House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

Generally, when innocence is thought of, the first speculation recalled to one’s mind is the thought of pureness and the idea that the specific individual is free from moral wrong. On the other end of the spectrum is the term known as guilt. Guilt is the emotional notion in which one feels that they have compromised his or her own standards in a negative way. In the novel Sarah’s Key, Sarah frequently proves to struggle with both guilt and innocence. These specific themes are put on display when Sarah realizes she is not going back home, the scenario in which Sarah boards the cattle car to the camps, and the tragic event in which Sarah takes her own life.

The main theme in the book, The Dark is Rising, is obviously the conflict between the dark and light. It is one of the many suspenseful fantasy books about the battle between good and evil, Susan Cooper wrote about the dark, light, and the mystical powers.

People commonly draw similarities between the relationship of a father and son and that of a man and their shadow. However, this raises several questions. What is one to do if their shadow becomes larger than themselves? Or perhaps the shadow no longer resembles the man? Such questions arise in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel and the graphic novel MAUS by Art Spiegelman. While no definite conclusions can be drawn, they act as guidelines in explaining why the family culture that emerges as a result of Holocaust events deters father-son relationships. The Jews all respond differently, causing such uprooted father-son connections and proving that similar religious beliefs do not necessarily translate to similar decisions in extenuating conditions.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay is a work of fiction about a young girl, Sarah Starzynski, who was collected in France during the roundup of Jews in July 16, 1942, when the French police arrested thousands of Jews throughout Paris. The girl and her family were sent to an internment camp where people were held before being sent to Auschwitz where they were executed.

The book Sarah’s Key was written by Tatiana de Rosnay. Tatiana de Rosnay was born on September 28, 1961 in the suburbs of Paris. Tatiana is English, French, and Russian descent. Her father is a French scientist Joël de Rosnay, her grandfather was Gaëtan de Rosnay. Tatiana’s paternal great- grandmother was Russian actress Natalie Rachewskïa, director of the Leningrad Pushkin Theater from 1925 to 1949. Tatiana’s mother is English, Stella Jebb, daughter of diplomat Gladwyn Jebb, and great- great- granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British engineer. Tatiana is also the niece of historian Hugh Thomas. Tatiana was raised in Paris and then in Boston, when her father taught at MIT in the 70’s. She moved to England in

The book Sarah’s Key was written by Tatiana de Rosnay. Tatiana de Rosnay was born on September 28, 1961 in the suburbs of Paris. Tatiana is English, French, and Russian descent. Her father is a French scientist Joël de Rosnay, her grandfather was Gaëtan de Rosnay. Tatiana’s paternal great- grandmother was Russian actress Natalie Rachewskïa, director of the Leningrad Pushkin Theater from 1925 to 1949. Tatiana’s mother is English, Stella Jebb, daughter of diplomat Gladwyn Jebb, and great- great- granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British engineer. Tatiana is also the niece of historian Hugh Thomas. Tatiana was raised in Paris and then in Boston, when her father taught at MIT in the 70’s. She moved to England in the early 80’s

The Night Tourist, a mystery novel by Katherine Marsh, pulled me in instantly and kept me glued to the book and never let me put it down. I chose this book because I love to read mysteries and they really grab my interest. This book is about Jack Perdu, an introverted ninth grader, who spends most of his time alone. But, while he is in school, he suffers a near fatal accident, which changes his life forever. His father sends him to a mysterious doctor named Dr. Lyons in New York City, where he gets a subway token. The subway token is special and lets Jack go into the underworld. While Jack is in the city, he meets a girl named Euri who offers to show Jack the train stations hidden places. He didn’t just discover the hidden tracks, he has stumbled

When it comes to Butler and based on her essay that we studied “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” where she introduced the term of gender performativity and based it on a feminist phenomenological outlook and suggested that this is based on experiences that we live. Butler accepts the notion of a "distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity". (Butler, Judith (1988). "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory".

“a large number of women’s writings about the city are androgynous figures: independent and hard-pressed working-class women, artists’ models or writers, if not deviants and misfits, outside the conventional bonds that define femininity. These female protagonists are women without family, often

The Starry Night Poem Analysis The Starry Night, written by Anne Sexton, makes me think about raging fires, destruction, death, hell, and demons. The word choice in the poem is very colorful, yet overwhelming and dark, which perplexes, yet astonishes the reader. This poem feels very depressing, but on the contrary, active and raging with life. The sky is alive and intense, yet the town is silent and solemn. The idea of a monstrous death is welcoming and yearned for by the speaker.

In Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh,” women stay silent as men flourish in achieving their greatest potential. In her academic journal, “Sexology and A Room of One’s Own,” Patricia Moran believes that, “A Room of One’s Own is arguably the most influential essay of feminist literary criticism” (Moran 477). Females, as noted in these two works, remain limited to the works of their home and unexposed to the first-class world of literature. They are required to dedicate their work and effort to a dominant male figure in their lives. Both Woolf and Browning argue that women live silently and restricted to the authority of their husband, parents, or a close relative. Despite the different time and literary periods of Aurora Leigh and A Room of One's Own, Browning and Woolf portray their female characters as stuck in their sense of identity. These women are regulated to the family society, discouraged from having a role in the literary realm, and expected to appear complacent to their male figures.

Surrealist artist, Dorthea Tanning, painted Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”) in 1943, Tate, London, England. The medium of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is oil on canvas, and measures “16 × 24”. The oil painting focuses on a monumental life-like sunflower, and two young girls upstairs, in the middle of a hotel corridor. The setting is illusionistic, so real, as if someone could just jump in. The bright yellow sunflower stands out and becomes the focus of the work. The space feels open, but at the same time seems to be taken over by the colossal sunflower. The color of the painting is mainly dark which contributes to the shift of a lingering creepy energy.

In the predominantly male worlds of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh (Book I)”, the women’s voices are muted. Female characters are confined to the domestic spheres of their homes, and they are excluded from the elite literary world. They are expected to function as foils to the male figures in their lives. These women are “trained” to remain silent and passive not only by the males around them, but also by their parents, their relatives, and their peers. Willingly or grudgingly, the women in Woolf and Browning’s works are regulated to the domestic circle, discouraged from the

To answer to Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble and again in successive works, debates gender in terms of what she calls performativity. Gender is not so much a construct or the "congealing" of a specific sexual identity, it is rather an enactment, a performed moment, in which sexual identity "becomes" through the moment of enactment in the body: "one is not simply a [gendered] body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body"' (1990:272). This performativity is not a performance, however. Performance as a more or less consciously explained act or series of acts can never be performative, in Butler's terms, because performance is too a priori, too conscious of itself and its biases and internal, social forces. Performance is more a showing

The third feminist critique to discuss is put forth by the theorists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from their text, “The Madwoman in the Attic”. Within this text, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the phenomenon in male-authored texts of creating two very distinct binary roles