Feng

Politics of Hedonism in Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (Image resource: amazon)  Bonjour Tristesse written by an eighteen-year-old, Françoise Sagan, is a novel about a seventeen-year-old girl, Cécile.   She lives with her forty-year-old father, Raymond. Raymond enjoys parties, young women, drink and easy conversation. He, Cécile and his latest girlfriend, Elsa, sojourn on the southern coast of France, where Cécile meets a young law student Cyril. Cécile is mercurial in her thoughts, but once a true rival for her father's affections arrives at the summer house, her jealousy surfaces fully. Anne had been a friend of Cécile's mother, and, unlike Raymond's other love interests, is intelligent and similar in age. Raymond wants to get marry with Anne. Cécile is afraid that their life will be changed completely by Anne. They cannot pursue pleasure any more in their hedonistic way. Although Cécile seems happy living without goal, she still often feels contradictor...

       After reading the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written by John Keats, I did not really understand the meaning of “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (Keats ll. 49) in the last stanza. I have seen various explanations, but they seemed abstract to me and none of them satisfactorily answered my question. Therefore, I try to find the answer by knowing the background of this poem, responding the criticism of T. S. Eliot, and analyzing this poem by myself .      At first, I want to talk about the background of this poem briefly. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819. It was in the peak of the Romantic era which was approximately from 1800 to 1850. In the Romantic era, people felt a deepened concern for the metaphysical problems of existence, death, and eternity. At that time, romanticists paid attention to the value of eternity and perpetual. Hence, everything on the urn is eternity. The u...

(Designed by FireduSoleil)           When I first read this poem, I think this is a gloomy and cruel poem which is about Nazi and suicide. The Sylvia Plath’s diction makes me feel absolutely terrified. However, after I read this poem carefully, I see the lights, hopes, and the imagery of rebirth. Therefore, I choose this poem as my topic of final paper because I am extremely curious about this contradiction. I find the imagery of rebirth in this poem by understanding and analyzing Sylvia Plath’s diction. I divide the process of rebirth into four stages. At the first stage, several words such as “lampshade” (line5), “linen” (line9), and “napkin” (line10) connote that she is material. These three materials have a common that they are cloth. I think the reason why she is material is that materials neither birth nor die. Her mind is dead like materials which have no feeling. At the second stage, she has the flesh such as “The nose, the eye pits, the f...

The Joy Luck Club   written by Amy Tan includes sixteen interwoven stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. When the mothers bring their Chinese patriarchal discourses and values to America and impose on their American-born daughters, the severe conflicts occur. From the conflicts to reconciliations, we can see how the mothers relieve from their painful memories, change their values, and reconcile with their daughters; how the daughters free from the conflicts and experience the process of their maturity through explorations of relationships with their mothers, which suggests that every woman who is also a daughter can attain her genuine maturity through sincerely exploring her relationship with her mother. In this novel, the author focuses on mother and daughter relationship so I am going to offer some statements on the mother and daughter bonding. Adrienne Rich analyzed that motherhood is an institution in patriarchy ...