Hypermasculinity is the psychological term for the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior such as an emphasis on physical strength, aggression and sexuality. In novels such as The House Of The Spirits, through the use of characters, Isabel Allende depicts political and social issues like this with characters such as Esteban Trueba. He embodies this to the point of toxicity and takes toll on character and plot development. Sexuality, strength and the power of Esteban play a pivotal role in The House Of The Spirits. Pancha Garcia’s rape is a key example of this.…
Through the experiences of Puerto Rican author and narrator Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria, exemplifies misconceptions and stereotypes Latin women face, as well as how American and Latin cultures differ. “You can leave the island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you’re a Latina, the island travels with you” (par 1), when being at the other side of the world, Judith witnessed a man kneeled before her, performing for her a rendition of “Maria” from West Side Story, while this gathered other people’s attention, it did not amuse the…
Women throughout the world have always had multiple roles in a society. Some roles were more influential, while others remained more domesticated. Yet, throughout both novels, women shared similar duties. Sundiata, by D.T. Niane, describes the journey of King Sundiata Keita’s road to become ruler of the Mali Empire. The Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Diaz, recounts the downfall of the Aztec Empire.…
Every night before bed, I waited impatiently for my grandma to read me one of her beautiful novels. I would walk into our room, where the shadows of the trees danced around the peach colored walls. The window that overlooked the moon glistened and reflected onto the candles that my grandma would turn off as soon as I fell asleep. We laid on the bed snuggled in my overly large blanket, my leg thrown over her in a way to keep her locked there. Her voice softened as she read me my favorite story about two sisters.…
Gabriel García Márquez was born in March 6, 1927. He was born in Aracataca. Hemingway gave him influence in the short stories he wrote. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man” exemplifies the elements of the supernatural world. He is one of the most representative figures in the so-called Latin American Boom.…
García Marquez’s book, Of Love and Other Demons portrays subjects such as magic realism, reoccurring motifs, and character oppositions. Sierva Maria and Father Cayetano Delaura are two characters that work in opposition to each other. Both of their worlds are parallel, with the exception of their love. Sierva Maria and Delaura are perfect opposites for various reasons; their differences are the roots of their hardship, and their love is revealed as a forbidden one.…
“ Spirit of the dead rise up and tell your story!” Sankofa is Ghanaian word that translates to “reach back and get it”. When one truly understands the struggles of the people of the past and what they endured, it somehow helps to find the purpose and motivation to be all one can possibly be. In the movie Sankofa, a young woman who was on the beach modeling with a white photographer, all of the sudden is taken into this dungeon full of captive slaves. When this African American woman was transported to a different time, and was suddenly being beaten, and forced to work on the fields, that’s is what “Spirit of the dead rise up and tell your story!”…
Time and time again people come to the common question of, “Movies vs. books?” Many movies follow their books word for word whether its character development or plot development, whereas other movies change and twist the book’s stories in unimaginable ways, yet people are still faced with the question, “Movies or books?” An example of how books and movies can differ is in the story “The Outsiders” written by S. E. Hinton and produced by Francis Coppola. Although there are many similarities that both the book, The Outsiders, and the movie share, there were many noticeable differences in the appearance and personalities of all the characters. Three of the main characters, Pony, Johnny and Soda, will be reviewed in particular.…
Authors intentionally develop male and female literary characters within their writings to reflect the role of women and men in society. The novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Women at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi display male and female literary characters. One Hundred Years of Solitude incorporates magical realism, through the novel it tells the story of the Buendia family generations beginning from the sixteenth century in Macondo. Garcia portrays a relationship with the characters husband, Jose Arcadio Buendia and wife, Ursula Iguaran. In the same way, Women at Point Zero is based on creative fiction about a woman that experiences a female circumcision and since the day she experienced circumcision her…
The society in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is a patriarchal society. In a patriarchal society, women play a vital role to maintain the community and families. This role is displayed in the actions of Ursula, Santa Sofía de la Piedad, and Fernanda. Ursula is a perfect example of this vital role, throughout the story she works to maintain the community and her family. Her role in her family is to try and preserve the family and the house.…
In my senior thesis, “An Identity Journey of My Own: Transnationalism, Identity Journeys and Liminality in Sandra Cisneros and Reyna Grande’s Work”, I survey Cisneros’ memoir A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (2015) and novel Caramelo (2002). Additionally, I engaged Cisneros work into a comparison dialogue with Grande’s The Distance Between Us: A Memoir (2013) along with her fictional texts Across a Hundred Mountains (2006). As indicated by the title, through an interdisciplinary approach this project explores a scarcely studied facet of Latina writers in the traditional Hispanic Languages and Literature. Through the bridging anthropology theories of identity formation with literature, I challenged the lineal approach usually adopted when analyzing literature.…
Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart shows the apparent ways that Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe differ in ways of presenting Africa in the colonization era. Conrad and Achebe books shows the difference between an Afrocentric and Eurocentric viewpoint. Joseph Conrad’s depictions of the Africans as savages an in a very racist undertone causes Chinua Achebe to write Things Fall Apart through the viewpoint of the natives of different tribes to show Africans, not as uncivilized savages, but as members of a very hierarchy society that is not too much different from the Europeans. One way Conrad’s views about Europeans to make the look as if they were higher beings to the African tribes was in his description of Marlow.…
"Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing" (Conrad 548-64). This a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and could be viewed as a metaphor for a life experience that forces a person to decide what kind of person they are going to be. The main character from Heart of Darkness, Marlow, can be seen as similar to Nick Carraway, the main character from Scott F. Fitzgerald 's The Great Gatsby, in the sense that they are both travelers. Both men are beginning a new journey in their lives; Marlow beginning his trip in Africa and Nick starting his new life in New York City. In addition to their physical journeys, they are also on a journey…
Gender Performativity: Reading Mahasweta Devi?s Draupadi and Luisa Valenzuela?s Other Weapons In this paper I propose to read and discuss two short stories, Luisa Valenzuela?s Other Weapons and Mahasweta Devi?s Draupadi under a comparative spectrum. This apparent unlikely comparison from two distinct social, political, linguistic and cultural paradigms, as diverse as Latin America (Cuba?) and Bengal, is the result of my curious attempt to decipher Laura and Dopdi on the lines of Judith Butler?s notion of ? gender performativity?.…
Magical realism, like all genres of literature, has proponents along with adversaries. Some critics say that magical realism describes the abject in condescending ways, while others have stated that it is a genre used to escape reality, and still others believe it is complicit in oppression and does not do enough to combat the rejection of the abject. Jazz by Toni Morrison, Perfume by Patrick Süskind, and “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” by Gabriel García Márquez are three examples of magical realism that either give power to the abject by revealing the truths of their struggle, to not provide mere escapism by challenging the reader to think about the events occurring, or uses the carnivalesque…