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Skylar Kirby Throughout the span between Langston Hughes and Vida Cross’s writing, there has been a shift in the cultural attitude towards language. I will be looking into the differences and similarities between how Vida Cross and Langston Hughes use their cities, their times, and their language. Hughes became a household name via his poetry,…

Megan Bogner Although the Oresteia and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (hereafter Deathly Hallows) may not seem to have much in common at first glance, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that both treat women in similar ways. Even the author of Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling, encourages the reader to draw connections between…

Chieko Dunham I’m going to begin with a little-known fact: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals up until 2017 used Lennie to assess the intellectual ability of defendants who may be sentenced to the death penalty (Loftis 62). The court felt that “[m]ost Texas citizens might agree that … Lennie [and individuals like him] ……

Ezra Alpasan John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is an indisputable addition to the American literary canon, one that found its place through the kaleidoscope of American perspectives that it provides. From topics like the American Dream, misogyny, loneliness, and race relations, Of Mice and Men is situated at the center of literature concerned with…

Nola Walston The majority of interpretations and works of literary criticism have read Lennie Small and Of Mice and Men as a problematic representation of intellectual disability, particularly in its eugenic implications. Critics such as Clare Lawrence and Sonia Freeman Loftis discuss the negative impacts of Lennie’s representation as animalistic, lacking subjectivity, and how “the…

Zoe Tedesco During the 1910s and continuing into the 1940s came a period of rebirth. This was the Harlem Renaissance. Art, music, relative freedom, and power emerged from the heart of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City and the voices of Black Americans could finally be expressed through literature they had written. This period…

Dear readers of The Common Room,  Let me write “out of character” of the magazine for a moment. In my time as an editor for this magazine, my appreciation for the creativity found within critical essays has grown more and more each year. While the use of the word creative may be unconventional, I believe…

Nathan Hill The phrase “coming out” used in a queer context has evolved over the years. In our modern understanding of the term, a person comes out when they announce their queerness to an assumedly straight audience, whether that audience be friends, family, or peers in some other way. While individuals in this audience may…

Megan Bogner “Daily, she is there — a part of the landscape of what becomes history.” -S.R. Joshel The above quote is from S. R. Joshel’s essay The Body Female and the Body Politic: Livy’s Lucretia and Verginia, which proved to be a formative text for my own essay. Though the women that Joshel focuses…