After hearing that our class was going to attempt a reading of Faulkner’s classic As I Lay Dying, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to expect. I knew nothing of the novel’s premise, and several friends of mine who had tackled the text in high school warned me to tread carefully, not because the text […]
Author Archive | Michael
Gender and Opportunity: The Average Joe vs The Indomitable Jane
Contrary to previous posts, I’m going to take a step away from the Newsreel and Camera Eye sections and focus more on what Don Passos is trying to convey through his fiction, specifically as it appears through the lens of gender. In the second Janey section, from pages 119 to 131, the reader is given […]
The American Nightmare: When The Dream Turns Sour
As the other two posts about The 42nd Parallel have so far focused on either the Newsreel or The Camera Eye sections of the text, I thought I would explore how Dos Passos best makes use of his standard prose chapters to uncover the supposed horrific truths behind what he considers to be the dangerous, often […]
Her Land of the Free: My Antonia as Cather’s Love Letter to America
In the midst of reading Willa Cather’s most beloved novel, My Antonia, first published in 1918, it becomes immediately clear why this piece of fiction is so often selected as a representative sampling of the Great American Novel. The author draws on her own childhood experience to conjure up life in the stunning, waving Midwest […]