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Dismantling Whiteness in the Collective Imagination: Lessons for Diverse Fantasy Literature in Ursula K. Leguin’s A Wizard of Earthsea Although fantasy is increasingly diverse with decades of world-building on the part of authors in the tradition, children of the new, globalist 21st century grow up with predominately Western, ethnocentric literature, and often are unable to […]

“All My Loving”: The Beatles’ Evolution From Romantic Love to Romantic Universalism in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe Julie Taymor’s fantasy/drama film Across the Universe (2007) is a musical, utilizing thirty-four Beatles’ songs all sung and performed by the actors as its sonic framework. Against the backdrop of the 1960s counterculture, this film follows a […]

    “Along that road to crazy”: Healing the Mentally Ill and Changing Our Attitudes       In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Institutionalized, marginalized patients are the center of Ken Kesey’s novel, which deals with malicious Nurse Ratchet’s immoral asylum that is changed irrevocably by the loud, boisterous, hero Randle McMurphy; […]

As consumer entertainment has melded with the rapid expansion of internet capabilities, video games such as Call of Duty, League of Legends, and massively online multiplayer games have risen to prominence among the sales charts. These games all encourage forms of cooperation, interaction, and coordination of skill between friends and strangers alike, making gaming a […]

  “Nature Hates Calculators”: Emerson and the Essay Anthony Garruzzo   There is no denying the humility behind the name essay, which originally simply meant an attempt. The history of the term begins with Montaigne, who, as a moderate skeptic, would wade into subjects with wariness and self-doubt, always willing to admit the narrowness of […]

Ballybucklebo: Pastoralism and Irish Turmoil in Patrick Taylor’s Novel, An Irish Country Doctor Erin Davis The fictional town of Ballybucklebo is, as imagined by author Patrick Taylor in his novel An Irish Country Doctor, nestled in the rolling hills of Ireland’s County Down and embodies 20th century pastoralism at its finest. I have always been […]

I was impressed with some of the research I encountered at the event. There was one student who did her research on The Catcher in the Rye, she also used the novel as her teacher’s observation. Basically the student taught the entire novel to a high school English class. I spent a few minutes discussing […]

To Awake the Perpetual Morning: A Transcendentalist’s Approach to Education in Thoreau’s Walden      “All intelligences awake with the morning,” Henry David Thoreau references from the Vedas during his early arrival at Walden Pond (393). “Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me” he says (394). Thoreau was fascinated by […]

Since its publication in 1970, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has long been considered a modern classic of American literature. The book, unique in it’s autobiographical nature and novelistic form, tells the story of Angelou’s early childhood in Stamps, Arkansas at the height of the Jim Crow South. Touching on issues […]

The First Ten Lies They Tell You in High School: A Critical Examination of the Dumb Adult Trope in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak “1. We are here to help you,” (Anderson, 5) “Young Adult Literature” is a term that is innately without definite shape, as the content changes as culture and society develops. It was […]