English Literature Writing Samples
The Effect of Affect in William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
Although William Wordsworth’s poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” ostensibly celebrates the speaker’s joyous connection with nature, it is more deeply about their power to imagine.
The Entanglement of Toxic Masculinity and Racism in “Everything that Rises Must Converge”
While the concept of individuality and independence are promised by the American Dream, achieving true individuality and independence is ultimately impossible. Whether through the forces of nurture, nature, or both, we are composed of a multitude of influences.
Hearing is Deafening: Communication in “Pierre and Camille”
The struggle to share and communicate our thoughts and feelings with others is a struggle that all humans wrestle with. Our minds and bodies often speak a different language than the one we make explicit.
Chesnutt’s Haunted America: Historical Consciousness in “The Goophered Grapevine”
Charles W. Chesnutt utilizes a frame narrative in The Conjure Stories to bring about heteroglossia and put the two competing voices of John and Julius in conversation with one another. However, the frame narrative structure also enables Chesnutt to blend time and fluidly move between the past and present. By embedding a story within a story, Chesnutt is able to recontextualize the present with the darkness of the past.
Boccaccio’s “Little Flame” Burns Herself: Fiammetta’s Dissociative Identity
For someone who writes voluminously about love, Lady Fiammetta appears to know little about loving herself; the love she has to offer Panfilo seems grossly disproportionate to the love she shows herself. In her desperate attempt to grapple with the curse of her impassioned love, Fiammetta blames her charms, Fortune, Love, Panfilo, and Panfilo’s father, and yet, none of these feels entirely satisfactory. After Fiammetta is arrested in Love’s shackles, nostalgic thoughts and melancholy feelings for Panfilo come to define the discourse that surrounds her relationship with herself.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” Torn Down: The Madness of Mitchell’s Rest Cure
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” illustrates not only the inefficacy of S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure, but also its pernicious and counterproductive effects that make women more debilitated than recovered. In her short story, Gilman does more than simply challenge Mitchell’s misogynistic evaluation of women’s “nervous conditions”—rather, Gilman gives her audience a taste of Mitchell’s own medicine by allowing readers to journey into the mind of a woman who is given the rest cure and spirals into madness as she is deprived of her motherhood, artistic abilities, and social interaction.
Persons Divided Against Themselves: The Rebirthing of a Unified Identity in Lorna Goodison’s and Kamau Brathwaite’s Poetry
The relationship between one’s identity and the rewriting of a forgotten and misremembered history is central to Caribbean literature. Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison and Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite struggle with reconciling their individual identities with a cultural history that has been stolen, slaughtered, and misappropriated by European colonizers.