Aristotle and Dante: An Exporation Into Adolescence in the 80s

By -

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Growing Pains - The Symbolism of the Tree in Speak

By -
I have felt the paralyzing pain of internal disease. The kind of trauma that causes your mouth to curl in and swallow you whole. I, like so many other women, are walking the halls in Melinda’s shoes in “Speak.” I thought Laurie Anderson did a phenomenal job of twisting all of the tribulations a high school girl goes through, into the tree that Melinda is. Whether we’re as strong as an oak or weak as a bush, we have all gone through the disease that strikes Melinda from the inside out. Melinda is like a half-dead tree. Some parts of her strive to blossom and create beauty. Other parts are broken and diseased. Like a dead tree, Melinda needs to save herself and “cut off the damage, [so it] is possible for the tree to grow again” (187). The symbolism of a tree is significant in “Speak.” Trees reflect her growing process. In the beginning, Melinda is a sick and lifeless tree. Her view is negative and dark. She’s so far past repair, bursts of sunlight do her no good. Sunlight would be pe...
Read more

Speak and the Symbolism of Nature

By Anonymous -
   Laurie Halse Anderson's,  Speak , dives into the murky, muddy waters of adolescent rape culture. When the book was published in 1999, rape was not a comfortable topic to discuss with adults, let alone teenagers. Anderson writes about Melinda Sordino and her freshman high school experience which is turning out to be rather negative. Soriano stands as a thriving young role model for struggling teenage girls all over the world. Although she isn't an outstanding student or have plenty of friends to juggle, through Melinda, other young women can see that it's completely normal and okay to struggle in high school not only academically, but socially and emotionally. One of my favorite parts of the novel isn't a super obvious quality. Throughout the novel, Melinda's attitude changes and grows with the coming of spring and through nature and art, she learns to move past her troubling end of summer experience and once again find the importance of her voice.    Melind...
Read more

Code Switching Decoded in The Hate U Give

By -
In the novel, The Hate U Give , the protagonist Starr Carter is described to be living between two different worlds, her poor black neighborhood and her white suburban private school. She navigates these two environments using a term called "Code Switching" which means that she changes her personality to assimilate with the community she is amongst at the time. She calls her suburban private school alter ego "Williamson Starr" and pulls out this version every time she is with her white school friends or even with her white boyfriend. She then reverts back to her typical self when she is with her family or her Garden Heights friends. This consistent switching back and forth outwardly weighs on Starr and she begins to find difficulty in this practice, as mentioned at the very beginning of the book. "There are just some places where it's not enough to be me. Either version of me." (Thomas 3) The thing about code-switching that this book is trying to portr...
Read more