“A Half-finished Love Affair”: Colonialism, Historicism, and the Decline of the World in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas Cloud Atlas seems to grab historicism by the throat, and show just how it can shape the world within it. David Mitchell, the award-winning and bestselling author, created the novel that features the reincarnation of one soul throughout […]
Author Archive | youngdw
Ephemeral Embrace
Normally I feel quite awkward when it comes to talking about subjects related to sex, but I enjoyed Yamashita’s description of it between Bobby and Rafaela in Chapter 45, page 254. I feel like the purpose of this scene was to show something where Bobby and Rafaela could meet each other somewhere in the middle, […]
Defying Definition
Even though she’s one of my least favorite characters in Tropic of Orange, I find Emi to be one of the most entertaining. As a Japanese American, she appears to have fully assimilated herself into American culture, and seems to care less about being of Asian descent. She doesn’t seem to outright hate her race, but […]
Humans and Yahoos
On page 245 of The Theory Toolbox, I read part of a sentence that triggered something in my memory. To paraphrase it, Darwin says that humans are animals just as much as any other creature on this planet. For some reason, that reminded me of the Yahoo creatures in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift. […]
Deconstruction of Meaning
I always found postmodern literature easier to read and understand because it’s easier for me to latch onto. I also particularly enjoy it because it’s also what I read the most as I develop my own writing style. In the Theory Toolbox, I enjoyed the table of Ihab Hassan’s list of the differences between modernism […]
Perspective is Subjective
On the first page of the Subjective chapter, towards the end of the page, the book says that “we call something subjective when it is relative to a person and his or her opinions,” which is something I very much agree with. I always like to tease friends with the short phrase “perspective is objective,” because I […]