The OWU English Department Blog
This piece contains spoilers for Bones and All and The Lighthouse.
Bones and All and The Lighthouse are two very unique horror films that travel back in time to bend reality, and to speak on common aspects of humanity that are always present in life. I am not the biggest lover of horror films, and I actually tend to avoid them, especially if they are excessively gory.…
A malformed, masked entity lurks in the shadows of a Parisian Opera house. His presence had only haunted the house until an aspiring opera singer, Christine DaaĂ©, stepped onto the stage. However, then the so-called âPhantomâ develops a desire to help Christine in her career and become the lead performer–but at what cost?…
Watching Gladiator II without first watching its predecessor for beat-by-beat comparison or borderline masturbatory indulgence in nostalgia is a bizarre exercise in interpretation. It is watching shadows on the wall of a cave, an astute audience perhaps faintly aware that these shapes cannot possibly exist in a vacuum, that their movements and patterns are too strange, too specific, and too divorced from their context to belong solely to the wall, but with nothing else to draw from they are forced to accept these as a complete reality.…
âAre people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?â A line from the opening song that cements a popular theme that drives the narrative of âWickedâ throughout the film. The line itself is sung by Glinda (or rather Galinda), the Good Witch of the North, which is in reference to the Wicked Witch of the West, otherwise known as Elphaba.…
The life of the former Queen of England, Lady Jane Grey, was anything but a comedy. Her life was certainly not a story most would make the center of a historical, fantastical, romantic comedy. But a 2016 novel, My Lady Jane, by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows did just that â and eight years later the Amazon Prime television show My Lady Jane was born.…
The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen was originally titled An Intimation of Things Distant. It consists of five fiction stories by Nella Larsen that were written in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, which was a movement to foster Black culture and pride through literature, art, and music. The pieces in her collection discussed tensions and hardships of the Black middle class in Harlem during the 1920s: restlessness, isolation, searching for belonging, psychology, marriage, race, and the complexities of having mixed-race heritage.…
(Note: This review is not spoiler-free)
In times of political unease, it is important to remember the value of books, the lessons and the values that they contain. Given the current political climate, one of the greatest examples of a book with such values and lessons is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel âThe Roadâ by Cormac McCarthy, first published in 2006. …
On Thursday, March 6th, before we all went on Spring Break, the English Department was pleased to host poet Marianne Chan as part of the Poets & Writers Series. Chan read poems from her recently published collections All Heathens and Leaving Biddle City. She also shared a few poems that she is currently working on as part of her next collection.…
In all honesty, writing was not my first love. It was not the career path that I was willing to center my future around, not immediately. However, it was always there in my life somewhere. As a child I had a great passion for artâpainting, drawing, and such. I remember the fun I had making drawings for the kids in my first-grade class who would give me a quarter to draw whatever they wanted. …
If someone were to ask why I chose to become an English Literature major, at first the question might make me laugh. When I think back on my life, it feels obvious, itâs hard to imagine myself ever choosing a different path. Iâve loved reading my whole life, after all. And yet, I realize that I really didnât decide to become an English Literature major until my freshman year of high school.…
