Edgar Morin

A bold juxtaposition of real and fantastical worlds is at the heart of Guillermo Del Toro’s visually striking, 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth. Through the application of audacious stylistic techniques, Del Toro creates a mesmerising, yet haunting cinematic experience. The lush binding of lighting, camera, and sound techniques are used to morph between eerie fairy-tale escapades and a horrific reality to create a film which expresses the value of imagination. The colour palette and its association…

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls, he goes into depth about how life is mysterious and that all the events that happen to us will become some kind of lesson to be learned. Longfellow had experienced the deaths of both his wives, Mary Storer Longfellow and Frances Elizabeth Longfellow, who both had tragic endings. The feeling of distraught and depression for losing the two women whom he had grown to love and cherish was something that he felt so strongly, which…

Albert Camus is an Algerian-born French author and philosopher. Camus is widely known to be the father of Absurdism, the rejection of a purpose in a meaningless world. One of his very first works, The Stanger, is centered on absurdity. The Stanger is a story about an Algerian clerk who commits murder, but, strangely enough, he is convicted because of his apathy towards his mother’s death. Using his beliefs and experience in poverty/life, Camus demonstrates that the world of The Stranger is…

Poetry is an unusual way of telling a story. It can be used to express feeling or some type of moral or lesson. “Hazel tells Laverne”, by Katharyn Machan tells a unique story filled with nonfiction and fun. To combat this story Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote a more serious story based off of a man living in his town. This poem, “Richard Cory” sheds light on how the views of others towards a person can be so far from the truth. Both of these poems are very different but strangely correlate in a…

Roald Dahl’s short story “The Landlady” is effective for the reader by cause of the well used foreshadowing and context clues. “The Landlady” is mainly rising action, and comes to a close before a climax is able to happen. Dahl's use of foreshadowing made for an engaging read. Without deliberately saying what is going to happen Dahl is able give the reader enough context clues to figure out what is happening. For example, before Mr. Weaver rings the doorbell Dahl uses foreshadowing to hint…

In a writing piece, close reading of the text is crucial for understanding what it is the author is trying to imply. In the short story “Videotape,” by Don DeLillo, a little girl is in the back of a car filming a man in the car behind her. As she is filming, the man is shot out of nowhere and the girl caught the whole thing on tape. The video is being watched by a man in his living room who is pleading for his wife to come watch the film with him. DeLillo uses literary techniques such as…

Compare and contrast the way in which the narrators of The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black are presented as psychotic In the shorts stories ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’ by Edgar Allan Poe, both of the narrators are presented as psychotic. Psychosis is a mental disorder characterised by symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations. In The-Tale Heart the unnamed narrator decides to kill the old man- not for money, but rather a fear of the man’s pale blue eye. Similarly, the narrator in…

Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner were authors who wrote in the style of Southern Gothic. Southern Gothic is “a style of writing practiced by many writers of the American South whose stories set in that region are characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents.” Some of themes used in writing Southern gothic include irony, social issues, violence, race, outsiders and southern settings. The stories had flawed characters and often have dark humor. They illustrated the social and…

Relationships are a fundamental part of lives, and war often changed the dynamics of these relationships. Because of accounts through letters, it is possible to witness the changing of these relationships through first hand accounts and careful reading. Edward Porter Alexander’s letters to his wife, Bessie, can serve this purpose. Through these letters, it it possible to trace his ups and downs throughout the war. The letter from August 5, 1861 is particularly interesting because it shows a…

Haunting is the appearing of a ghost or spirit. In “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson, there is a possibility that the characters in the book are experiencing unknown activity in the house. A haunting can happen to a variety of people. Whether you are a believer or not can play a role if you see or hear them. Some types of hauntings that are less terrifying to bone chilling are residual, intelligent, and demonic hauntings. The first kind is a residual haunting, which is one of the…