Niobe, By Ted Hughes

In the poem “Loch Ard Gorge” by John Foulcher he represents his vision of the world by describing a place called Loch Ard Gorge where there is a constant battle between life and death with death slowly winning. He does this by describing the Gorge in a way that compares life and death with the sea and the land, two places which can not exist without the other yet are difficult to reconcile.

In Larry Lankton’s text, “Beyond the Boundaries” we gradually enter an unknown world that is frightening yet filled with immense beauty for miles. Due to the copper mining industry, a gradual increase of working class men and their families start to migrate to the unknown world with unsteady emotion, yet hope for a prosperous new life. In “Beyond the Boundaries”, Lankton takes us on a journey on how the “world below” transformed the upper peninsula into a functional and accepted new part of the world.

In the story “Gryphon” by Charles Baxter, a strange substitute teacher teaches in 4th grade class in Five Oaks, Michigan. Her name is Ms. Ferenczi. She is strange in the way how she is super superstitious and tells strange stories and believes them as well. This story is told from the point of view from one of her students, Tommy. In the beginning, the class’s real teacher gets sick. The next day, Ms. Ferenczi shows up as substitute. The day after the next day, Ms. Ferenczi appears again and decides to reward the class for being a good class. This time, her reward was a fortune telling with a tarot pack. The problem was was that one of her students got the death card. That kid told on Ms. Ferenczi and got her in trouble. Tommy heard about this and got in a fight with the kid because Tommy liked and defended Ms. Ferenczi. In the story, Tommy’s behavior and actions showed that Tommy liked things that were strange and new because Five Oaks is so boring. Ms. Ferenczi is just the opposite since she is strange and mysterious. That is the reason why Tommy defended Ms. Ferenczi. Some of Tommy’s behavior across the story show that when he likes something, he defends it and also.

The poem Fifteen by William Stafford, describes the ideas of a young teenager and imaginations when he sees a motorcycle at the side of the rail, It tells us of how the main character gets familiar with adulthood and starts getting mature, it gives us changes. The author in his poem describes the ideas and temptations that a fifteen year old would have, and it gives us a message of how when you are blinded of your teenage dreams, at the same time to take and decide the correct paths and decisions.

Discuss how your investigation of the generic conventions of poetry has influenced your understanding of at least one poem that you have studied in this unit.

In Mario Puzo 's book The Fortunate Pilgrim, he highlights the struggles of Italian immigrants coming to America through one family. Using the Angeluzzi-Corbo family Puzo is able to show the struggles of living in a new country, giving up old ways, and adapting to new customs. He shows the immigrants struggles the best by using Lucia Santa, the mother and the rock of the Angeluzzi-Corbo family. By using Lucia, Puzo is able to make the reader see her struggle of keeping her family safe from the harshness of the outside world. Lucia is mainly concerned that her children do not lose the Italian ways and that she can continue to provide for her family. While reading the book the reader can see how Lucia struggles keeping all six of her

“I’m Nikhil” (Jhumpa Lahiri 96) these are the words that Gogol uttered for the first

Life is the toughest thing you will do in your life. It is the test on how well you can survive the world, and all of its cruel punishments. It is the assessment on how to cope with the bad, so the good times seem greater. Life can throw a enormous amount of cruel events that sometimes are unavoidable. Not everything in life is bad, but people tend to make things much worse than what they really are. People over exaggerate many events that could be easily fixed, but then there are the people who are not exaggerating the paing and irony they are facing. There is a number of ways of how to cope with tragedies, such as being with friends, talking with family, or just doing something fun to keep your mind off of the harsh environments

Runner by Carl Deuker is a book written to describe the life of a boy named Chance Taylor and his dad. Chance is close to starvation and homelessness. He worries about paying the bills, having enough food to eat, and keeping his home, a small boat named the Tiny Dancer. While out on his usual run around the marina and beach, a man asks him if he would like a job. The man says all he has to do is run. Chance will have to pick up a package along the beach each day. The package will be hidden in the recesses of a rock buried at the foot of a maple tree. He then has to leave it in a locker. The man says the job pays a lot of money. Even though he suspects that he is smuggling drugs, he always completes the job and now has extra money in his pocket to spend at the café

Have you ever been forced to pick between right and wrong? Sometimes we are forced to choose between two hard choices, despite the consequences. In the book “Runner” by Carl Deuker, a boy named Chance is faced with a rough life, where his father drinks and his mother is no longer present. He lives on a boat with his father, in Seattle. Soon he is faced to with a offer to run packages around for men he doesn’t know, but get paid in the process. His small family needs the money, but who knows what is in those packages? He takes the opportunity for the money and goes through many adventures throughout this book, such as meeting a girl named Melissa, who lives the opposite life of his, privileged and nice.

Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson centers on the internal slave business in New Orleans as well as the slave market as a place of portrayal and oblique connotations built around the commoditization of the physique of slaves .A significant interest in Soul by Soul relates to the slave pen, where slave bodies as commodities determined the identities of black and white persons. Slave transactions were typically about show and filled with meaning-making, which was itself characterized by cost and worth. The paternalism ideology employed the black persons’ physique and slave transactions to imply that white persons were assisting powerless black people in the slave markets. In essence, the ideology suggests that, contrary to common perceptions, white persons were not separating slave families .The slave market history discussed in Soul by Soul relates to that of the antebellum in the South where slave trade was basically about purchases and sales. Those who owned slaves were consumers in the marketplace. Consumer way of life had structured individual identities. Slave bodies were regarded as items to be rated and assessed and were usually the subject of discussions. Every slave was given a made-up and decorated past. The market culture of slavery in that era was based on fantasy just like the ideology of paternalism. Succinctly, the slave market stimulated the self-definition of white persons from the South.

Harriet Wilson’s novel Our Nig, follows the life of Frado, a young mulatto girl in the household of a white family in New England. She is abandoned to this family at the age of six because her mother could not afford to care for her and resented her and the hardships to which her birth had contributed. The mistress of the household to which Frado is left is a cruel and spiteful woman, especially towards blacks. When Frado is left in the care of the Bellmont residence as a young girl, she has no idea of the troubles she would have to face for most of her life. From the very beginning, neither Mrs. Bellmont, the main antagonist, nor her equally cruel daughter, Mary, show any hint of compassion or even mercy for the young girl. The story follows Frado and her life in the Bellmont household.

- 1970s: Early 1970s seemed to be continuation of ‘60s. Banning of news reports of opposition and overseas, but impossible to silence people completely. Exiled parties and people who were released from the problem tried to let me people know what was happening, but difficult to create literature and art: segregational theatres and restaurants. Act of creating The Island is an act of defiance in itself: different people of different races coming together, monument to defiance of political tyranny, extremely difficult  strategy: no written script until after internationally famous, no evidence, no arrests!

The Indigenous Australian imagination perceives the way of the world and all that exists as not the result of a singular force or mind, but, rather, the result of powerful totemic ancestral beings who once roamed the land. This ontological tradition, known as “The Dreaming”, serves as an infinite link between past and present, people and place, and both the natural and spiritual world. “The Dreaming,” then, asserts that all of humanity and nature in its entirety is alive and connected. In his ethnographic account titled, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, Fred Myers examines the importance of The Dreaming to Pintupi society and its centrality in the constitution of their lived world. Descriptions of what happened in The Dreaming underlie Pintupi social relationships and constructions of “country.” It is through this mythological construct that the Pintupi Aboriginal people mediate their relationships with the land and negotiate aspects of personhood and identity.

Nighthawks, was painted in 1942 by Edward Hopper (1882-1967) an artist who was known as “a great master in the ranks of America realists.” (Levin, Gail) Hoppers paintings were first hung in “retrospective in 1933, Hopper played host just three years later to the first major show of surrealist art in New york.” (Levin, Gail) Hopper grew up in Washington Square, and lived there for most of his life. “ Hopper excelled in creating realistic pictures of clear-cut, sunlit streets and houses, often without figures.” (Levin, Gail) “He offers a brand of realism not bound to reality, and the places he depicts are familiar and foreign, comfortable and disquieting,” said the USA Times. The painting resides in the Art institute of Chicago. Nighthawks just like many of Hoppers paintings give a feeling of loneliness, and isolation as well as a feeling of darkness due to the dark hues. The picture leaves the viewer with thousands of words and interpretations with a third person view of an isolated man as he sits in a small parlor and ponders. The painting was created in 1942, which took place during the time of the great depression.