Heteroglossia: The Hubris & Humility of Humanity

Life, no matter how elusive to the untrained eye, is nothing more than the ceaseless, semiotic cycle of becoming experienced in our everyday existences. Together, these distinct moments—both our downfalls and salvations—culminate in the central, overarching process of humanity: emergence. Every passing instant signifies a steppingstone on our perpetual path toward this enlightenment; as we […]

Authorship: Playing God for the Time Being

To be an author is to create, breathing life into every word we envision, adapt, and put down on paper. Each of our imaginations is an unparalleled constellation of all that is conceivable in the human mind, destined to evolve and expand with our notion of “authorship” over time; in this sense, are we not […]

A Visit from Reality

Ergodic literature is that which requires a considerable effort from consumers to comprehend and compartmentalize its interconnected components, a prime example being A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Say what you will about the organization of this novel’s fragmented realities, but its versatility redefines the limits of “literature by expanding our notion […]

Becoming Human

Emergence is a transcendental process, one which most of us still have yet to achieve in the fullest extent. Due to our everlasting state of existential crisis, human sentience can be seen as both a blessing and a burden, for we spend the entirety of our already much-too-limited lifetimes plagued by mundane apprehensions that may […]

Are We Amateurs, or Are We Gods?

Literature is much more than the printed embodiment of our creativity—it is an outlet for exploration, for self-discovery. To write is to escape into a fictional realm of your own making, one which tethers authors and audiences alike to a shared experience, to the same, singular universe, even if only for a few pages. As […]

Cultivating America in the Face of Human Extinction

Regardless of its etymological origins, “cultivation,” in the contemporary sense, extends beyond any conventional definitions, beyond the mere preparation and usage of land; now, to cultivate is to nurture, to build, to facilitate growth. Our species is centered around a shared goal of everlasting expansion, of growing, for we are each the product of human […]

Equipments for Living–and Leaving–in a Dystopian World

Humanity, ever-desperate for change, for evolution, has dedicated innumerable lifetimes to the shedding of its former skins, disregarding history as an inconsequential casualty destined to be left in the dust of our wake. Regardless of any shifts in scene or setting, though, a singular, archaic impulse has stained our species since the dawn of time: […]

God’s Country: Burying the Author (Dead or Alive)

Percival Everett, despite having written God’s Country into existence, does not inhabit the realities of this work of fiction; it is not Everett’s essence which breathes life into every character meet, not his commentary which, page after page, continues to drive us forward–it is our own. As emphasized in my first blog post, “what matters […]

Curt Marder: Unreliable Narrator or Unredeemable Racist?

While, at a first read, God’s Country seems to be centered around the persistent shortcomings of Curt Marder and his anticlimactic, justice-seeking journey, it has been evident from the start that Marder is far from a hero in his own, “real” life, and as such, he is reflected as being equally as incompetent in this […]

Who Qualifies for an “Artistic License”?

Though the concept of “objectivity” may seem comprehensible when relayed to you in layman’s terms by Dictionary.com, the reality of this literary device is much too elusive to encapsulate within a singular definition–personally, I had no idea what the word meant until I was a senior in high school (shout out to the ever-inadequate public […]