The final assignment for my upper-division modern British literature course (taught at the University of Minnesota Duluth in Fall 2023) was to ask a question about a text from our syllabus and answer it in a format and medium of the student’s choosing. Beginning with Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW, John Leppik asked the question: … Continue reading NW Elysium by John Leppik (Introduced by Kathryn Van Wert)
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Cautionary Tale of Totalitarian Ideology by Shahin Hossain
In Texts and Pretexts, first published in 1932, while discussing his concern regarding the present and future, Aldous Huxley asserted, “Personally, I must confess, I am more interested in what the world is now than in what it will be, or what it might be if improbable conditions were fulfilled” (6). In the same year, … Continue reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Cautionary Tale of Totalitarian Ideology by Shahin Hossain
Shoes, Rap Music, and Guns: Transitional Objects as Objective Correlatives in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone by Tanya Stafsholt Miller
When a person has gone through extreme trauma, writing about it can have a healing effect. The act of shaping the words on a page puts the trauma outside the self and becomes an entity of its own that can be shaped and molded. Some trauma victims use writing to expunge emotional baggage—writing it down … Continue reading Shoes, Rap Music, and Guns: Transitional Objects as Objective Correlatives in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone by Tanya Stafsholt Miller
MEJ 