Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (henceforth OANOF) is a 1985 Bildungsroman (novel of development) centered on the life of Jeanette, a girl who is adopted and raised by a woman who happens to be a fundamentalist Christian. Jeanette's mother believes in literal translations of the Bible, and she freely uses religious rhetoric to accommodate her black and … Continue reading Gender and Non-Normativity in Jeanette Winterson’s [Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit]
It's 1:53 a.m. and I currently can't sleep because of this book. I was going to wait and write about it in the morning, but I really need to engage in the cathartic process of writing in order to make sense of all of the thoughts that are fireworking in my head. I was expecting … Continue reading Masculinity in Robert Cormier’s [The Chocolate War]
Lately, I've been on a quest to read self-published young adult fiction, mostly because I've noticed that self-published authors tend to take more risks when crafting their stories. The reasons for this are obvious: there is no middle-man, no editor, and even more importantly, self-published authors do not face issues such as censorship and the … Continue reading Logan Kain’s [The Dead Will Rise First]
If there is one thing that gay young adult fiction should be thankful for, that thing would be the internet. Because of the advent of the web, we have witnessed the increase of self-published e-novels distributed through online stores such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Self-publishing, in my opinion, greatly expands the possibilities of … Continue reading J.C. Lillis’ [How to Repair a Mechanical Heart]: A Gay YA Novel on Fandom, Religion, and Canonicity
Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth … Continue reading On Stasis, Mobility, and Postmodernism: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
It is difficult to find quality young adult novels with a sensitive male teenager as the protagonist. While this has to do with the stereotypes generally tied to readers of the genre, the rarity of this character also has a lot to do with issues and perceptions of gender in contemporary society. There is something … Continue reading John Corey Whaley’s “Where Things Come Back” – A Haunting and Truly Thought-Provoking Read
We are told that everything has a beginning and an end. This, of course, is due to the fact that the human mind is constructed to perceive the world through temporality and linearity. However, as Emerson posits, perhaps the reason why the human mind is unable to pinpoint the beginning and the end of the … Continue reading I Want to Believe: The Perpetual Circularity of Truth and Power
The following entry discusses some ideas that I plan to explore in a research paper that I will write for a course titled "Knowledge, Belief, and Science in Melville's America," which is being offered by Dr. Laura Dassow Walls at the University of Notre Dame during the fall semester of 2012. During my last semester … Continue reading Decoding the American Scholar: Towards a Distant Computational Reading of Emerson’s Prose
“Knowledge is knowing the tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in your fruit salad.” - Miles Kington Knowledge, as can be deduced from the morphological composition of the word, entails knowing: an awareness that is developed empirically. Wisdom, on the other hand, is concerned with the judgment, assessment, and use of knowledge … Continue reading On Wisdom, Experience, and Self-Reliance
Back in the day when I was an ESL instructor at the University of Puerto Rico, I was assigned to teach a writing and rhetoric course centered on controversial and contemporary issues. Before I began to lesson plan, I encountered a wonderful editorial in the New York Times titled “Mystery and Evidence,” written by Tim … Continue reading On Fables of the Mind
