新生事物春满园 妇女顶起半边天
The Garden is full of new things/Women hold up half the sky
Everything I wrote during my BA in English Lit.
In recent years, English has spread throughout the world and become a language used in various multicultural cultures and communities, transforming its status from an Anglo-Saxon language to one that ...
Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor follows an unnamed female protagonist and a young child Emily in a chaotic city ridden with poverty. The city is dirty, filled with roaming gangs and the auth...
Boey Kim Cheng’s poem ‘Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB’tackles themes of migration and cultural identity, drawing historical examples of Chinese pioneer migrants who crossed the seas to find new...
In his 1981 essay ‘Hiroshima’, John Berger uses the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to argue against the use of nuclear weapons. He explains that the bombing of Hiroshima “was not a miscalcu...
Nobody can escape ideology. According to Louis Althusser, an individual is a subject of idealogy even before one is born (Althusser 1505). Ideology forms an invisible and absolute structure which gove...
Fantasy worlds have always been a safe space for children to explore their imagination and inner ideals. In Alice in Wonderland, Alice goes on a journey in the imaginary world of Wonderland. Carroll r...
In Shel Silverstein’s ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’, he depicts the adult world as harsh, drab and dull. Yet he suggests that childhood imagination is the key to surviving this world, as represented by th...
In the excerpt, Hutcheon refers to Lyotard’s main concerns with postmodernism, which he defines as an “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 1). Metanarratives provide a framework to understand...
Belief in an invisible world of demons, angels, and spectres was essential in early colonial America for understanding the world around them. In a world where education was not readily available, it w...
There has been much scholarly writing on the symbolism, imagery and meaning of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, but much can be gleaned from reading the novel through the lens of a coming-of-age st...
There has been much scholarly writing has been done on the content, imagery and Christian symbolism of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, yet little has been said about the emotional effect of the tex...
Despite being filmed 32 years apart from each other, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express both tackle the theme of time. In La Jetée, a man is sent back in time to save humanit...
Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is an avant-garde film which defies categorisation. The film confuses the viewer with switches between fiction and reality, utilising both scripted narratives...
The Star Trek series has been one of the most popular science fiction franchises for more than half a century, lauded by fans and critics alike for its optimistic outlook on the future and ingenious t...
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is a film steeped in Russian history, evidenced by its meditations on spirituality and the uniquely Eastern European figure of the yurodivy, the Holy Fool. The Stalker appea...
There must have been some kind of mistake, for Jovan K. was arrested on the 25th of March for a crime he did not commit. Jovan K. woke up at six-thirty that morning, just like he did for every weekday...
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo follows an Italian protagonist through the jungles of Costaguana, a fictional stand-in for Colombia. Yet Conrad has clearly repurposed Colombian history to embellish his novel...
Charles Dickens’ Bleak House is a novel with an extensive cast of characters, ranging from all walks of life. More importantly, Dickens critiques and satirises characters from different social classes...
Three short stories which share themes of exploitation through capitalism and globalisation in developing nations. All three authors are emigrants and penned their stories in English.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir proclaims that women have no claim of “the virile myth that would reflect their projects they still dream through men’s dreams” (Beauvoir 213). The women of clas...
In her 1944 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir defines gender as a duality. The man is an absolute being. By alterity, the woman is defined as an Other. She is an “inessential” (7) Object, as she...
This slacker took 5 modules along with 1 online module this semester for a total load of 15AU.
Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed is often assessed through an ecocritical lens and read as a utopian novel. David Landis Barnhill performs an ecocritical reading of the novel, asserting that it...
Turn of the Screw, Henry James’ landmark gothic novella, has frustrated readers for centuries with its deliberate ambiguity. The twin ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel terrorise the young governes...
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus undergoes an epic journey to reclaim his throne and return to his faithful wife Penelope. The adventures and battles of the titular protagonist form the basis for philosop...
Utopian literature has often been criticised for being overly idealistic and unrealistic. Mark R. Levin writes that:
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were both British soldiers fighting on the Allied side of World War I. They both wrote anti-war poems that were influential in subverting stereotypes about war. In ‘...
To understand Keats’ poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, we must understand it with reference to Edmund Burke’s “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beaut...
Despite being written 44 years apart, Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shares many thematic similarities with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas presented in ‘Self Reliance’ regarding pe...
In Alfian Sa’at’s short story ‘Orphans’, Teck How and Karen are brought together not by love, but money. Sa’at portrays a transactional relationship where Karen is brought together with Teck How becau...