Nobody is just one thing. For Audre Lorde – a black, feminist, lesbian – who was writing during a time before intersectional feminism was really a thing, it was sometimes hard to reconcile the different parts of her identity. In her poem Who Said It Was Simple, Lorde discusses both feminism and racism, and the…
Their Boy
In a world where women in the same field are often pitted against each other, it can be especially nice to hear about a (relatively) healthy friendship between two female poets, such as that between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The two women bounced ideas off of each other, possibly inspiring the others poetry at…
Stella For Star
When talking about A Streetcar Named Desire, the characters that are most discussed are Blanche and Stanley. And this makes sense, as Tennessee Williams clearly made them the focal point of his play. But this means that Stella, poor Stella, can often be pushed to the wayside. Stanley and Blanche are on opposite sides;…
What is Africa to Him?
It’s fitting that last week I talked about Eliot and Pound, and this week I get to talk about Countee Cullen, because Cullen’s poem Heritage actually reminds me of The Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Hear me out here, before you just click away. Like both Eliot and Pound, Cullen was interested in writing…
The Waste Land of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Okay, so I did talk about The Waste Land in a blog post during my summer semester. I almost decided not to write about it again, feeling almost as if that was cheating. But then I thought well, we didn’t also discuss Ezra Pound last semester, and decided to do it anyway. T.S. Eliot and…
The Waiter’s Hybrid Wife
Continuing on the theme of cultural hybridity, let’s finish up these British Lit blogs by discussing the melding of East and West, and tradition and the modern-world that appears in ‘The Waiter’s Wife’ from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The focus of the story is the character of Alsana, a Bangladeshi woman in an arranged marriage…
Jean Rhys and Other Hybrids
In the days of the British Empire, there were a multitude of distinctions between people. There were the distinctions between the colonizers and the colonized, often racial and class distinctions. This was the big one, of course. But there was also the distinction between the “true” English, and the English whose families had lived in…
An (Imperalist) Image of Africa
To be entirely honest, I was supposed to read Heart of Darkness in high school. I read some of it, hated it, and stopped reading and faked my way through quizzes. Eventually, I had to read it for another college course, and I did, but still struggled with it. I struggled with it this time…
Before Big Ben Strikes
Time passes. This is inevitable. If you’re writing a story, time is most likely going to elapse within it, though some writers aren’t very good at showing this in a realistic manner. Virginia Woolf is one of those writers that is really good at it. Mrs. Dalloway follows the elderly Clarissa Dalloway, but we are…
Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins
A longer time ago than I like to think about, when I was a junior in high school, my English class did a unit on T.S. Eliot. The teacher gave us all copies of The Waste Land that he’d printed out and added his own notes too. I adored it and years later still have…
THE ARCHETYPIST 