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Code Switching in Sag Harbour

  We think of summer as a time of endless freedom, a time to slack off and sleep in all day, but also a period of time long enough to change. For Benji, summer is an opportunity to reinvent themselves and shock everyone once they all meet again in the fall. But what exactly is he rebuilding? And is he the one who gets to decide what to change? Sag Harbour follows Benji as he escapes his predominantly white prep school in Manhattan to spend the summer in Sag Harbour, a historically Black coastal community, on Long Island. In Sag Harbour, Benji is with a community where he can navigate his identity and also the pressures to code-switch. Code switching, a common phenomenon where individuals alternate between two or more dialects or registers within a single situation, is mainly influenced by social, cultural, and practical factors. Benji experiences this firsthand through the contrast of Sag Harbour and his school in Manhattan. During the school year, Benji is “Ben”, the polite and pr...
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Black Swan Green: The Best Bildungsroman Yet

“Bildungsroman”, translated to Coming of Age novel, refers to a narrative that focuses on a character’s journey from childhood to adulthood, usually exploring their psychological and moral growth. In this class, we have read multiple novels from a complex range of characters from J D Sallinger’s Holden Caulfield to Alison Bechtel’s autobiographical through a graphic retelling. Most of these novels are critically acclaimed or are icons in the YA coming of age genre, but dare I say our most recent read Black Swan Green, truly is the first book we’ve read that actually has a character to come to age. Black Swan Green, a semi-autobiographical novel written by David Mitchell, tells the story of 13-year-old Jason Taylor through thirteen chapters, each representing one month from January 1982 through January 1983. Mitchell crafts a narrative where the protagonist doesn’t just survive adolescence, but rather grows from it.  At the beginning of the novel, Jason Taylor opens with his experie...
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The Bechdel’s OCD

In Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, her father Bruce and her both struggle with OCD. Bruce has an odd fascination with renovating his home into a Victorian marvel. Alison counts the insignificant details, whether that be adding the same repetitive phrase to her diary to conceal the subject’s identity or counting the number of drops falling from a water faucet. Though different obsessions, they both show how control can affect one’s relationship with their family and identity.  Bruce’s OCD with Renovation and Organization The beginning of Fun Home opens with the story of Bruce’s renovation hobby, showing a Victorian mansion filled with antiques and aesthetics that Bruce has spent years refurbishing and reconstructing. It seems to readers that the only place Bruce truly finds peace is when he’s renovating. Yet, renovating is not a mindless hobby to Bruce. Renovating is an obsession. Bruce Bechdel’s obsession with renovating is not just a hobby or an aesthetic pursuit, but more of a manife...
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Suicide as Cleansing - Death Through Sylvia Plath’s Literary Work

       In all of Sylvia Plath’s literary work, the idea of cleanse and rebirth emerge as a central theme. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenworld needs a physical cleansing through bathing. In her poem Ariel, the entire poem is about shedding herself.       So what does dying mean to her? Why is she so compelled with this idea of cleanse and rebirth?      We know The Bell Jar is semi-autobiographical, and I interpret death to Sylvia as start is to new. Death for Sylvia is a chance to start anew, to shed the skin or her life (which probably hints to her depression, etc) and start over. In her poem “Lady Lazaruz”, we can see her mindset on her suicide attempts. In multiple stanzas, she says that every time she comes back from an attempt that she is treated inhumanly. She is treated as a miracle, something to sell, rather than a person. In one of the stanzas, she says that “Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman”. This quote shows h...
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Holden Caulfield, Lorde, and the Universal Fear of Growing Up

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     It’s no secret that Holden Caulfield is scared of growing up. As someone who hates phonies and facing the reality of his future after throwing his present away, Holden wants to stay in his idealized, innocent, version of life forever. Though written in the 1940’s/50’s, Holden’s coming of age and fears in adolescence resonate with many teenagers everywhere, staying timeless in its ideas and themes of alienation from society.       With that said, one of the only things I couldn’t stop thinking about was how similar Holden’s narrative felt to one of my favorite albums from New Zealand artist Lorde: Pure Heroine.       Pure Heroin e , a coming of age album released by Lorde when she was 16, also echoes the same themes of social anxiety, adolescent angst, and critiques against consumerism and phonies in current society that Holden constantly complains about in "The Catcher in the Rye". One of the major themes of both mediums is wis...
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