James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” distinguish between different forms of societal influence. “Where Are You Going, Where Have [...]

In Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll House” and James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” the primary interest lies in the representation of masculinity. Ibsen’s representation of masculinity is reflected through such characters as Krogstad, Dr. Rank and Helmer Torvald. In Thurber’s short story, his main figure is Walter Mitty. To adequately investigate [...]

Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper introduces thematic concepts of longing, isolation and deprivation. Gilman combines several aspects of narration to enhance the richness of this short story. Moreover, Gilman’s structural prose defines the narrator’s changing perspectives through dynamic uses of various sentence structure lengths, diction, and the convoluted details of [...]

Careful reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s First Fight. Then Fiddle indicates a meticulously arranged construct of society and universal arguments regarding war and peace. The speaker of the poem demonstrates a [...]

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” suggests that music may be society’s equilibrium among “arms” (9), “armor” (9), and “war” (13). To the speaker, the fiddle is a significant symbol; for instance, “Ply the slipping string with feathery sorcery; muzzle the note with hurting love” (1). In the first line, Brooks conveys the idea [...]