African-American Lit

 Everything after this post is for African-American Literature. 

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Bullying in Black Swan Green

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Esther's story is really not universal and I kind of like that

    The story of The Bell Jar  is fundamentally one about mental health and the fairly severe six-month psychological break that Esther experiences during it. Many coming-of-age protagonists suffer mental health issues, Holden Caulfield, for example, definitely had some stuff going on and we theorized that he might be in a mental hospital while telling the story of The Catcher in the Rye . However, the severity of Esther's illness is something that I think is quite rare, in other words, this is not a universalizing coming-of-age narrative. Sylvia Plath is not trying to access some sort of essence of adulthood and convey it to the reader, she is telling the story of one specific person, arguably herself.      It is undeniably true that people can relate to Esther Greenwood and her struggles. After all, many of the issues that she struggles to reconcile are larger sociocultural problems that affect many women of her generation, race, and status. It is also tr...
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Holden has unrealistic standards that make him hate almost everyone

     Over the course of our reading J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye,  I have attempted to come up with a clear and simple thesis to Holden Caulfield's worldview. It is not that his view of the world is complicated. It is something that is immediately familiar without being completely explicable or tangible from the first paragraph of his narration. His hatred of movies, of people doing things to make money or because they experience societal pressure to do so, and Holden's disdain for this exemplified through his own refusal to "participate in society" are all reminiscent of so many angsty boy pop-cultural classics. Of course, his positions themselves stem more from his place in society than any removal from it. However, regardless of his perspective's familiarity I still could not really explain exactly what it is that he believes or what drives it. There is no central problem or battle that he is fighting, no underclass that he represents, and no one,...
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