Southern Literary Messenger

In “the death of the author” Barthes essentially gives power to the reader. It addresses the power of the author in reading and analyzing writing. It says that the reader has the option to cast off the background of the writer and focus more on his ideas. Volitair’s Candide and Tolkien's opposition to allegorical corresponds to "the death of the author". So what is "the death of the author"? To understand how Tolkien’s opposition to allegorical writing, one must fully understand the…

When analyzing literature there are a variety of different tools and methods a person can use. Critical lenses are one of those tools people can use to analyze literature. One novel to investigate due to it’s heavy psychological approach is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The psychological lens is one of many critical lenses that can be used to analyze the characters of Jane Eyre and how their thought process influences their actions. What’s so great about the psychological lens is that it can be…

Response to the Introduction Memory, Symbol, and Pattern affect reading of literature by giving the reader a deep interpretation with more structure of a piece of literature. It also makes the reader associate more things in the piece of literature with his experiences or others types of literature. The Recognition of Pattern helps the reader to have a clearer understanding of the literature for the reason that it makes the reader to relate the patterns of the literature with patterns in real…

A text is an exemplification of humanity that may be used to provide the audience with an insight into the perplex nature of people and politics. Composers are consciously aware about the purpose of their text when the choose their textual forms, media of production and language choices. These factors are effective in influencing and shaping meaning in a text. The responder is situated to consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s play Henry IV: Part 1 and Steve Richards’ TED Talk, Art of Politics…

reader seduced or comforted by the ideas in the works studied and in what ways challenged or alienated? The writer can affect the reader in a negative or positive way through the author’s use of literary devices such as narrative voice, tone, and symbolism. The reader is definitely affected in the literary works, The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano and in A Doll House. However, depending on the reader’s sociocultural context and historical context, the reader could have…

The literary point of view of any novel or screenplay is an important characteristic because it gives either adaptation ambience towards the characters or how the story is structured. It also describes the character’s position in relation to the story and his/her outlook in regards to the attitudes and events that revolve around them and supporting characters in the storyline. Mildred Pierce, a 1941 novel written by James M. Cain and later adapted into a film noir screenplay directed by Michael…

V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidad-born British author of Indian origin is an eminent commonwealth writer. He has been recognized as a literary giant, one of the finest writers in the English language today. Rootlessness and alienation form the dominant themes of Naipaul’s best novels. His novels show his obsession with the lot of the Caribbean people – their displacement, exile, dispossession, alienation and isolation. He analyses how the colonial experience of displacement and the consequent experience…

Shakespeare's stance on the value of a woman and a man's masculinity has been widely debated throughout many years. Though, many of Shakespeare's works portray a strong female character that has superiority in matters of love and portrays the male as unreliable and are made out as fools (Thrasher 40), however, this portrayal is not consistent throughout every piece of work. It can be inferred that Shakespeare's wavering stance on gender roles and who holds the power is stemmed from his…

So much of the critical discourse regarding Othello and Iago is defined by the impression of the self - the critics' selves, that is. In a mess of questions of good and evil, right and wrong, critical supporters of Iago (T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor) characterize themselves as realists, pragmatic, practical, eschewing the supporters of the so-called weaker Othello, who conversely tend to describe themselves as somehow morally elevated, more empathetic. While the study of literature has never been…

Feminist theory is a fairly new approach to the IR discipline and the aim is to produce knowledge that helps inform practices to improve the lives of women. Feminists use the experience of women to make research that is beneficial to women. In doing so they believe that their viewpoints might uncover aspects of reality that is hidden by more conventional approaches. Feminists believe that by paying attention to experiences of women IR theories might be reformulated and the understanding of world…