Is Maurice a Hopelessly Flawed Text?

Andrew Sullivan, author of, What is a Homosexual, portrays his experience growing up; trapped in his own identity. He paints a detailed portrait of the hardships caused by being homosexual. He explains the struggle of self-concealment, and how doing so is vital for social acceptation. The ability to hide one’s true feelings make it easier to be “invisible” as Sullivan puts it. “The experience of growing up profoundly different in emotional and psychological makeup inevitably alters a person’s self-perception.”(Sullivan)This statement marks one of the many reasons for this concealment. The main idea of this passage is to reflect on those hardships, and too understand true self-conscious difference. Being different can cause identity

By doing this, he is succesful in showing that gay men are the same as anyone else. The only difference is who they choose to share a sexual life with. Once again modeling reality, several characters are confident in their sexuality but are hesitant to admit to it.

The playwriter Oscar Wilde sexual philosophies are reinforced throughout his play, The Importance of Being Ernest. Wilde’s characters and choices of stage direction evoke a tone of sexuality and deviance. The characters’ social belief’s and identities are in parallel with the Literary Queer Theory on many key points.

Second, the transvestism of the English renaissance theatre creates a "space of possibility" for "structuring and confounding culture" as well as enacting a "category crisis" which reflects a potential destabilization of the dominant hierarchy (Garber 16, 17). Greenblatt points out that the enactment of such difference is an instrument to increase audience anxiety before reifying the normative and conventional in the play's res-olution, a pattern played out in The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; yet this cannot account for the defiant and yet compassionate resolution of Dek-ker's The Roaring Girl, where the mannishly clad Moll blesses the marriage of Sebastian and Mary Fitz-Allard and their reconciliation with their fathers, at the same time refusing the conventional solution for herself.

“The Haunting of Emile Griffith” by Bob Herbert, presents Emile Griffith as an average individual, briefly describes the Paret v.s. Griffith fight in vivid imagery, and tackles society’s twisted view of homosexuality. Considering the article was printed approximately 40 years after the big fight, tensions have calmed down and people can analyze the surrounding circumstances with logic and rationality rather than emotion. Ultimately, the texts main purpose is to emphasize society’s distorted view of homosexuality and to present Griffith as a victim through the use of tone, diction, and credibility.

Fulfillment of desire is human nature, an aspect of a person that is universal. Throughout the story of ‘Ethan Frome’ by Edith Wharton, the self-titled protagonist struggles to fulfill his own desires, battling social norms as well as his own morality. Even when the whole situation has been set out to work perfectly for Frome, he cannot bring himself to cheat on his wife, an aspect that is admiring, but ultimately self-crippling. His indecisiveness is not only an aspect that drives the whole story forward, but a trait that leads to his own undoing. In a final twist of irony, the penultimate scene of the story not only sums up the consequences of the characters’ mistakes, but as well as a fate that coincides with the very same social and moral

Ernest Hemingway grasps the intimacy and authenticity of human relationships, in his book, “In Our Time.” The book consists of short stories following the lives of different individuals. Few of the short stories include The End of Something, Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, Cat in the Rain, and The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife. Through these short stories, relationships between male and female characters, lack meaningful intimacy. There is a disconnect amongst these couples. Hemingway redefines intimacy and what it means. Intimacy goes beyond sex; it is a bond between individuals. He is depicting two forms of intimacy through his characters. One form of intimacy is emotional intimacy, which is portrayed in the male characters. The other form would be sexual intimacy. Thus, Hemingway is changing our perception of intimacy; it is not only found in male and female relationships, but also in friendships. The bond between the male characters is more meaningful and stronger than the female and male relationships.

A “time being” is someone who is placed in a certain place, or duration of the universe. According to Zen Buddhist teacher Dogen Zenji, he expounds that “if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being” (p. 259). This quote explains that an individual, who grasps times as simply something that’s passing, does not understand that everyone is linked together homogenously in more ways than one. In addition, a “time being” is someone who is linked with time, and with their surroundings in a fixed locus. In the novel, the author Ruth Ozeki gazes at the landscape from her home, and says

Another important aspect of the novel is that of sexuality and of same-sex desire. Froehlich states that, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,

Although I enjoyed Aldous Huxley’s writing style and novel Brave New World as a whole, I disagreed with many aspects of the World State. While reading Brave New World, I couldn’t help but be disgusted by the relaxed sexual nature that was ubiquitous throughout this society. Due to the fact I grew up in a conservative Pakistani household, the idea of casual sex and erotic behaviors in children present in Huxley’s novel left me appalled. When John responds to Lenina’s attempts to seduce him with “Impudent strumpet”, John’s conservative nature rooted from the Shakespearean society is revealed (Huxley 194). Similarly, unlike the majority of my peers I view sex as a sacred union, not as an act to get instant gratification.

Throughout David Lean’s film, Dr Zhivago, and Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights, the inherent tragedies losing one’s love and gaining one’s “heart’s desire” are explored. Both authors present their protagonists with different adversities in order to reveal the difficulties in making a moral decision. Lean and Bronte agree that losing one’s love can lead to psychological issues, but whereas Lean explains that adulterer is able to fully recover from these difficulties, Bronte indicates that these issues are permanent and lead to death. Not only do both Lean and Bronte explore the misfortune of being unable to satisfy lust, but as it is a superficial need, they highlight how once it has been initially satiated the adulterer’s temporary

It could argued that our common-sense notion of endurance through time is incorrect. That this mistaken self-conception lead us to experience the passage of time. If so, this would be illusory no? And if this enduring ‘me’ is an illusion then so is the passage of time.

Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman’s life legacy and at the same time the most praised and condemned book of poetry. Although fearful of social scorn, there are several poems in Leaves of Grass that are more explicit in showing the homoerotic imagery, whereas there are several subtle – should I say “implicit” – images woven into the fabric of the book. It is not strange, then, that he created many different identities in order to remain safe. What Whitman faced in writing his poetry was the difficulty in describing and resonating manly and homosexual love. He was to find another voice of his, a rhetoric device, and his effort took two forms: simplified, and subverted word play.

The passage of time is intrinsically connected to every aspect of life, as it is the construct through which we understand human experiences and the framework through which we comprehend our existence. The essence and effects of temporality reverberate through narratives; acting as a catalyst for action, or becoming an impediment to the future. Through the response that characters in The Wanderer and The Tempest have towards the transience of time, it becomes clear how these effects echo throughout the narrative, prompting these events into movement, and how they seep throughout every aspect of these texts.

It is paradoxical to have a course, which revolves round the corrosiveness of faulted Western notions of time and its depiction through abstraction, identify itself with an abstract title but argue for the concreteness and tangibility of the portrayal of time and space. A Place Beyond Time does just that. Containing a vastly abstract title, A Place Beyond Time may at first glance appear to properly relate time as a tangent notion with space. Upon further contemplation, however, it becomes patent that A Place Beyond Time possesses a conspicuous absence present in its philosophy of aloofness from intangibility. And although the name of the course attempts to tackle and manifest the complications of abstract and concrete time, it is through its lack of definition and precision, lack of possession, and lack of sensation of repetition that A Place Beyond Time fails to properly capitalize on this dilemma.