Off The Road By Daniel Duenter

Michael Gow’s play Away is the story of three different Australian families who go on holiday for Christmas in the sixties. By going away each family is hoping to resolve their issues. Although Away is set some time ago the themes and issues explored in the play are still relevant to a modern day audience, even one of a non-Australian background. Shakespearean plays that were written many hundreds of years ago and are still understandable and relevant to people all over the world today.

There are an infinite amount of unique responses to the question “What is the meaning of life?”. However, the majority of people will agree that the true meaning of life is to find happiness and what is really important to one’s self. In Jon Krakauer’s, Into The Wild, Chris McCandless conveys this idealism through his life’s journey as he bravely defies all limitations. Chris McCandless isolates himself from society in his Alaskan Odyssey as a way to defy accepted expectations and to begin discovering the meanings of life without any corrupted influences.

“Pavement” consists of mostly modern but there are some hip hop movements, infused throughout the entire performance. Most of which are popping movements that usually occur when the negative situations happen such as: dancers being holding up hands, being arrested and even being shot at. Abraham chose his movements carefully when he choreographed ‘Pavements’. According to Brian Seibert, that is what Kyle Abraham is known for

Throughout the course of the book, A Long Way Home, Saroo Brierley, the author, encounters a series of traumatic experiences that lead to bittersweet moments. Unlike a normal child’s infancy, Saroo was physically and mentally consuming. Through his experience, we are able to get a glimpse of the many struggles and hardships young children live in India daily. His petrifying experiences of living on the streets, Liluah, and Nava Jeevan finally lead to his safe haven of being taken by the Brierley’s.

“Passing,” by Nella Larsen is a novel all about pretending to be something that you are not. It is about giving everyone the impression that everything is in order when in reality everything is falling apart. Passing in this novel refers to the ability of a person to be classified as one thing, normally a social group, while belonging to a different group. Passing is usually done to gain class or acceptance by groups other than one’s own. The primary focus of the novel is on racial passing which is the ability to look white and belong to a white group when in reality the person is an African-American in order to gain privileges that were unavailable to them. Although racial passing is the main focus, another major theme in this novel is sexual passing and identity.

Michael Gow's play, "Away" expresses the idea of going through changes and receiving help from people around you. The key characters of the play experiences change and renewal as a result of their relationships with others ad the summer vacation. Coral and Gwen is two characters that undergo the most changes throughout the trip. Coral manage to moved on from her's son death while Gwen changed from a snobby person to a person who is more understandable. Tom is one of the critical character that help Coral and Gwen realised their issues and surpasses it. The play showed lives of people and their own struggle during the 60s and how they overcome it.

Jamie Fader’s book Falling Back which was published in 2013, is based on ethnographic research over three years, from 2004 to 2007, of black and latino males on the edge of adulthood and that were incarcerated at the Mountain Ridge Academy reform school located in a rural area: “within a dense forest in western Pennsylvania, is Mountian Ridge Academy … ninety-acre campus contains eight dormitories, each of which houses thirty-two young men between ages 14 to 18” (p.1). The criminal thinking approach was intended to help young people identify the patterns that had led them to delinquency and replace it with corrective and prosocial thoughts. These young boys had been involved in drug offenses and violence within their suburban communities and were now in the process of behavioral change in order to help them reflect and be able to make better decisions which would lead them to a better life.

The short story On The Bridge by Todd Strasser is about two boys, Adam and Seth, who are hanging out after school on a bridge that overlooks the highway. Seth was the character that demonstrated maturity towards the end of the story. He showed some examples of this when Adam got them into some trouble. For example, when Adam flicked his cigarette onto the windshield of a car below the bridge, the drivers came up behind them. “But suddenly he [Seth] noticed that all three guys were staring at him. He quickly looked at Adam and saw why. Adam was pointing at him.” It was this point where Seth started to question his friendship with Adam, because they had gotten into trouble because of Adam, and then he blamed it on Seth. After the men left, Seth

Celeste Tyree is a privileged black nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan who boards a train from Detroit to Mississippi to join the civil rights movement in an effort to increase African American voter registration. “Freshwater Road” by Denise Nicholas follows Celeste as she becomes part of a movement called “Freedom Summer”, organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The story also follows her father, Shuck, as he tries to manage his business in Detroit all the while also containing his fears about his daughter’s activism in Mississippi.

The author of “The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War” is David Laskin. Laskin, born in New York, attended the New College, and earned MA in English. Laskin wrote several books about history, travel, and literary biography. In “The Long Way Home”, Laskin shares the struggles the immigrants had to face in America; an endeavor to start over in the land of opportunities, and the ordeal of their return to Europe in uniform to fight.

This paper will be reviewing the case brought upon the state of Confusion by Tanya Trucker, who owns a trucking company in the state of Denial. The state of Confusion has enacted a statute requiring all trucks and towing trailers who use its highways to use a B-type truck hitch. The problem is that Tanya Trucker would have to purchase these hitches to go through this one state or go around the state of Confusion.

How can we describe the world in which we live in today? On the one hand, we can look at it as a developed place where education, technology, and communication have evolved over time and people have more opportunities than they did before, but on the other hand we can look at it as a place where education, technology, and communication have been used in a negative way. How? The industrialized world in which we live in has taken great advantage of the technological advances and people’s well-reasoning and education in order to exploit the natural world. Scarce resources such as water and fish are good examples of how humans have been over exploiting the resources around us. Wendell Berry’s text Two Economies portrays how the industrial economy is destroying the world around us and how there are other two types of economies which should be seen as the way out from this disaster, which are better known as the Great Economy and the little economy. Additionally, this text can be related and applied to the writings entitled Water by Marq de Villiers and Salmon by Paul Greenberg, which portray how these two resources mentioned in the text titles, which represent basic human needs, are being over-exploited through the industrial economy depicted by Berry.

Instead of presenting a static Arab-American identity reliant on the past and defined through preservation of cultural heritage, Nye suggests that what it means to be Arab-American is discovered by making sense of different experiences and cultural contexts. Nye’s poetry insists on selfhood as a process of becoming and discovery. The critic Wahju Kusumajanti ponders that being both, an Arab and an American, does not indicate a state of being torn between two sides, but can be a steady and helpful position from which one can see the two sides more clearly. Nye inherits a sense of empowerment that permeates her work. She never feels fragmented because of her bicultural identities, on the contrary, she

Alexander is basically a poet who writes fictions as well. Her excellence lies in the deft use of symbols so intricately networked into her writing that it becomes artfully evocative and suggestive. At times the images and symbols become very private and then the readers are teased into guessing and coming to their own meanings. Meena Alexander’s achingly spare poetry is precise, intense and critically self-conscious. She employs very few words to create highly abstract metaphors. She then evokes these time and time again with the subtlest and barest of references, to weave along with other metaphorical imagery into new layers of meaning. Her fiction is a sort of exercise in the stream-of-consciousness technique; the mind of the protagonist

"Hangovers" by Jennifer Pashley is the story I chose after laying out one by one the other stories proposed. From the very first lines, I was attracted by the story. This is the style I prefer; Not an ordinary course of events, but a kind of description of the feelings, of the mood that each of us may feel at one time or another.