19th century against a backdrop of rapid and radical social change, contrasting views on women’s liberation […]

  by Rosa Kontogianni “Goodnight, sweet prince” (Shakespeare, 2016, 5.2.358) and “Carpe diem” (Weir, 1989, 00:14:13) seem as opposite as the night and day they describe. The first is spells acceptance of loss, the second a desperate fight against it. The former is Horatio’s last words to his friend, the latter is the defining quote […]

by Gurleen K. Kulaar   I do not know everything. Nobody does, and anyone who claims they do actually does not, but they do not know that they actually do not know. Mankind is inherently ignorant, and Friedrich Nietzsche explores this complicated and humbling account of man in On the Genealogy of Morality, exploring how […]

Culture and Consumption: The Importance of Food within Typee and Unfamiliar Fishes   by Hayley Jones   Understanding a culture’s relationship with its food can be one of the best ways of examining how its society functions. Food can be viewed as a necessity to keep humans alive, but it can also be viewed as an […]

by Caitlin Khong   The setting of Jane Austen’s 1815 novel Emma is heavily centered around romance, with the primary goal of many characters being the courtship and marriage of a significant other, but the protagonist Emma Woodhouse appears to be an exception to this romance-riddled world. Emma’s choices and values align her instead with the […]

  by Johanna Clyne   Aphantasia is a condition where a person is unable to conjure images with their mind’s eye voluntarily. The phenomenon was first documented when Francis Galton described a trend among his colleagues, the vast majority of which claimed that “mental imagery was unknown to them” (Galton 302). The understanding of this […]

    by Alexei L. Villareal CONTENT WARNING: The following essay contains offensive language and discussions of sexual assault which some readers may find disturbing. Superhero fiction has had a long history of presenting ensembles of characters that reinforce a bastion of heteronormativity. Amidst conventional representations of gender and sexuality, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ […]

  by Talia Neelis   As bright lights illuminate the stage of the Jericho Arts Center, an elderly woman wearing a pink dress and a pregnant belly emerges from the darkness. No laughter sounds from the audience. Rather, they listen intently as her canticum on voluptas fills the theater. Among other expressions of voluptas (pleasure), […]

by Sloane Madden Literary writing is constantly responding to the works of others: rewriting, endorsing and refuting existing ideas and views of culture. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake makes clear through references to the Allegory of the Cave that he has read Plato’s classic text Republic, and throughout the text, Blake engages […]

  by Audrey Wahking Set in Iceland’s Viking era, Grettir’s Saga follows the life of Grettir Asmundarson—a famously strong, cunning, and cursed man—as he fights enemies and rids Iceland of the undead, completing many cruel and heroic deeds along his journey.  While the text focuses primarily on Grettir and other men, women make up a […]