Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • Natasha Marshall gives an impassioned performance in a semi-autobiographical show, writes Veronica Lee

  • As a talented and well-known writer at home and abroad, her poetry and prose served as a form of intellectual activism and as a medium to incite socio-political change. In fact, Ayim derived a key source of political and emotional energy from her writing, which was a constitutive element of her activism.

  • The painter’s struggle at the crossroads of artistic expression and social progress

  • Edith Eaton’s Expanding Oeuvre American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism Volume 27, Number 1, 2017 pages 6-10 Mary Chapman, Professor of English University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Since the early 1980s, when S. E. Solberg published a short checklist of twenty-two works of fiction and journalism by Chinese American author…

  • Talking the Talk: Linguistic Passing in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 2017 pages 156-176 Melissa Dennihy, Assistant Professor of English Queensborough Community College, City University of New York, Bayside, New York Danzy Senna’s 1998 novel Caucasia, set in 1970s New England, follows the breakup of the…

  • “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi” goes a line often attributed to William Faulkner. More than half a century later, Jesmyn Ward may be the newest bard of global wisdom.

  • While sound influences dialect, black oration goes back much further, to the idea of nommo, which is rooted in West African tradition. Through both dialect and nommo, former President Barack Obama was able to inspire black and white audiences, altering his word choice and patterns accordingly…

  • I will be analyzing these novels under the four themes of passing, acceptance, romance, and Paris/escape. I will also be mapping the characters in the novel on a QGIS system in order to indicate where the majority of the novel takes place and to see if certain characters have more movement than others.

  • Not long after the Baz Luhrman adaptation of the novel came out, I saw a theory floating around that Jay Gatsby could be read as a black man passing as a white man, and I thought that theory was pretty interesting and did some more research on it.  I think reading the novel with that…

  • The transformation of the American nation into a multicultural society could result in a nation that voluntarily and openly accepts the benefits of contributing traditions, values, philosophies and behaviors. This trend, though, is struggling against a social structure that has been perceived to be grounded upon a dominant culture and value system.