Author: Ashley Glenn

As an English speaker I find Hemingway’s short stories endlessly frustrating and insulting. Having read poetry and other fine works of literature I have some grasp of the capacity of the language to evoke the beautiful, powerful, and the like.  However, I think that there is a reason that variation is a key piece of […] Read more →

I was impressed by how many things the short section “What Some Have Thought” is doing (p. 354-365). First, it’s a sort of SparkNotes or “Navidson Record” for dummies in that it does all sort of interpretation for you. There’s literal readings of the house, feminist, Freudian, philosophical, and scientific readings etc. The meaning of […] Read more →

I got so scared reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire for my other English class. I was afraid the similarities between the books was going to suddenly tear down my love for House of Leaves by making it seem derivative and stolen. We finished Pale Fire right before this class started House of Leaves. I was very […] Read more →

Three years ago, I wrote a paper on this poem using the materials in MARBL. I chose to look at them again to see what else I might notice or see differently years later. In looking over the paper I wrote then and at the drafts of “Mrs. Lazarus” again, it was clear that I […] Read more →

In examining the six drafts of “Only Dreaming,” the most substantial change I observed was to the form of the poem. While a couple lines of the poem were changed slightly though the drafts, the main aspect of the poem Duffy seemed to be trying to work out was how the poem was arranged. As […] Read more →

Because we walked through the first poem in the book in class, I decided to look at the last. “Miles Away” echoes the first poem, “Practising Being Dead,” in many respects. Again, there is a ghost but this ghost is more obviously metaphorical. It is night in both poems and the speaker is calling up […] Read more →

In reading Franco Moretti’s “Abstract Models for Literary History—1,” his use of multiple metaphors to talk about novels became increasingly interesting to me. Throughout the article he uses metaphors from different fields of study to describe the changes he see in genres and cycles. First, he describes novels in a way he sees as typical, that […] Read more →

The first time I read Mrs. Dalloway I hated Clarissa. Her self-important mind-wanderings about how old she is and looks and feels drove me crazy. This time I felt the same but sympathized more with the overall sadness of not only Clarissa’s thoughts, but Peter’s and of course Septimus’s as well. The contrast between the things the […] Read more →