Clad in a red hooded jacket, Wendy leads her son Danny into the Overlook’s hedge maze as Jack, wolf-like and haunting, peers down over the miniature hedge maze model from inside the hotel. Later, he will break down the door leading into their quarters, wielding an axe and shouting “Little pigs, little pigs! Let me in!” with a grotesque grin.

While in Stephen King’s The Shining, the reader’s sense of the uncanny is awakened by our not knowing whether or not an object is truly alive (the hotel is inanimate but behaves like it is not; the hedge animals outside…

After finishing the last play in Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, The Eumenides, I am left with several questions.

First, why is it that the Furies seek revenge for Clytaemnestra’s murder but not Iphigenia’s, given that each were killed by blood relations? Why is it worse for the child to kill the parent?

Second, why is it that Agamemnon’s spilled blood “clots hard, it won’t seep through, it breeds revenge” while the blood of Clytaemnestra “wets the ground, // you can never bring it back, dear god, // the Earth drinks, and the running life is gone” (Fagles, pp. 179 and 243)? …

During the second week of school, I completed my readings out of order: first the theory, next the plays. With all of Simon Critchley’s explanation of Sophist argument and antilogia alongside Gorgias’ “Encomium of Helen,” I read The Trojan Women by Euripides and found myself in awe of Helen’s self-defense, her anachronistic Gorgian testimony. Critchley says that “Helen seems to follow the precise line of defense that was prepared for her by Gorgias,” and it is against this statement that I read her speech (Critchley, 117).

First, Helen absolves herself of blame by placing responsibility with Hecuba and Paris, for…

One hundred pages in to the newest addition to the Twilight series, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of the unheimlich, the feeling that something is off.

Perhaps this is the lingering effect of too many horror novels. I recently re-read Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” where the unheimlich (re: uncanny) permeates through the storyline, journeys ending in lovers meeting and doors shutting no matter how many times they’re propped open. …

The premise of this book is wonderful: five teenagers are brought together by a prophecy. They are the Chosen Ones who will, after enough training and mastery of various magical artifacts, defeat the Dark One who has terrorized their world. The book begins ten years after they do so, and thus we learn about each character after they’ve had ten years to live with the trauma of survivorship and saviorhood.

It took me two and a half weeks to finish the book, and I suspect that it would have taken me a lot longer had I not given up on…

In his 1819 poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats creates a persona who longs to identify with what he calls the “immortal Bird” so that he may fly away from his life of pain (Keats, line 61). The speaker wants to escape into the kind of immortality that the bird experiences — the immortality of poetry — rather than stay in his own world of death and disease.

While human life is ephemeral, creative expression is immortal.

Juxtaposition and Imagery

Keats’ persona juxtaposes his desire to “fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” his worldly pain against his need to remain in…

Poetry collection due for publication on 19 May, 2020.

This short poetry collection by Renaada Williams floats around themes of suicide, depression, Black pride, and heartbreak. The poems are pithy and often broken up word-by-word. It took me fewer than thirty minutes to read through about 150 pages of content.

I’ll preface this by saying that I did not enjoy the book. Many of the poems read like the vague sentences about heartbreak shared around on Facebook by people afraid to be more specific. I think that the poems each could have been more powerful were they separated by instances…

No matter what your major or minor, chances are you need to take English 101/102 (or your school’s equivalent) in your first year.

Each time you have a paper due, your instructor will be reading stacks of them. Some of your peers will come from an AP background; some will have never read the book.

Here’s how to write a perfect paper that will make your essay stand out from the get-go.