Author Archives: glasfsu

Maureen Spengel This time last year, I was still reeling from the loss of my first “true” love. That once tragic loss, ultimately proved to be the best thing for me; spiritually, physically, emotionally, mentally (and possibly even financially). Through that separation, I gained what is of the utmost importance to me: that is freedomContinue reading “The Heart in Times of the Unknown”

August Braddock Through the act of contacting journalists and the police, the Zodiac Killer taunted and terrified masses of people throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Decades after his final slaying and letter, no one knows who the man that brutally murdered several individuals is — that is, no one but the killer himself. In theContinue reading “I Would Like to Report a Murder”

Rosette Simityan Didion’s essays “Holy Water,” “Bureaucrats,” and “Los Angeles Notebook”  critique the assumption of ease that undergirds the myth of Los Angeles, and California in general, as paradise by addressing urban and environmental issues contemporaneous to the social unrest of the 1960’s and 1970’s. She questions what social ecologist Murray Bookchin calls the abstractionsContinue reading “Didion’s Los Angeles: Dis-Enchanting the California Dream”

Rachel Egoian Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue and lyric poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” creates an unsettling apocalyptic world, caused by human destruction and the polluted makings of the industrial footprint. The dialectical discourse from Nature strives in obtaining obsolete change in order to ease Nature’s cries of pain and suffering. However, Nature’sContinue reading “Nature’s Slime and Aggression: Browning, Hopkins, and Tennyson’s Lens of Ecology and Natural Theology”

Teresa Diviachi First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—             because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—             because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—            Continue reading “Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: Have Human Rights Become a Privilege?”

Teresa Diviachi Power is a force which does not allow one to self-determine but rather privileges one with the allowance of self-determination. To wield power is to decide one’s value, to decide the value of one’s thoughts, to place oneself into the larger relationship of society as a recipient of attention, of desire, of comfort.Continue reading “Power and Privilege within the Academy: The Study of Oppressed Identity in David Mamet’s Oleanna”

Damascus Triola In this essay, I compare the ways in which Macrobius’ fifth-century work on dreams and discourse differs from Chaucer’s fourteenth-century work which operates along a similar line of dream inquiry. As such, I will first explore the Macrobian conceit of dreams and then move into a Chaucerian understanding of dreams, discourse, and narration.Continue reading “Halcyon Dreams”