Correction

Coming of age, we aren't doing it anymore. This is an African American Literature blog now. bye bye

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Coming of Age Essay, Condensed

My coming of age essay was about the 2011 animated movie Rango. Rango starts the movie with zero identity; he literally lives in a cage making up stories where he is the valiant hero to satisfy his crushing loneliness and crisis of self. When he is thrown unceremoniously into the Mojave desert, he has to face the fact that not only is he not as brave as he thought he was, but that the real world is unforgiving, and there are very few people in the desert willing to help anyone but themselves. When he arrives at the main setting, a town called Dirt, people ask who he is and where he's from. It is then that he realizes that as he has no identity, he can spout whatever lies he wants to impress these people, and he does that exact thing.  However, when he is appointed sheriff, he has to deal with the reality of having people rely on you, as it is now his responsibility to save the entire town from dying of thirst by retrieving their water. When he fails on his mission and has to come b...
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Aviation: It's the new sensation

An oddly common motif throughout  Black Swan Green is that of birds: Jason lives in a town with "swan" in it, and he also attends a goose fair, during which he makes a crucial decision regarding his own principles (choosing to return the wallet to notorious asshole Ross Wilcox). Now, that's not a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice. We can do something with this.      "Black Swan Green hasn't got any swans." This sentence is one of the first things we hear about the town from Jason. It's a quick little quip, something that could be easily passed off as world building. And yet, at the end of the book, when Jason is contemplating the many changes his life has gone through in such a short time, what does he see? A swan.  Swans are very common symbols in literature, and mean many different things, but one I'm choosing to focus on one specific meaning: that of elegance and femininity. Jason is embarrassed about his poetry; the hypermascul...
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Speech and Janie

 Throughout the novel, Hurston makes it clear that speech is a very integral part of the environment. Rumours get twisted, gossip is spread, and the dialect of the novel is very clearly articulated. Every line of dialogue is carefully crafted to be correct to the time period and accurate to the novel. While Hurston could have very easily just written the dialogue in an unaffected manner and allowed the reader to make their own connections, she instead chooses to put in the extra work to enhance the experience herself.   This is done not only to make a sort of time capsule out of the novel, but also to bring the concept of speech to the forefront of the novel, as a recurring theme throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God  is the concept of words being stifled or brought to light. Every relationship Janie has in the book is based around this central theme of vocal expression. Throughout the beginning of Janie's life, she is constantly being stifled by those around her: ...
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