Brent Wiggins

Politics is a construct of civil order and an overthought stratagem for peaceful domesticity. The role of politics however does the ironic service of keeping dominion rather than instilling domestic sovereignty. It is a broad term that only gets broader with its disseminators and dissenters wanting more and wanting less. Language is a transient trapping and release both consequential and sequential to the specificity of what politics' purpose and definition is. Since politics is a global game board with constant diplomatic decisions being made at the toss of a die, public opinion influences government opinion as much as government opinion influences public opinion. A solution to an issue that caters to a minority will assuredly win favor in the majority who brings that solution forward. Likewise, a majority that welcomes and concedes to a solution is met with willingness and expectation from the minority. The public and the republic are the duality in a democracy in which both are participatory functions and reactions of each other. Richard Condon's novel The Manchurian Candidate introduces this participation during the Cold War as a predilection for competition between freedom and loyalty which is strained by both the powerful and the powerless in society, limiting any potential changes, political and domestic. These choices are masked by entertainment treating the idea of espionage and exploitation as exciting as science fiction. Unbeknownst to the masses, entertainment, like satire, can be an attractive Pavlovian distraction that conceals the truth more than it reveals the truth.

Anne Sexton is a confessional poet who is open in her Love Poems about anatomical distinctions being treated as biological distinctions and challenges these distinctions with sexual identity. Gender is anatomical and in reference to the reproductive phallus and the yoni. Gender is the binary to which society relies on to establish cultural expectation in the form of male and female. Roles of each gender are repeated to create a pattern of normalcy that is accepted and never questioned. As a result of this heteronormative pattern, sexual identity suffers in the biological stratification and bifurcation of gender.

T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” shares this impersonal tone of accepted and rushed knowledge and interconnection with images of belief and action that reaches its own objective purpose from its subjective practices. Researchers agree that these hollow men are in a transcendent development, in between states of being and nonbeing. It is easy to pigeonhole this poem as a post-war poem, as well as a pre-war poem, since its publication came after World War I and before World War II in 1925. Interesting enough, “The Hollow Men” is a mid-war poem, filled with the disillusionment after a war and the obligation before the war. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” holds this transitory pivot for agnostic reverence and religious urgency that sarcastically accepts and seriously questions the temperament of existentialism.

Family by nature is a social group of individuals who share similar attributions and characteristics. In the Victorian sense however, the definition of the family and its dynamics take on a drastic change. The Victorian family is defined less by its nature, its biological associations, and more by its nurture, its artificial means of cultivating similarities. The Industrial Revolution changed both the social landscape of public and private life into inverses of each other. Work now entered the home, turning the family from a real occurrence to an ideal expectation. A family is not of family members, but of a solitary union, each different from the next family. This social striation is otherwise known as classism which soon became the societal norm. Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times explores the function of the family in both terms of nature and nurture. There are three families this paper will put into contention: the Jupes, the Gradgrinds, and the Bounderbys. With their respective social backgrounds, each take on their own sense of nature and nurture in gradual and finite stages. The resilience of nature and the variance of nurture conflict within the three families of Hard Times but the nature of the traditional family remains unchanged in response to the nurturing of social expectations and individual determinations.

Regarding the play by Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape has a plot that is made uncertain by the certainties it gives its audience. Like most of Beckett’s plays, it has been debated whether or not it is a play at all. A solitary man named Krapp is alone in a room with no literal outside influence. He is surrounded by mementos, recorded tapes that make the past more concrete than memory will allow. Absurd as this play may be, the definitive, if not primary theme of identity is found and lost. This is the inner and outer conflict Krapp faces in his play. He cannot cope with his past, he cannot look forward to any expectations for his future, which corrupts his space and time in his present. Krapp is a striated individual, cut between mental time and physical space. While research provided has relied on the Oedipal complex and some have concluded the play embodies literal nothingness, this paper will digress from this form of psychoanalysis. Instead, another Greek myth will be used to explain Krapp’s striated self, namely the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, to show the associations and dissociations from the love in his past and the art in his present as they change or maintain his absolute self.

Writing has historically proved to be an outlet for power. The assertion of authority holds more credibility in the written word than it does when spoken. Making thoughts tangible on a page rather than phonetically persuasive by word of mouth takes more precision and procurement. Power comes in many forms, from political to religious and from social to economic, all of which share in their own respective level of controversy. Writers can be misunderstood and misinterpreted for something they believe or never intended. The written word is its own multiplicative voice that can carry more than one conversation. John Donne is a seventeenth century writer from the English Renaissance, a time where advances in literacy were becoming more widespread and accessible. He is known for his use of metaphysical conceits or a combination and comparison of controversial imagery. For example, his popular poem " The Flea " incorporates religious matrimony and sexual connotations that reinforce each other's imagery. This shock of incongruity demonstrates the power play of the written voice John Donne is capable of. This paper will explore two poems by the perverse poet, his Elegy 19, " To His Mistress Going to Bed " and " A Valediction: of Weeping, " in regards to their carnal and marital love respectively, to show John Donne as either a vicarious vessel for human desires and passions or human debauchery and sin.

Women, power, and writing have throughout history been a triad of triumphant and tragic inattention. The subject of power becomes disassociated from gender roles and gender roles become roles through proteiform medium of writing. Women may not have had a spoken voice but they did have a written voice. Queen Mary I of England wrote and gave a speech to the people of London in 1554 with the knowledge of the influence of power and gender roles and she gave a speech that implicitly subverts both influences all at once.

Religious doctrine and discipline are specified observances and practices within the realm of faith. Without doctrine, there is no discipline and without discipline, there is no doctrine. On occasion there is the instance of blind faith or the proclivity to act in correlation to guttural, uninhibited responses. The story of Samson, attributed from the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the Holy Bible’s Book of Judges, deals with the religious and subjective call to action in an individual as well as the justification of each in their enactment. A binary is seen between Samson’s liberty by ransom and the Philippians’ enslavement of his people, the Israelites. For both Samson and the Israelites and the Philippians, deliverance takes on the nature of divine intervention which soon becomes man’s designs, a possible excuse for his justification, which he calls divine justification. John Milton’s rendering of this biblical tale is an analogy to his epic poem Paradise Lost where he attempted to “justify the ways of God to men” (Milton 1.26). In his work Samson Agonistes, the ways of men are being justified to God through the idea of deliverance or divine justification.

Paradise Lost is a retelling of the Holy Bible’s Book of Genesis, explaining the role of man’s disobedience while introducing the untold perspective of the fallen angel Lucifer, made Satan. Already the reader gathers that there is man, or Adam and Eve, the physical, and Satan, this higher entity, the spiritual. John Milton uses gender in Paradise Lost not as marginalized but as amorphous for want of a nonpartisan binary, rather than a dichotomy, between the mortal and immortal bodies to create a syllogistic unity.

Batman, the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight, the Masked Manhunter, whatever alias he is given, the clad hero is still a relevant icon today as he was back in his May 1939 debut in Detective Comics #27. The attention readers give to a fictional character is not strictly make-believe fluff. More so, the reading of a character requires a suspension of disbelief and the making of a character, a certain mindset. Comic books are not just catered affectations for young children. Although they can be seen this way, the colorful pages provided stories reflective of the feelings from era to era. For these reasons, Batman serves as a pivotal example of both psychoanalysis and reader response theories.

It is clear to the student masses that spatial balance is a managerial skill they wish to uphold. When they are bogged down with work and seek solace and silence to balance it all, there must be a place to call their own, and at the very least, a place that can reflect the volatile career of an academic. The library could be an office just as the outdoor patios or cafeteria could serve as a place to lounge or unwind. All the same, the place of work could just as well be the place of play and vice versa. The place students have come to know that shares this binary the most however, is the dormitory. Studies from Julian J. Edney and Michael J. Grundmann discuss the spatial behavior between small groups, primarily groupings of four, in relation to each other as well as other groups who share a single space. Their analysis deals with more space to claim and therefore mobility, but regardless, the interaction between members still stands apart from this while designated to this space. The dormitory is not a completely social space dependent upon a group. Collectively, individual and personal modes of operation take place. Autonomy allows dynamicity, but not necessarily in a synchronous manner and because of this, each person to that group experiences their own headspace as understood by Peter Salvatore Petralia. To the individual, a daydream-like awareness takes place outside of that space and asserts an alternate, ideal space with a maintained attention to reality.


With this singularity, a coupling theory from Sophie Antoine and Wim Gevers deals with number-spatial associations where spatial response mappings are brought on by magnitude and magnitude’s locations. The confined space of a dorm room will prove to be a place with many compartments donned in the headspace. The interactions within it go far pass the cluttered-desk-cluttered-mind management and reasoning stereotype. A further approach to number-spatial associations involves Carrie Georges, Christine Schiltz and Danielle Hoffman’s departure from visuospatial account of numbers in favor of the less considered verbal-spatial account. The verbal-spatial account provides contextual evidence to say “left” and “right,” “up” and “down.” In addition these associations, according to Bodo Winter, Teenie Matlock, Samuel Shaki and Martin H. Fischer, are not limited to the vertical and horizontal traversed planes or dimensions; it also includes the sagittal. The dorm might only cater to vertical and horizontal planes in relation to number-spatial binaries. However, there is the potential for the sagittal plane having relation to Petralia’s headspace as it reaches for a better real. This paper will attempt to explain what spatial conditions influence the small, confined, divided and shared space of dormitory living and challenge these propositions with the space one is given.