Welcome Home by Jack Levine and City Landscape by Francis Criss

During Mr. Rosenberg’s leave we learned different dramatic elements such as script analysis, stasis and intrusion, dramatic conflict, etc. This helps us to understand the different elements so one day when we have to apply the elements we will already be mindful of them. Additionally, we also learned about the beginning of theater dating back to ancient Greece and their different ways of displaying theater.

There are an infinite amount of unique responses to the question “What is the meaning of life?”. However, the majority of people will agree that the true meaning of life is to find happiness and what is really important to one’s self. In Jon Krakauer’s, Into The Wild, Chris McCandless conveys this idealism through his life’s journey as he bravely defies all limitations. Chris McCandless isolates himself from society in his Alaskan Odyssey as a way to defy accepted expectations and to begin discovering the meanings of life without any corrupted influences.

What does the word home mean? In the essay “On Going Home” by Didion she recreates her feelings and thoughts about her meaning of home. Family is a big part of one’s life and important one at that and Didion uses it as the center of her work. The work itself is about re- defining what home truly is.

In Alison Bechdel 's Fun Home, there is a focus on a sculpted perception of gender roles produced by society and a great emphasis on how Bruce and Alison challenge these strict gender specific characteristics. Through Bruce’s femininity and Alison’s masculinity along with their homosexuality, they are able to go against the norms and the collection of rules set by society. It is also through their struggle with gender roles that one is able to understand their sexual orientation. Although Bruce and Alison seem fairly different from one another, there are elements that pull them closer together revealing their similarities.

Science fiction is a way for an author to express their concerns in the world while using fiction to bring up controversial ideas. In Unwind , Neal Shusterman is able to incorporate science fiction in a way to not only get his points across but to also make the reader think, and adjust the message to relate to one's own life. Unwind takes place in the future where it is an option for parents to choose to have their child unwound, meaning they would be taken from their family and taken apart. Their body parts would then be given to someone who is sick or injured. The reader is introduced to the main characters: three teenagers who have relatable backgrounds to teenage readers in order to help one connect and feel a part of the story. As readers start learning about these characters, Lev, Connor and Risa, new issues develop which create life or death situations that these adolescence have to deal with alone. While this story is science fictional the plot of these kids struggling to find who they are and what their purpose is, while their parents have given up on them, is something most readers can relate to in one way or another, whether it’s being unsure about the future, having family problems, or being told something can’t be done. In Unwind, the author, Neal Shusterman,

Through my understanding of the book, Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May explores two traditional depictions of the 1950s, namely suburban domesticity and anticommunism. She intertwines both historical events into a captivating argument. Throughout the book, May aims to discover why “Post-war Americans accepted parenting as well as marriage with so much zeal” unlike their own parents and children. Her findings are that the “cold war ideology and domestic revival” were somewhat linked together. She saw “domestic containment” as an outgrowth of frights and desires that bloomed after the war. However, psychotherapeutic services were as much a boom then as now, and helped offer “private and personal solutions to social problems.” May reflects her views on the origin of domestic containment, and how it affected the lives of people who tried to live by it.

Many people today arrive in the United States of America in pursuit of achieving the American Dream. What is the American Dream, and what does it mean in today 's culture? The term “American Dream” was established since the Great Depression representing Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; the very values this great nation was founded upon. The Dream was said to be successful if a person worked hard to achieve his/her goals. Even though prior the American Dream has been terminated however, citizens have transform it in terms of personal goals since the 1930s. Author Brandon King describes the American Dream as an, “Opportunity for each according to ability and achievement”(610). The American dream has to do with the concept of achieving success; being able to perform daily tasks to provide a brighter future for a person, and his/her family. Essentially, if you are passionate enough about what you do, success is always possible even with manageable obstacles. Although, hard work is one of the factors in achieving the American Dream, self-motivation has also made an impact. The reality is every citizen has the opportunity of achievement depending on his/her choices, and access to education.

Though the viewers focus first on the centered figures, it is easier to first analyze the surrounding settings to understand them. The stone wall foreground and the open fields of the background each embodies one of the girl’s thoughts. The back landscape is filled with warm, airy colors of blue and orange, as if it were under a bright sun. On the other hand, the foreground’s stone walls and concrete floor has dark, cold, shadowy, earthy colors that seem to appear as if under a stormy cloud. The sunny land suggests free, pure, spacious land previous to the industrialization. Yet, the darkened foreground due to the overcasting shadows resemble the currently dirty,

Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home, is a compelling narrative in which Bechdel takes the reader through her life and gives insight into her relationship and the complex lifestyle her closeted homosexual father, Bruce Bechdel. However, her serious topic is told through the narrative of comics, images that literally put the readers into the moments of her life with her. Even though, the graphic images provide visual insight, Bechdel makes a conscious decision to include a multitude of literary allusions because, as Bechdel describes, “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parent’s are most real to me in fictional terms.” (Bechdel, Page 67) Her continued use of literary allusions can be seen as an insight to her life. The particular works of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde’s plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Ernest because of their content concerning facades and the lengths one person goes through to keep a part of their identity or life a secret. TRANSITION Bruce Bechdel was the master of secrecy, hiding a part of his sexuality behind his heterosexual marriage in order to keep his idea of an acceptable livelihood. It is clear that Bruce Bechdel had a few infidelities with males throughout Bechdel’s childhood, infidelities that she did not know until later in life. This creates a whole new perceptive for Bechdel. The father who she thought as a controlling, stern, literary fein

‘All The Bright Places’ is a story about love and depression, where a boy, Finch, helps Violet find the will to live, while he has trouble keeping his head above water. My family has gone through the stress, anger and sadness of depression, too: my cousin, Mitch, committed suicide by hanging himself. Although it has been two years, the pain has still not completely gone away.

Joyas Voladores by Brian Doyle and Feet in Smoke by John Jeremiah Sullivan are essays that both portray the ideas of living and dying. They are both effective in all the ways necessary. The determining factors of effectiveness are if they depict the right mood for the subjects, if they address the subjects, and if they give details.

This painting appears to take place either at either dusk or dawn, when the sun is at the horizon. Likely it is dusk, as the setting appears to be in the Northern Hemisphere and the snow in the picture residing on the left hand side of fence would suggest it has yet to melt, so the sun would be setting in the west, or on the right. So the viewer, as well as the subject, is facing south. This affects the painting in several ways. The lighting is very dramatic, the middle ground being very much more lighted than the foreground and background, therefore the colors are more saturated than the foreground and background. Greens, browns and greys are used a lot in this piece and makes it very muddy. The house really does stand out against the painting because of the contrast of lighting.

The Blind side is considered one of the best sports biographies and one of the best sports related inspirational stories. The blind side was published in 2006 and was written by Michael Lewis. This book is based on a Memphis native, Micahel Oher’s. The Blind Side contains two stories within its plot. One story begins with Michael Oher. The book explains the trials and tribulations of the young African American teenager. Micheal was from one of the worst neighborhoods in Memphis. He lived with anyone would would give him a place to stay for them night, The story follow his journey from being poor and then meeting the Tuohy family, who is a wealthy Memphis family who took him in and helped make his dream come true of playing the the National Football League. The book then goes into detail about the evolution of Micheal trying to play in the game of football. Lewis describes in the book how the left tackle position is one of the best positions on a football team, because the person maintain gin this role is responsible for protecting the quarterback 's “blind side” (“Blind”).

Teju Cole’s phenomenally written original novel majorly takes place in New York City. Cole character was easy to relate to because of his Nigerian American decent being that I am a Ghanaian American. Cole is a Nigerian American. He was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992 at the age of seventeen. Cole is also well educated and is a graduate student at Columbia University. I found it insightful how in the novel Cole met several various types of people, including other immigrants. He met and shared stories with a Haitian shoe shiner, at work in Penn Station; a Liberian, imprisoned for over two years in a dentition center in Queens; and a Moroccan student working at an Internet café. I enjoyed the fact that the narrator was well stocked minded. He touched on the topics of art, music, and interesting books. He had a very eclectic set of interest.

Queer Theory is the best approach by which to examine Angels in America because using Queer Theory allows us to see/ illuminates the difference between socially constructed gender and sexual acts based on sexual identity. Queer theory argues that gender is a cultural construct, that the social norms of men being masculine and women being feminine were manipulated as a culture to be seen as normal. In Angel in America, Roy Cohn is an attorney with power in his work place; he expresses a strong masculine character with “clout”, strong political power. He mentions that he is a powerful man and how with only a few phone calls he is able to get a hold of the president. These are expectations of how a masculine male is supposed to act, with power, confidence, and without fear. Being a man of politics, Roy lives up to the expectations of what society believes a strong man is supposed to be and how he is supposed to behave. When he goes to see his doctor and he is told that he has AIDS, Roy refuses to admit that he has AIDS and Homosexual. Roy tells his doctor, Henry, “You Think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that.” (Pg. 51) He argues that his identity is not homosexual because they do not have “clout”; that he is a man of clout and has a lot of it. Roy states, “Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.”(Pg. 51) An example of Queer Theory, Roy tells his doctor that labels like Homosexual, Gay,