Life As We Knew It By Susan Beth Pfeffer: Literary Analysis

Being hurt emotionally by death is by far the worst kind of pain in the world. It causes one to completely shy away from doing what is right. Alice Dark’s In the Gloaming, illustrates selfishness in one character, and righteousness in another. Although this story is written in third person, it is out of Janet’s perspective. Janet plays the role of the protagonist character. She spends all of her time taking care of Laird and making him happy. Dark gives her readers many symbols and metaphors throughout her story to explain her theme. She tells a story about a family that is being pulled apart by their brothers and sons homosexuality as well as his death from AIDS. According to David Caron, “The family is an institution, and like all

was the step-mother’s interest to make sure that his children were gotten rid of, for she wanted

In Susan Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It, life for Miranda and her family comes to a screeching halt after a meteor collides with the moon, triggering calamitous natural disasters. After the initial tragedy, humanity is left with unanswered questions, to which no one seems to have answers for. As a result, Miranda must forget about her normal, mundane life and focus on the hardship ahead of her and her family. With her world collapsing around her, she is left with choices and responsibilities that affect her loved ones as much as herself. Through literary devices, Pfeffer emphasizes the emotional struggles and physical battles Miranda must surmount before and after the misfortunate collision.

Eavan Boland’s poem “It’s a Woman’s World” illuminates the fact that history has shaped an unfair role for women in today’s society. Boland criticizes the gender bias with regards to the limitations placed on women and their job choices despite their ability to be just as successful in the workplace as men. Regardless of the fact that the bias against women in the workplace is often overlooked, Boland aims to show the shared reaction of women to the gender bias prevalent in our society by using short sentence fragments, repetition, and a fire motif throughout the poem.

When students are bullied, they are encouraged to speak up about it to a teacher or some other adult; however, many do not, because they may think their cases are not important enough to be told, because no one will believe their stories, or because they are embarrassed by what happened. As these cases turn from simple bullying to a more severe event, this inability to speak up only increases. Laurie Halse Anderson shows this effect with being raped, as well as the emotional damage that goes with it. Through Melinda’s experiences in Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson’s writing reflects the time in which it was written, her views on teens and the adolescent years, and her early life.

Susan R. Wolf (born 1952) is a moral philosopher who works extensively on the meaning of human life and is the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wolf addresses the questions of the meaning of life in hope to distinguish the characteristics and reasoning that gives meaning to life. According to Susan Wolf view about the meaning in life, “I would say that meaningful life are lives of active engagement in projects of worth… two key phrases, ‘active engagement’ and ‘projects of worth’” (Wolf, 205). However, I believe that her proposal leaves out our basic motives and reasoning that’s

In her work, “This is Our World,” Dorothy Allison shares her perspective of how she views the world as we know it. She has a very vivid past with searing memories of her childhood. She lives her life – her reality – because of the past, despite how much she wishes it never happened. She finds little restitution in her writings, but she continues with them to “provoke more questions” (Allison 158) and makes the readers “think about what [they] rarely want to think about at all” (158).

The book I chose to do was If We Survive by Andrew Klavan.This book starts off with Will, Meredith, Nicki, and Jim- four high school students who decide to go to Costa Verdes with Pastor Ron to rebuild a schoolhouse that had been destroyed by Los Volcanoes. On the last day of their building trip the kids and Pastor Ron go into a local bar called the cantina. They are all having a good time except for Palmer their pilot for the trip. All of a sudden Mendoza a wretched, and heartless man , who is also the leader of los volcanoes, and a man who wants to take over Costa Verdes and start a revolution against the current government. Mendoza took all of them and held them hostage in the hotel above the cantina. In attempt to negotiate with Mendoza’s

"Life as We Knew It," is a book by Beth Pfeffer, which is known to be science fiction. The story involves environmental changes, which involves science but can be fictional as well because it is not likely to happen in reality. So this story was written by Beth Pfeffer and she had decided to write this book after watching a show about a meteor. She asked herself, what it would be like to be a teenager living in a catastrophe. Beth later came up with the story, writing it as a 16 year old girl's diary. The story first main point starts out with everyone getting ready to watch a meteor pass and ends up hitting the moon.

I agree with the position expressed by Francis Schaeffer in “How should we then live?”, asserting Rome fell because of their inward base. Matthew 12:25 teaches us that a kingdom or house divided cannot stand and will be brought to desolation. Unlike the Greek’s unifying passion to search for truth and understanding, Roman society settled for a set of common laws but remain divided in their philological and spiritual wellbeing.

Both Mother Who Gave Me Life by Gwen Harwood and Woman to Child by Judith Wright, explore the bonds shared between mother and child. While both poems explore the same themes, each poet uses different techniques in doing so. Woman to Child is from the point of view of a mother. Although the poet has used the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’, the poem is not from Wrights point of view, rather, from every woman’s, as majority of women have experienced the intimate experience of becoming a mother. Like Woman to Child, Mother Who Gave Me Life also uses personal pronouns, but unlike Woman to Child, Mother Who Gave Me Life is a personal elegy for Harwood’s mother.

Have you ever felt like you were invisible? Well, Melinda from “Speak” has. The novel “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson is about a freshmen girl trying to find out who she is. At Merryweather High School, the constantly changing mascot symbolizes Melinda’s lack of identity. Melinda’s high school, Merryweather High, already changed their mascot the first day of school.

Gwendolyn Brooks was an African American poet, who came to national prominence in 1940’s to 1990’s. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985. Throughout her lifetime Gwendolyn Brooks faced many trials and tribulations. Brooks had a real talent in her ability to express reflective human emotions in such logical expressions. Truthfully, She creates a horrific imagery that abortions are terrible; and in the poem “The Mother “, she expresses the pitiless emotions of anxiety over her aborted children, her perspective is regretful of the consequences of her actions, and she mirrors herself to reality to show the missed opportunities of a child that women who

The author Donna Jones in her article “Invidious Life” can be related to the recent events that are happening in our country. Black history can’t be forgotten for the people who went through the struggles and difficult, to them past can not be abandoned just because it passed, their present also carries their pain of their ancestry’s, as if like their whole future, past and present are each one connected to the other. As Donna said, “Black thought has been singularly capable of exploding the specious present, holding the future and the past together with the present” (233).

In this analysis, Kate Soper’s book ‘The Human In Posthumanism’ (___) will be studied in regards to Soper’s defence for human exceptionalism between humans and animals. In this text, there is a strong concern for the depletion of the current ecology and the rise mass consumption, Soper suggests this is due to our current ideologies of what it means to live a ‘rich’ lifestyle. The posthumanist notion of a human-animal blurring is viewed in this text as a change that needs to be resisted in order to move forward with the worldly issues at stake. However to do this, Soper suggests there needs to be a sense of self-realisation and self-recognition that humans are in fact more exceptional than animals to “recognise their [humans] unique responsibilities for creating and correcting the environmental devastation” (pg377)