Sammy's Musings and Insights

Today I just saw an article of a group called 4chan users, who have started a smear campaign against Emma Watson for her speech to the UN on feminism.  Part of this smear campaign is the threat of posting nude pictures of herself to the internet.  How distasteful can people get?  And why threaten someone like Emma, who is peacefully making her voice heard about a subject she cares about: women's equality and feminism?  How far will someone go to make sure a woman's voice is shut down permanently? This corresponds to a topic I was reading in Psychology about conformity.  In society, women are expected to be the weaker sex, the submissive sex, the docile sex.  As the generations passed, women are evolving into strong, proactive, intelligent thinkers, movers and shakers, and as we all know evolution is a process in the change of the world.  Yet there are people out there, like these users, who feel by smearing Emma and her speech, they can make women li...

This week, Emma Watson gave a powerful message about women and equality.  It brought me back to one of my first writing assignments about women and feminism.  Below is the writing assignment I did regarding radical heterosexuality.  Enjoy!!! Naomi Wolf's article, "Radical Heterosexuality", brings up a grey area of how a woman can be feminist woman and yet still be a wife to her husband. She brings up a question in the beginning of the article: "By day, they fight gender injustice, by night they sleep with men. Is this a dual life? A core contradiction? Is sleeping with a man 'sleeping with the enemy'?" (1) In other words, how can a woman be wanting gender freedom and equal rights if she is also affectionate with a man? How can she have the same power and freedom as a man when she is also seeking affection and attention from them and giving them the same? Is it possible to have it both ways. Wolf brings up a point that being a radical femi...

I have seen magical realism prominent in many of Isabel Allende's novels such as House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's short stories and novels such as In the Time of Cholera . I have also seen it in American novels too, such as Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen . It is a genre I love because it brings the fantastical inside the reality of the novel. Magical realism has the power to grasp the reader into the story or novel and get a dose of reality mixed with fantasy. What exactly is magical realism and how does it fit in with Garcia-Marquez's story? According to Postcolonialstudies.emory.edu, magical realism is a literary device that brings out two perspectives: “ one based on a so-called rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality”. In other words it is the merging of the supernatural with the actual existence in the story. The reader can see this firsthand in the story ...

Another assignment post that I think is relevant to this blog because it focuses on literature and is related to my writings on Latin American writers.  Enjoy!!! What is the definition of a Latina writer? How is it different from being a Latino writer? In my Week Two response of what is a Latino writer, I had concluded that “besides the author that wrote it, it must be a piece that Latin-Americans can relate to, like history or experience.” I still stand by that principle with a Latina writer, like Sandra Cisneros. Why would our publishing want to distinguish Latina writer from Latino writers, just because of the gender? Do they thing this will make it easier to sell a book just because an author like Cisneros is a woman and cannot be in the same category as Junot Diaz and Roberto Bolano? Just because the gender of the author changes does not mean she is less of a writer than a Latino writer. Unlike Bolano and Diaz, who were born outside the United States, Cisnero...

This summer I started an attempt on a reading project for myself and read Marcel Proust's famous In Search of Lost Time, the six volume novel of gigantic proportions.  I had taken interest in this series because I had already owned the first volume and decided to get the other six for my collection (all of them match by the way).  I also decided to read this because a friend had suggested them and has my same tastes for literary and classic fiction.  I have had them on my shelf for a while and when I finally finished Tropic of Cancer and some light reads, I wanted to take on something ambitious.  Thus, I gave myself a project and a goal: to read this six part novel in six months. Unfortunately, this goal has changed immensely.  Here are the reasons why: 1) This is not a light read novel.  In fact, a few times I had to go back to try to understand what M. Proust was saying when my mind wandered off the page to images that captured my mind.  2) Becau...

This is an assignment I just completed for my Latin American Literature class and felt this was a good topic to put up here.  Enjoy!!! When reading Junot Diaz's, “The Pura Principle”, I was noticing that Diaz went back and forth writing in English and then using Spanish phrases to capture the authenticity of the story. I say authenticity because most households that speak both English and Spanish speak with a hybrid of both languages. Though this was never practiced in my immediate family, my father's cousins' families did use a hybrid of both English and Spanish when speaking because they grew up learning both Spanish and English. It was more dominant when expressing emotions. Only my father and his siblings were able to keep up with their cousins in the interchanging of languages. Like his story, in the interview, Diaz switches back from Spanish to English on occasion. This is because this is authentic for him as he is familiar with both languages due to “...