Daniel's AP Lit Blog

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been particularly fond of Shakespeare. For the most part, I find my mind overworking to rearrange the convoluted language into something somewhat comprehensible, and end up mindlessly drifting away from the subject matter hidden within. I have no doubt that so much of our understanding of the play comes the actual performance; the emotions, gestures, tone and phrasing the actors put into their lines all serve to provide clues to what the words are actually saying. The grief stricken wails and the maniacal laughter suddenly integrate with the characters heartfelt or diabolical monologues to create the performance. When we began reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was fretting about how in the world I would be able to dissect the text thoroughly enough to come to the “better understanding” needed for this blog. I wasn’t looking to it, but having carefully gone through each act as a class and seeing some of them in film, I’ve found a remarkable contrast in the

While reading through East of Eden, I was struck by the great diversity of characters and the lives they lead; there were the mundane and superficial, the zealous and overbearing, the protectors and predators, all wrapped up somehow under one cover. Steinbeck of course wrote each character carefully and beautifully, but one in particular stood out to me. It’s probably no surprise to anyone reading this that I believe the greatest character in East of Eden is Samuel Hamilton. From his introduction, his presence is that of vitality; he is described as “remarkable well educated and well read” and “connected and related to very great people and very small people”. With a “rich deep voice” and an unequal ability for “soothing hysteria and bringing quiet”, Samuel brought his richness of character and let it saturate the bones of everyone he interacted with. One thing I find so fascinating about his character is his ability to balance such a monumental set of morals with such a low profile of

Since humans first learned to observe their own behaviour and convey it through writing, art, and other mediums, we have struggled to determine how our own actions line up with our values of what is right or wrong. In the Odyssey, while the great hero Odysseus is portrayed as, well, a hero, a deeper look into his own actions, his relationships to and compared with the gods, as well as the cultural values he exhibits shine light onto the grey area of the question at hand: are humans inherently good, or evil? Throughout the entire epic, Odysseus’ name is paired with epithets that proclaim his sature: godlike, great, tactful, many-minded, great hearted. However, while every epithet is intended to in some way bolster his heroic image, many of them come with more negative connotations, at least for those of us living in the modern age. Lets consider a few: Lord of the lies, the city sacker, man of exploits, and mastermind of war. The first one clearly refers to Odysseus’ clever wit and