Black Hole is a place in space that gravity pulls strongly that light cannot reach and cannot get out of it. The gravity is so strong that matter has been in a tiny space. This happens when a star is dying. What is the Author trying to say with this title?Is the Author trying to warn […]
Read More →Archive for November, 2016
(Alien)ation
The first thing you notice when you open Black Hole by Charles Burns are the “normal” faces of teenagers in a high school yearbook. The inside cover presents this novel as an “eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself”. If you flip to the end of the book, you see these portraits grotesquely […]
Read More →Some comments on Nemesis
Hi, all — I’m not sure why the comments function isn’t working for this week’s conveners’ post, so I’m pasting some comments here. If you’re responsible for commenting and haven’t yet done so, you can try to comment on this post or, if it still doesn’t work, send them to me and I’ll add them […]
Read More →Deontology V.S Utilitarianism?!
Throughout Philip Roth’s Nemesis, we can see the main protagonist, Bucky, constantly putting more and more responsibilities on himself even if he shouldn’t be the one to bear the burden. After knowing that he “might be” the cause of the contagion (not even definite about the exact source of contagion), he holds himself accountable for […]
Read More →“It couldn’t find them here”
Philip Roth’s Nemesis gives us a glimpse into the lives of the residents of the polio-stricken neighborhood of Weequahic. We are introduced to several characters in the course of the story, each displaying a unique relation to the world on the basis of their understanding of polio. Indian Hill was a means of escape for Bucky, […]
Read More →Revenge in Nemesis
Nemesis, the Greek goddess of revenge and retribution is the mythological woman who gives title to Philip Roth’s novel about Polio-stricken New Jersey. Set in 1944, our narrator tells us the story of Eugene “Bucky” Cantor, a 23-year old Jewish playground director whose life is filled with loss: his mom died at childbirth, his dad […]
Read More →The World’s Worst Industrial Disaster: Who’s To Blame?
In the early hours of December 3rd 1984, between 30-40 tons of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic gas, leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide plant just three miles outside of Bhopal, India. The poisonous gas burned people eyes, throats, and resulted in the immediate death of at least 3,800 people. In a 2006 affidavit Indian […]
Read More →DID YOU JUST CALL ME A BLEEPING ‘ANIMAL’?
Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, set in the city of Khaufpur (meaning “the city of fear”), serves as a reenactment of Union Carbide city gas leak that affected the people of Bhopal in 1984. The story is set almost two decades after the leak, around 2001, when Animal reaches the age of 19. Unlike other novels […]
Read More →AIDS in China and Censorship
Check The Guardian’s article for an interesting review of the censorship process Yan Lianke went through to publish not only Dream of Ding Village but many of the other books as well. Dream of Ding Village was banned and publishing his texts cost Lianke many consequences: being forced to leave the army, forced to write auto-critiques […]
Read More →Love for Life
From Yan Li, who took this course in the spring of 2015: As promised, here is the link to the full movie based on Dream of Ding Village. This movie is directed by Gu Changwei, one of the most famous “fifth generation directors” in China, and performed by many famous Chinese actors, such as Zhang Ziyi. You […]
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