The Still Pilgrim Makes Dinner

A Companion to Lope de Vega, 2008

Reading is considered as one of the best raptures people get to experience in their lifetime. The art of reading is not only a task to be done during leisure. It is perceived almost as a necessity verisimilar to the process of breathing that is done in order to live. As readers, it is important not only to read the lines but also to read beyond it with slow deliberate carefulness. This is where the importance of analysis takes place. With this being said, this output focuses on the piece of literature, entitled The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan as the subject of analysis. This includes the background of the novel, the author, summary, and relevance of the novel to modern times. Moreover, this analysis aims to probe, critique, and interpret the work using different approaches in literature such as Formalism, Marxism, and Psychoanalytic literary theory

Revista X, 2024

Based on Weisgerber (1978) and Durand (1993), we understand that symbolic language allows the unity of a literary text to be sustained. By transfiguring familiar elements for both readers and characters, it seems to bring together narrative components that are scattered throughout the artistic text. The novel to which this work is dedicated, The Father’s Tale (O’Brien, 2011), tells the saga of Alexander Graham who wanders down several tortuous paths in order to find Andrew Graham, his youngest son. During his journey, the character has a series of daydreams which, according to Amorim (2023), are particularly concerned with nostalgia for his hometown. Engendered by the poetic, dreamlike and cosmic aspects of the images of the house, the snow and the igloo, following Durand’s (1993) classification, these fantasies, as we intend to demonstrate in this article, are also linked to ideas of hospitality, reconciliation, communion and thanksgiving. Therefore, we were able to see how literary images can be combined with multiple meanings.

To be' a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real nature. (Hall, 1918, p. 297) Not only the probability and the desirability of marriage and the training of children as an essential feature of woman's career, but also the restriction of women to the mediocre grades of ability and achievement should be reckoned with by our education systems. The education of women for such professions as administration, statesmanship, philosophy, or scientific research ... is far less needed than education for such professions . . . where the average level is the essential. (Thorndike, 1906, p. 213) The greater variational tendency of man is a fact of the widest significance .... Psychologically the greater variational tendency of men, as likewise the greater conservative tendency of women, radiates to every distinctive aspect of their contrasted natures and expressions. (Jastrow, 1915, pp. 567-568) Undoubtedly one of the most difficult and fundamental problems that today confront thinking women is how to secure for themselves the chance to vary from the mode of their sex, and at the same time to procreate, in a social order that has been built up on the assumption that there is and can be little or no variation in tastes, interests, and abilities within the female sex .... At times it seems well-nigh insoluble. But to affirm that it is insoluble is at the same time to affirm that there will always be a hard choice confronting women whose tastes vary from the mode; that there will be restlessness, unhappiness, and strife with the social order on the part of these individuals; and that society must tend to lose the work of its intellectual women or else lose their children. (Hollingworth, 1914b, p. 528)

2015

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International Journal of English Literature, 2019

Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) explores the dissolution of the family unit, and the psychological impact on its characters when they can no longer fit into the idealized Dick and Jane heteronormative family paradigm. The dinner place, the empty place that Tyler’s father Beck Tull no longer occupies, is the complex focus of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. In this essay, I explore how Tyler delves deep into this absence of place and space during the dinnertime ritual as a metaphor for the collapsing family, no father figure dynamic—a world where mother-woman struggles to survive.

International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences

Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) explores the dissolution of the family unit, and the psychological impact on its characters when they can no longer fit into the idealized Dick and Jane heteronormative family paradigm. The dinner place, the empty place that Tyler's father Beck Tull no longer occupies, is the complex focus of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. In this essay, I explore how Tyler delves deep into this absence of place and space during the dinnertime ritual as a metaphor for the collapsing family, no father figure dynamic-a world where mother-woman struggles to survive.

Theater of the Mind, Stage of History edited by Peter Carravetta

When I was invited to present a paper at the Third FIAC Forum on Italian American Criticism, I was caught a bit off guard as I am hardly a “critic” of anything Italian American. Then I realized that its run-on title was an excuse to honor my older friend, Professor Mario Mignone, on his 70th birthday. I was greatly honored by the request, but not at all surprised as he was one on the few who has consistently included me among his “Italian” (as opposed to “Italian American”) friends. He has always understood that despite my ignorance of much of that which makes one Italian in his esteemed estimation, he understood that I treasured my marvelously mysterious patrimony that includes, among other poignant cultural insights, the fact that all Italians are anarchists; that is, until they are in charge. He also has faithfully shared my observation that being Italian, or even Italian-American, is not merely a matter of having an “appropriate” surname. It is in these ways that Mario is partially culpable for my Columbus-like search for, and non-discovery of, my Sicilian roots that I have cryptically subtitled “You can’t get there from here.” This Columbus-like search and discovery will be presented as an allegorical journey through the mountains of Campania and a real trip to find half of my roots in Sicily.

ELH, 2010

1988