By Arundhati Ghosh CW: mentions of suicide, self-harm, nymphomania, substance abuse Depictions of inward, self-effacing feminine emotion have evolved through time and mediums, but their themes remain universal. Society’s inherent overarching patriarchal nature has generated an ever-lasting debate over whether women have autonomy or if they are at the mercy of the situations and circumstances…
Read MoreHark, Triton! Plumbing the Depths of Nautical Fiction
By: Lana Haffar Grime, putrid and ancient, coats your shoes and your lungs. The wind bites and the salt spray stings your face and arms. Below you, the water churns in primordial agony. Around you, sunburnt tourists in cargo shorts enjoy a perfectly temperate afternoon. But to an eight-year-old, that catamaran in San Francisco Bay…
Read MoreIn Pursuit of Eternity: Spirituality and Religion in Emily Dickinson
By: Harmony Moura Burk When I was a little girl living in Brazil, my mom took me and some visiting family friends to a cathedral in São Paulo. We weren’t Catholic–I come from a strictly Prostestant background–but the cathedral was still a high point on the trip. At the time, of course, I didn’t fully…
Read MoreFrom Barns to Greenhouses: Adapting Murakami in Burning
By Jack Gross When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes (almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you. It’s a very…
Read MoreTell Me Something I Don’t Know: In Defense of Gossip
Harmony Moura Burk Every Sunday, three old women gather in the kitchen, chattering about the latest church scandal. They’ve turned it into a ritual over the years, laying out secrets like they layout tea sets and cakes. Their mothers did the same thing, and their grandmothers, and their great grandmothers. The table is set, the…
Read MoreIdyll Generations: Sifting Through My Grandmother’s Bookshelves
I spent my winter break surrounded by stories both spoken and concrete. Over the past few months, my grandmother has been sifting through and donating objects around her ranch to make more space. After decluttering cabinets with my mother and unearthing old records with my uncle, she invited me to help her with the bookshelves. We spent a few days sorting through the bookshelves in her storeroom, then her hallway, then her bedroom, then her living room. To my excitement, Tennyson greeted us on three separate shelves like three chance encounters with a childhood friend.
Read MoreInterview with John Morán Gonzáles
Written by Guadalupe Rodriguez Texas land is huge—with approximately 28 million people, the faces of Texas are colorful, and filled with different experiences. From rich stories of black and Latino people, to the stories of Native Americans, UT’s English Department attempts to account for some of the faces of Texas and beyond. One colorful face…
Read MoreSocrates, Aristotle, Yeezy: It Feels Right
Written by Kylie Warkentin In a conversation with Axel Vervoordt—actually who he is (a curator, designer, and antiquaire named to Architectural Digest‘s inaugural 2018 AD100 Hall of Fame) doesn’t really matter, because Kanye West interviewed him, and it was revealed that Kanye West is writing a philosophy book! Plato is shaking!
Read MoreJane Austen Heroines Ranked in Order by How Much I Want to Be Them
Written by Madalyn Campbell Fanny Price (Mansfield Park) How can I want to be Fanny Price when I am already Fanny Price? She worries a lot, has horrible self-esteem, is too hard on herself, but is also terribly judgmental. She wallows in her own misery, is applauded as a sweet girl, but is often judging…
Read MoreWhat You Should Be Reading in 2018
Written by Emily Ogden ANYTHING, PLEASE.
Read MoreLola by Junot Diaz: Reshaping the Children’s Book Industry
Written by Kiran Gokal Junot Diaz, the Dominican-American author of renowned books This Is How You Lose Her and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, recently released a children’s book called Islandborn which focuses on six-year-old Lola, an Afro-Caribbean girl who came over to the United States so young that she has no memories…
Read MoreThe Old “New Digital Age”
Written by Sydney Stewart The world is constantly changing. Innovations occur, technology improves, societal customs shift with the times, and the responsibility is placed on the average individual to accept these changes. Yet with innovation comes a slew of new issues and more developments that must be made. While the digital era brings new challenges,…
Read More