The Channel Posts

While both Book II of The New Arcadia and Twelfth Night end in heterosexual unions, cross-dressing permits the exploration of lesbian homoerotic potential within the bounds of an overarching heterosexual narrative.

Spenser, in Book One of The Faerie Queene, constructs the knight figure as an identity symbiotic with the lady figure, the latter being an otherness that intervenes to direct the path of knighthood towards virtue.

Through Satan, Sin, and Death, Milton contrasts hellish invention, which is individualistic, with divine creativity, which is cooperative. The failure of Satanic invention lies in its absorption, while the success of heavenly creation lies in its collaborative nature.

Woolf’s structural decision to narrow the perspective of the story onto selective characters before the narrative lens pans back to the garden reflects a modernist focus on society rather than the individual.

Through an intricate poetic structure, heavy-handed symbolism, and the fusion of protagonist and speaker, Cohen conveys the degradation of the protagonist’s mind and body and suggests that displeasure in the living world, brought about by poetic ponderings, elicits the destruction of the divine.

Kafka charges eating in his personal and fictional life with meaning and power: he uses food and nourishment to criticize the gender hegemony in early twentieth-century Prague, which involved an inexplicit control over women by men, manifesting in males performing duties outside the house and women’s responsibilities being limited to inside the house.

Shakespeare demonstrates the emancipatory potential of returning to the natural world. He therein instates an ecological discourse used to evaluate humanity’s relationship with nature, arguing that not only is humanity subservient to nature, but that it can also benefit from encounters with it.

Emerging out of two decades of critical commentary are two parallel interpretations of Engel’s novel: Bear as romance, and Bear as realism.

Dictee strategically allows for both an essentialist and a constructivist view of national identity to coexist in order to resist imperialism and assimilation for those who have been “transplant[ed],” or extracted from their “lineage” (20), and no longer fit seamlessly within one national identity.