Student Work: Criticism
Poets and Composers
There are poets and there are composers. In a way, it’s simply about their strategies for producing art and relationship to art making. In another way, it’s an inherent, spiritual quality—housed somewhere between the body and the note.
The Metronome
I do not practice with a metronome because I want to become a better drummer. I practice with a metronome to practice focusing. To practice pretending that the world is objective. To meditate.
In Defense of the Non-Place
I seek the sublime enclosed within banality; I seek a hidden form of secular revelation.
The Broken Column
Frida Kahlo's "La Columna Rota" is an anthem of self-reflection, fearlessness, and honesty for people who do not belong to predetermined classifications.
Imagining Berlin
I want to imagine Berlin. It yearns to be x-rayed. We must examine its broken bones.
A Take on Ericka Hart’s Self-Portrait
Hart's self-portraiture engages with disability art as it focuses on a self-representation that explicitly rejects and complicates traditional representations of breast cancer survivors and people with impairments/disabilities.
Guilt and Shame in Oedipus the King
Sophocles’s "Oedipus the King introduces" important questions about the nature of justice and calls into discussion what warrants guilt and shame.
Freeing Algerian Women’s Histories
How can you reconcile your identity as a liberating force while using the language of your oppressor and benefiting from physical freedom that many of those in your homeland do not possess? Assia Djebar wrestles with these questions in "Fantasia."
Murderer and Trailblazer: Medea as a Feminist Text
Medea possesses qualities that conform to the gender expectations of ancient Greece, but many parts of the play suggest that Medea is a feminist figure who challenges the gender and social norms of her time.
Redefining the View from “Five Flights Up”
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Five Flights Up” simply gives the poem a place to be: a vantage point.
Hamlet: An Identity in Crisis
Life is absurd. We are born into a world without a clear reason and we must play silly little games and perform trivial roles in order to be accepted into said world. And, in the end, we disappear.
The Dangers of Masculinity in Macbeth
The rigors of masculinity have tainted men’s understanding of themselves, their relationships with others, and the societies in which they live. In "Macbeth," the main characters implicitly express their beliefs on what a man should be.
“You and I”: Grammar and Narrative in Kinship
“Look, Doni!” the girl called to me, “I’m like a bird!” She discovering “the other,” organizing the world around her into the grammar of you/I, bird/not-bird, like/not-like.