Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
identity
The nature of textual creation from a blank page— of all creation, really—is an exercise in identity politics: Each entity fashioned depends on inclusions and exclusions. Thus, literary texts achieve selfhood via the delicate balance of their various constituent parts; just as humans are products of their DNA, so are literary texts the result of the countless phenomena occurring between their covers. They are unique entities, themselves possessing a … Read the rest
Commodification/Commercialization
Commodification is a multifaceted concept, having roots in political and economic theory as well as cultural and literary studies. Broadly defined, commodification is the transformation of immaterial, social relationships into commercial relationships that often utilize the language and ideological stances of a market driven economy and capitalist society (for example, terms and ideas surrounding “buying and selling,” “supply and demand”). In order to understand this important and complex idea, … Read the rest
American Dream
In his 1931 book The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams coined the phrase the American dream, which is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is .╯.╯. a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest … Read the rest
Ambition
“Ambition” is a difficult trait to pin down because it is so human: On the one hand, we want to reward ambition, yet on the other hand, we want to warn against it. Literature, especially, has taken the latter interesting approach to examining ambition; however, the term itself was originally relatively neutral, coming from the Latin ambito or ambitus, meaning “going around, circuit, edge, border.” Initially, this referred to … Read the rest
Alienation
Countless literary characters feel painfully alienated from the social institutions that surround them. Some, like Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, feel alienated from their own communities. Others, like Caddy Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, feel alienated from their closer connections, including family members and loved ones. Still others, like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a … Read the rest