The Channel Posts

When Edna finds herself in nature she is taken back through memory to her childhood, a time in which she was free of external pressure and could be most genuinely herself. It is this journey that highlights Edna’s driving motivation throughout the novel: to preserve her basic sense of self.

“The End” likewise portrays an account of old age marked by infirmity and decay; however, Beckett’s modernist aesthetic suggests that decay has revelatory functions, and therefore, old age uncovers existential truths, which otherwise remain concealed.

The act of recovery, when juxtaposed with The Lost World’s purported driving forces of scientific discovery and colonial expedition, reveals the illusory and unstable nature of knowledge in both the scientific and the colonial contexts. 

Cohen’s poem “The Last Dance at the Four Penny” demonstrates the Montreal Jewish community’s connection to their heritage in the aftermath of immigration, the Holocaust, and assimilation into Canadian culture.

With the bloody endings of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Duchess of Malfi, in which both women are killed by their brothers, the playwrights suggest that incestuous male desire stems from a selfish and possessive impulse, resulting in vengeful acts of violence against their sisters.

Melville comments on the self-gratifying element of charity that reveals the donor’s interiority; the indulgence of the donor’s interior desires demonstrates a disconnect between the giver and receiver of charitable acts. 

Munro depicts a world where other people’s minds and histories are frustratingly inaccessible. Anyone may in fact realize that there are latent monstrous qualities within their loved ones.

Through their radically different art forms, two groups of Queer Black women artists in the 1920s—Blues singers and Black female poets—provide alternatives to the Black middle-class respectability that stifled autonomy, desire, and possibility for homosexual experiences.

Parallel scenes between The Underground Railroad and Colson Whitehead’s other novels, most notably Sag Harbor, point to a frustration over the lack of racial progress across the decades, but they also indicate that more privileged Black people today can choose to act like their ancestors did with pride by having similar events as their ancestors.