The OWU English Department Blog
Children’s literature is a genre that focuses on simple storytelling for the sake of its audience’s understanding, but also often incorporates life lessons that help young people navigate challenges such as friendship and family. One common way that children’s literature does this is through the trope of the “found family”–a group of non-biologically related characters that form bonds that enable them to act as an interdependent unit, similar to a biological family.…
Need some new music to listen to? Need a soundtrack for whenever you start a rebellion? Well, you’ve come to the right place!
Over the past few months, I started dipping my toes in the realm of K-POP music, short for Korean Pop. Although it is somewhat similar to Western pop music, K-POP has a culture of its own.…
Fantasizing about reading classic literature was (and still is) one of my favorite pastimes. So, when I got the opportunity to read works like Homer’s Illiad and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno with Professor Merkel, you could say that the dark academia wannabe in me was excited. Reading works like these were required for a class called “The Devil, the Hero, and God” which looked at literature that had these interactions.…
This last Tuesday, Ohio Wesleyan was so excited to welcome home Anni Liu ‘13 for a reading from her poetry collection Boarder Vista. Liu joined us in the Benes Room for an engaging reading and discussion about her work, as well as an open time for questions. Liu was introduced by Ronan Thompson who gave an introduction to her professional career and the themes her work covers. …
Haruki Murakami did not consider himself an author until the age of thirty, when, seemingly on a whim, he began to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in the spring of 1978 after watching a baseball game. Since then, over twenty of his fictional novels have been translated into English, along with a number of non-fiction novels, essays, and short stories.…
The holidays are coming up– this is the perfect opportunity to expand your book collection and treat yourself to some new reads. Whether you are looking for an emotionally gripping book, captivating poetry, or a purely self-indulgent read, this list has the perfect story for you.
The following recommendations are a collection of essays or feature elements of essay writing in their composition.…
This past weekend, Delaware, Ohio was thrilled to have award-winning author Tommy Orange visit the Delaware County District Library for a reading and conversation about his book, There There. The conversation was moderated by OWU Associate English Professor Amy Butcher and recently retired OWU Associate English Professor Karen Poremski.
Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel There There.…
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is a film that changed my life. When people talk about the magic of cinema it is almost impossible to define. I think that you know it when you see it though. That could not be more the case than with Taxi Driver. This film has tremendously guided my personal work, as I plan on writing and directing feature films for the rest of my life.…
The digital sphere has recently erupted with stories detailing young adults’ experiences with burnout. From blog posts to Instagram stories, many people have begun coming forward with stories of how they slid into burnout, all of which tend to follow a similar pattern.
Many testimonies begin with a high-achieving person, more often than not a woman, who begins by talking about her seemingly perfect life before developing burnout.…
When I first read Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban this semester in Professor Butcher’s Narratives 2: Longer Forms, I was perplexed as to how the story could have any literary significance. At face value, this is the story of a lonely housewife, Dorothy, in an unhappy marriage who falls in love with a monstrous frog-like man–a clear allusion to the aquatic creature Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.…
