“For you a thousand times over.” In Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” Afghanistan is portrayed in a flashback of this family’s life. Baba and his son Amir lives in Kabul with their servants Hassan and Ali. Being that Hassan and Amir grew up together they have a very strong bond that is unbreakable under any […]
In recounting the account of a development where enduring and torment have been annihilated at the cost of individual self-sufficiency, Aldous Huxley Brave New World explores the dehumanizing impacts of innovation, and infers that torment is important for life to have meaning. The story starts with three explanatory sections depicting the advanced society of World […]
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, is a challenge to the novel as a narrative paradigm. The book is a collection of first-person monologues of four mother-daughter pairs, which delves into the generational divide. In it, the conflicts between mother and daughter and the differences between traditional Chinese values and American values […]
Russ’ The Female Man is a key text of feminist science fiction. Writing in response to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Russ explores “gender, Utopia and the divided self” (xii) in her convoluted narrative that spans multiple universes and hundreds of years. A key concept in this exploration is arguably the theme […]
In Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is a text that begs to be understood from some of the philosopher’s more well-known concepts including the categorical imperative, which is introduced in the book as a way of evaluating the motivations for individual action. For Kant, a proposition declaring a certain action as necessary […]
In her poem “For Malcolm X,” Margaret Walker states “[t]he voice has gone” (1) on the death of the late Civil Rights activist and the leader within the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X. Malcolm X used his voice to influence millions of African Americans grasping for a shimmer of hope within the darkness, African Americans […]
Written at a time where the conventions of marriage were being challenged and transformed, Le Bel Inconnu charts a tale of romance and self-discovery ultimately ending in the abandonment of true love and instead acceptance of a royally approved marriage. Given the relative power of the ‘woman’ in the story, and the prominent part played […]