Why literary theory? Flannery O’Connor sums it up best in her short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” when she writes, “It’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has… Read More ›
Essays
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.
~Roland Barthes
Refresh, Refresh
In Benjamin Percy’s short story, “Refresh, Refresh,” Percy powerfully captures the urgency of a young, fatherless boy searching for his father: “[O]n this bike I could ride and ride and ride, away from here, up and over the Cascades, through… Read More ›
The Fractured Form of Eliot’s Ellipsis
“Make it new!” That was the rallying cry of Ezra Pound harkened to by young artists of the early twentieth century. This period would later be coined “modern” due to the rapid advancement in industry, technology, science, and women’s liberation,… Read More ›
Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Flannery O’Connor lived only thirty-nine short years before dying from lupus in 1964, but in those thirty-nine years, she left a legacy through her writing. Although she completed two novels, it is her short story collection that left an indelible… Read More ›
Loyalty Then and Loyalty Now: Cordelia, Kent, and Snowden
Loyalty is a principle on which many relationships and institutions have been built since the beginning of time. In Shakespeare’s day, if a person was unlucky enough to have his or her loyalty questioned, it could result in imprisonment, torture,… Read More ›
Deconstructing A Good Man is Hard to Find
There are multiple ways to experience life as there are multiple ways to experience literature. We each, individually, experience both in our own unique way, with our own ideologies guiding us, and looking through the lenses of our own subjectivity…. Read More ›
Richard Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man and the Inevitable Failings of Capitalism (Just in Time For the Election)
American author, Richard Wright, was born in Natchez, Mississippi, forty-five years after the emancipation of slaves. Though slavery was technically no longer practiced, codes and laws were still set in place, limiting African-Americans’ rights and freedoms. It was in this… Read More ›
The Outcasts of Poker Flat: A Story of Redemption
“The Outcasts of Poker Flat” was published in 1869 by Bret Harte. Harte, who lived in Northern California, was familiar with the mining camps of the West, and he was a master of portraying the stereotypical characters of the West,… Read More ›
Harte, Chopin, Zitkala-Sa and the Beauty of Landscape Description
“Landscape description was once an important element in novels not only to give meaning and shape to the story but for its strange ability to carry the reader deeply and intimately inside the fiction, to establish the fiction’s truth” (Katz… Read More ›
What You Pawn I Will Redeem
What You Pawn I Will Redeem, is a beautiful short story about a homeless Native American, Jackson Jackson, who discovers his grandmother’s regalia in a mysterious pawn shop. He is given twenty four hours to come up with the money… Read More ›
Morning Pages 