Author: Nicholas She

So if our goal is to not read all of Hemingway and then try to make some generalizations about his writing, what better way to do it than to take the random sample extracted for examination that surely does not suffer from sampling bias given its ample size of three and make some sweeping generalizations based […] Read more →

Before reading the short stories for class, the only Hemingway I’d read was The Old Man and the Sea which, much like middle school, left me feeling sad, dejected, and just a little bit lonely. Which is probably pretty indicative of my expectations for these short stories. In any case, I found these short stories difficult to read, […] Read more →

I must admit, I don’t know what to make of House of Leaves. It’s so drastically different from anything I’d previously read, so instead of talking about all its weird things, I’ll just talk about one thing: how the senses are deceiving, fake if you will, in the real world, while more concrete in Zampano’s imaginary Navidson […] Read more →

If the poems of The World’s Wife paint women as independent and headstrong people who get along swimmingly without men, then “Mrs Rip Van Winkle” is a delightful poem that clearly portrays this agenda. Although it deviates somewhat from the original short story (Dame Van Winkle is dead by the time Rip Van Winkle wakes up), Carol […] Read more →

It would seem that Carol Ann Duffy was much less satisfied with the initial state of “Mrs. Beast” than with “Lovesick”, going through multiple revisions. She composes it stanza by stanza (reasonable given the poem seems to build on itself) with earlier stanzas receiving less and less revisions further along. The first stanza sets the […] Read more →

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Lovesick” describes someone finding and being enchanted by an apple. Interestingly, Duffy’s available drafts of the poem are not very different from her final revision, the most significant change being ‘have to of-‘ (presumably ‘have to offer’) into ‘calling about’. “Lovesick” is an extremely symbolic poem and can be interpreted in […] Read more →

In Mrs. Dalloway, the section of Septimus’s death and Clarissa’s fascination stood out to me. It seemed that this passage was the culmination of the story: the recurring image of clocks, everyone’s distant and almost miraculous relationship and interactions with one another, and how time and age become more and more apparent to the characters […] Read more →

Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway” details a day in the life of an upper class middle-aged English woman along with several others in close relation to her. In particular, I found Woolf’s section on Septimus very intriguing given the reality of the time. In short, I feel Woolf has done a remarkable job in portraying […] Read more →

“Sexy” by Jhumpa Lahiri follows Miranda as she immerses herself in both Indian culture and as a mistress of a married man. Miranda strikes me as a rather vacant person to start: she’s woefully ignorant of geography, almost apathetic of her colleague’s family troubles, and eager to start a relationship with a married man. However, she […] Read more →