ENCW 452: Senior Portfolio Seminar

The second of the Alice Munro stories that I have chosen to read this week is “Too Much Happiness.” Like “Runaway,” it is the titular story of the collection it was first published in. “Too Much Happiness” is a fictionalization of the life of Sophia Kovalevskaya, a famous seventeenth century Russian mathematician who died at […]

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Sandra Newman’s book 1984 Julia brought a new plot to George Orwell’s 1984. Newman’s novel especially gave away a new plot because the point of view was different. Julia, the character that Newman’s book follows, goes on the journey of Julia finding about how in the end Big Brother is bad and she hates him, but she not only […]

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Reading the essay “Fog Count” in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams felt similar to dreaming in the way it meandered. The first couple of paragraphs explain that she’s looking for quarters in a West Virginian town in order to bring them to prison, where she will visit a man named Charlie and will buy food […]

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Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire grapples with the idea of what it feels like to no longer belong to the world you originally came from. Belonging and trying to find your place in all of this are at the heart of the novel. As well examining the true lengths people will go to […]

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The first essay in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams is titled the same as the book. It introduces Jamison’s job as a medical actor, someone who pretends to be sick in order to train medical students on recognizing and diagnosing ailments. Jamison describes the detailed scripts that actors are given to memorize, that include details […]

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Sandra Newman’s Julia introduced many aspects to the story of 1984, but what really interested me the most was Part 3. Here we as the reader were thrust into the unknown, beyond the confines of the original story. Beyond having a conversation with Winston after she is released from The Ministry of Love, Julia is […]

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Sandra Newman’s Julia looks at the world in George Orwell’s1984 through the perspective of Julia. By exploring her story, the audience is able to learn so much more about the expectations of women in Big Brother’s dystopian society. Though it is mentioned in the original story, Artsem (or artificial insemination) is described in Julia to […]

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Reading both books, 1984 and 1984 Julia, one can sumerise that the gorvernment Big Brother can be seen not only as government enity but a religious cult. Big Brother can be seen as a religious figure within a  cult because the praise of Big Brother shows the omnipotent power his image holds on the people of Oceania. Especially, […]

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Every Heart a Doorway decides to jump into murder mystery horror very quickly with the students beginning to drop like flies and accusations of who killed them begin being tossed. But throughout it all, there is a level of morbid understanding between the students. When one student mentions a dead girl’s parents should be contacted, […]

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In the final week of this class, I have decided to revisit the short fiction of Alice Munro. Out of everything that I have read in the course of my pursuit of this degree, Munro has had the greatest impact on me – in fact, Carrie Brown’s class “Chekhov and Munro: The Masters” was the […]

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In Leslie Jamison’s book The Empathy Exams, there is an essay called “Lost Boys.” This essay goes over the documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hills, and what conclusions people drew who had watched it when the documentary first came out. To summarize the documentary to get a brief idea of what this essay discussed, it goes as […]

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Though it is prominent in 1984, Sandra Newman’s Julia puts more emphasis on the division between hierarchy of classes in Oceania. The Proles are shown to be fearful of messing with  both Inner and Outer Party members, even going so far as to make sure that Julia is okay when someone attempts to rob her, […]

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  Today I finished Morgan Parker’s collection Magical Negro. Throughout this collection Parker was able to focus on the fetishization of black people intersecting it with media representation of black people. As stated in my previous post, the term “magical” in this context is referring to one who is unhuman or immortal. There is a long standing […]

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Towards the end of the story Winston seems to hold onto hope that Golstein’s revolution is alive, and is even willing to join the cause. It offers the reader a sense of hope alongside Winston, suggesting that there may be a chance at changing the world even if it does not happen until much farther […]

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In Virginia Woolf’s short story “An Unwritten Novel,” there are two parallel stories: first, there is the “real” story, which follows a passenger on a train who becomes fascinated by the older woman riding across from her. This woman seems unhappy, and instead of smoking, reading the newspaper, or in any way trying to conceal […]

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Leslie Jamison’s chapter “Morphology of THE HIT” in her book The Empathy Exams is a great example of the format working for the essay and how to navigate areas of memory that are skewed from traumatic events. The term “morphology” has two separate meanings- a biological one, and a linguistic one. The biology definition states, “the […]

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To close out the last week of Senior Seminar I have chosen to read from Morgan Parker again, another poetry collection called Magical Negro. Just like her previous work this collection has themes of the black experience and racism, but what I found to be interesting about this collection so far are the ways that she discusses […]

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1984 Julia by Sandra Newman is a retelling of the famous novel 1984, but from the view point of Julia, Winston Smith’s lover. In this book, we get more detail about life outside the outer party. Newman’s story has more explaination about the life of the proles than Orwell’s book because we see Julia having regular […]

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Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But does that understanding count if you don’t believe the reason for someone’s pain is the thing they say it is? Can you feel true empathy if you secretly doubt the person you are empathizing with? Chapter two of Leslie Jamison’s […]

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of those authors whose books come with their name printed larger than the title. In other words, his reputation precedes him. I read Marquez’s most well-known novel, 100 Years of Solitude, for the course “Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction” two years ago. Like that novel, Marquez’s slightly more recent novella Chronicle […]

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We are introduced to Emmanuel Goldstein’s book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, in Chapter IX. Readers will note that the font changes within this chapter from the story itself to Goldstein’s book, indicating the transitions between Winston reading the book and talking about the book. In the beginning, Winston reads the first […]

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Julia holds an important role in both parts two and three of 1984, and though she further drives Winston’s rebellious acts and thoughts, that is essentially her sole purpose. She is the embodiment of sexual freedom and desire, which is shunned in the eyes of Big Brother. This is applies even if you are married […]

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Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire from the beginning tackles the question many isekai novels, shows, and mangas/manhwas leave us wondering: what happens if/when they go back? Many of the stories in this series end with the characters choosing to stay in their new world, but McGuire tackles the question. What do you do […]

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