Category: Literary Criticism

Why do you think that Chopin decided her main character should have heart disease as opposed to any other ailment? After reading ‘It’s Never Just Heart Disease…’ I assume Kate Chopin decided that Mrs. Mallard should have heart disease contrary to any other ailment due to the heart being a cliched’ symbol of emotions, the…

How has irony been used as a figure of speech in Kate Chopins The Story of an Hour? In the story of An Hour, Kate Chopin used irony in three different ways they are dramatical irony, Verbal irony, and situational irony. Dramatical irony is used to make readers feel in a way that the characters…

Growing up, I always noticed that men and women were treated differently by society where men were presented as powerful and women as powerless. Back then, the future was more promising to men than women because right after graduating from college they were able to get hired quickly. Meanwhile, women used to hang their diplomas…

Janice Mirikitani is an author who wrote Suicide Note which is a poem that is filled with many smiles, metaphors, and lines of repetition. Just from reading the title, readers should get the feeling appears to be gloomy and depressed. It almost felt as if the poem got colder after every single sentence till the…

It can be said that animals bring out the best in humans. Paul Muldoon when introducing us to his anthology Faber Book of Beasts believes this, but also feels that poetry does, so it so no surprise that there are volumes of poems published where animals are used literally and metaphorically as an elaborate link…

Both ‘America’ by Allen Ginsburg and ‘I Am Waiting’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti respond to their American mainstream societies through the use of anaphora, form, and allusions. To begin, both poems effectively use anaphoras found in their titles that greatly emphasize their sentiments and opinions towards the society they lived in. For example, Ginsberg uses the…

Night Walker by Brent Staples is a personal narrative in which the theme is considered to be dont assume who they are just on the appearance of a person. Night Walker is about an African American man who has insomnia. To cope with this, he takes walks throughout the city he lives in to tire…

In the novel Lord of the Flies, Golding uses many symbols that foreshadow the boys, mirror them, and give a deeper meaning to the story. The conch is one of many in the story that has its own meaning and importance in the story as it is a symbol of order and hierarchy amongst the…

The existence of paradoxical literature can be traced back to the birth of literature. However, there are works and instances in which paradox explodes and it is almost impossible to pass them. Virginia Woolfs The Death of the Moth is a paradoxical piece of such, and her analysis would obviously overflow the particulars of limits…

Although there is debate on whether The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is able to properly critique all parts of Twains society, it successfully analyzes the immoral practices of his society through his descriptions of mob mentality. The most blatant way Twain critiques mob mentality is through the use of the character of Colonel Sherburn and…