Antigone is an old story, to be sure.  But I believe it is still relevant for today, because it illustrates the price sometimes paid for doing what one believes to be right.  When the protagonist buries her brother, she was doing what she believed was her duty, to honor her brother by giving him a proper burial against the command of the king.  ( Read more... )

   A Doll’s House is certainly a triumph in the fine art of plays, but it is more than that: it is a crowning achievement of marvelous storytelling, the kind that draws the reader in to the very last page.  It captures the attention and refuses to let go until the reader is finished with the story.  I believe I know one of the reasons the story is ( Read more... )

   Considering that it was penned by one of the most well-known and revered writers of English literature-William Shakespeare-Hamlet is, in my view, rather cliché: a ghost appears to a young man, telling him about how he was murdered, and so on and so forth.  Perhaps it is because our modern literature seems to be saturated with vampires, that ( Read more... )

   Greasy Lake is fascinating not only because of how masterfully it is written, but also

because of the metamorphosis which takes place in the narrator during the course of the

events depicted in the story.  First, Greasy Lake is extremely well written: the characters

are fairly deep for a short story, and the author uses descriptions of the ( Read more... )

Reading The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I was impressed at how well the narration was done, and how smoothly the narrator’s mental deterioration was described.  In order for the narrator’s increasing insanity to be believable and to not seem over the top, it must be developed relatively slowly; however, in a short story, there is ( Read more... )

This is, without doubt, one of the best, if not the best, poems I have ever read!  Not only does it address a problematic and deeply troubling social issue, but the imagery and flow of the poem are nothing short of amazing.  But the thing I admire most about this poem is the courage with which it addresses racism, a subject that is at times rather ( Read more... )

Sometimes people can be very much alike, but make different decisions, and thus end up in vastly different places.  This is what happened in the short story Sonny’s Blues, by James Baldwin.  The two brothers both grew up in the projects; one of them went on to start a blues band, and became addicted to heroin.  The other went on to become a ( Read more... )

Sometimes we think we know what we want, but we don’t really.  Or maybe we do, but our priorities are so unstable that we get what we wanted, and then immediately decided we wish the opposite had happened.  That seems to be what happened to the protagonist of The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin.  This short story tells the tale of a young wife ( Read more... )

This week I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Elliot.  I was intstantly intrigued by its clear imagery and its personification of objects.  Those factors really made the poem incredibly vivid and interesting!  My favorite verse is the third one, that begins, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes…” I love the way ( Read more... )

This week, I read Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats.  It is a very interesting poem, but I found it somewhat hard to decipher its meaning.  Dr. Angel-Cann discussed its meaning in some detail in class, but it was still a bit unclear to me.  I will go through the poem verse by verse in an effort to understand its meaning.  It seems that in the ( Read more... )