Literature

• I finished The Basic Eight and I can't decide if I enjoyed it

  Spoilers to follow.

  I wrote in my week notes:

  The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler. Handler’s Adverbs is often what I cite when folks ask what my favorite book is, and I loved Watch Your Mouth, too. I need light reprieves from The Odyssey, too, so this seemed an excellent time to round out my reading of Handler’s bibliography. I’m about halfway through and enraptured by the narrative voice. It’s pretentious, as a story narrated by a precocious high school senior should be, without being cloying, and with Handler’s charming humor throughout. I love it so far and have faith that the feeling will continue. I normally hate books set in high school, but this one takes me back to my high school self — somehow, in a good way, which I don’t think I’ve ever felt before.

  17 Aug 2024
• LITR 308 Emily Dickinson & Queer Theory

  The lives of many literary greats remain a relative mystery; literary critics and historians are often left to piece together details from letters, documentation, and, sometimes controversially, the author’s work read for repeated motifs. They then draw what conclusions they can about the authors’ lives. One of the most prolific female poets in the English literary canon, Emily Dickinson’s life is preserved in letters and artifacts from her life. When examined as a body of work, Dickinson’s poetry reveals a pattern of focus on women’s interior lives and relationships that may be regarded as queer, especially with the added dimension of her close relationship with her sister-in-law. This essay examines a selection of her poems through a queer lens, highlighting the poems’ relationships to female love and Dickinson’s life and arguing against established patterns of erasing Dickinson’s queer identity.

  28 Dec 2023
• LITR 250 Close Reading 2E

  In the beginning of Chapter VIII in the third section of To the Lighthouse, pages 186-187, Virginia Woolf’s unique approach to perspective and introspection create a subjective presentation of reality and relationships, supported by extended metaphors of fluidity and stillness. On a boat trip mandated by Mr. Ramsay to the titular lighthouse, Cam and James anatomize and unfold their feelings towards their father. Cam evolves as the boat moves across the sea while James’s unflinching rage and violence towards the patriarch repeat in this section as the sailboat halts and space contracts to exacerbate his indignation. Woolf thus frames and explores the figure of Mr. Ramsay and the nominal motif of a journey through individual introspection and excurses. ¹

  19 Sep 2023