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  Marx saw society through a rather practical “materialist” lens, understanding that life is made up largely, if not exclusively, of physical needs like food and shelter. He believed that it was our social conditions which determined our consciousness, not the other way around – so that a poor (proletariat) person and a richer (bourgeoisie) one would see the world differently because they were either poor or rich. And he saw the world as being “divided between a class of people who labor to produce goods” and a class of people who exploit them (Parker 230). Within Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass Carroll has created a literary world which brings to light social hierarchy, particularly the binary opposition of the ruling class and the working class. There are clear socio-economic stratifications on display. The treatment of the working-class playing cards by the aristocracy, the fact the bourgeoisie don’t align with and stand up for them, and the f...

Happy National Poetry Month (a bit late ... hey, cut me some slack I've been busy). To celebrate, I'm getting back into creating randoms word poems (I take 6 words from a random word generating website and write a poem using them).  Get in touch and share your efforts with me - I'd love to see them!  

  Original Title of the Paper: External Perceptions and Feminist Judgments of Women’s Choices Through the Lens of Mrs. Dalloway             On the surface Clarissa Dalloway is a conformist and a seemingly vapid socialite whose main concern in life is staging an excellent party. But in Woolf’s use of the stream of consciousness technique, we are let in on Clarissa’s secret internal world. Clarissa is not just running errands for her party, she is also having an internal existential crisis. At the same time Woolf shows the juxtaposition of Septimus. He is Clarissa’s opposite in many ways, male vs female, younger vs older, working-class vs upper class, etc. Septimus’ psyche has been damaged by the hardships of life (in his case war), which Clarissa has actively tried to avoid experiencing. However, both characters are examples of the gap between the external and the internal. Externally Septimus is young, healthy, and able-bodie...

Feminism is “a simple concept” in that, at the end of the day it is just “about taking women seriously and respectfully” (Parker 152). With Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: and, Through the Looking-Glass written within the timeframe of first-wave feminism when women still could not vote, Carroll, undoubtedly, lacked any concept of the term or even the idea of feminism. However, he does write an unapologetically plucky little girl, relatively untouched by societal pressures regarding women’s behavior which could easily seem like a feminist figure at first glance. Alice does display bravery, intelligence, and strength. She stands up for herself and makes manifest the fragile autonomy of an unrepressed girl before a patriarchal society imposes too many rules and expectations upon her ‘proper’ feminine behavior. However, upon further inspection of three main female characters within Alice's Adventures , Carroll is clearly not, in fact, writing feminist characters. In the end, Car...

Since all my time is taken up with school, I'm going to be posting some of the things I'm being forced to write for my courses. Several of these will be applying different literary criticism techniques to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: and Through the Looking Glass. This was assigned - for the record I hate this story and am no fan of Carroll. __________________________________________________________________________________             Our concept of reality, especially as it relates to language, involves definition through difference. We develop the meaning of words/things largely via the perceived gap between it and another word/thing. Deconstruction holds that any word, all words, in fact, have a “multiplicity” of meanings and that there is actually “a ceaseless play of language” at work (Parker 87). And rather than destroying meaning, Deconstruction actually “gives it many meanings” (Parker 88). The main thing Deconstruction...