Southern Literary Messenger

Often times throughout literature questions are brought to the reader's attention to think about. Within Tim O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried” readers are forced to question how O’Brien captures the “truth” of war. Although composed of different short stories, the book seems to raise similar ideas and themes in each of them. Within each of his stories the idea of being prideful enough to suppress your true emotions is brought up. The short story, “The Things They Carried” brings up…

to bring to light and analyze paramount issues of a particular time period. Critic Harold Bloom claimed that no aspect beyond aesthetics, or influence should be considered when determining whether a work or text is great or worthy of being in the literary cannon. This essay will specifically delve into Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and how it completes preceding works in classic Greek Tragedies. In the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the main character Onkonkwo, can easily be…

John Steinbeck’s novella, The Pearl, is filled with literary devices. The main character, Kino, lives in a Mexican coastal town and does not have much money. In the story, Kino finds the Pearl of the World and becomes a rich man. He hopes to marry his wife, Juana, in a church, educate his son, Coyotito, and buy a rifle. Many people make Kino offers for the pearl, but he turns them down thinking his pearl has more worth than what others offer him. Kino’s greed begins to get the best of him. John…

How to Read Literature like a Professor Essay John Henson 09/25/17 Period 6 In the book “How to Read Literature like a Professor” many forms of literature are used to get the reader to understand why some of them are used and how to use them in certain situations. Terms such as Irony, allusion, symbolism, etc. are used in this book to get the reader to understand the way a professor writes literature and comprehend all of the terms themselves. For example the book…

Throughout the introduction to his book, Literary Theory, Jonathan Culler extrapolates upon four ideas to answer the question “what is theory?”: the interdisciplinary nature of theory, how it is analytical and speculative, its dispute of common sense, and how theory relates to metacognition. To complete this task, Culler employs two inverted examples––Foucault on sex and Derrida on language. Culler demonstrates what theory––a complicated genre––is through exemplification and highlighting its key…

Analysis of Animal House, the Wizard of Oz, and The Curse of Chucky The manifest functions refer to those expected consequences in a film while the latent functions are those that are unintended or recognized in a piece of film. Often in films, we realize that the author or the performers have a certain intention. However, apart from being able to implement the intended message and pass it across to the audience, there is the unintended message where the artiste is an audience too. He/she did…

Reflective Statement Before the interactive oral on the impact of translations in the understanding of novels, I never regarded the influence of a translation on my understanding. While reading The Stranger, I knew the book had been translated from French, but disregarded that the translation might lead to alterations of words or ideas based on the style of the translation. With books originally written in one’s own language, it becomes easier to derive meaning closer to the author’s…

What does each of the three authors suggest is the appeal of “getting famous”? Atwood suggests the appeal of fame is in receiving attention and love from the audience. In Text 1, the character uses her admired voice to be “courted” by spectators. In response, she has “bouquets… thrown to it”, “money… bestowed on it”, “men [falling] on their knees before it”, and “applause [flying] around it”. Thus, Atwood’s protagonist wants fame to be celebrated. In Text 2, Smalley suggests fame is not only for…

According to George P. Landow, canonization can be assigned to a relic of great books, narratives and other classical text considered by scholars to be the most important and influential texts of the western culture. It is also a method which speaks among race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Edmudson point out in his book that “it was the belief in great writing that thirty years ago made me become a teachers”(Edmudson 1). He deduces that great writing is written in English by great white…

Md. Milad Hussain Tom Wells History 1301 November 08, 2015 Book Project of “Isaac’s Storm” Discussion points for description factual are not limited to such questions as supportive or inconsistent with the writer, debating the book's rightness, or taking a position on polemical issues. Just as for imaginative writing, readers carry their personal personality to the books that they are investigative. What is clear and…