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Hi! I'm Zona Hrnjak and this is my blog for African American Literature.

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"Sex and Death": Evolving Power and Gender Dynamics

“Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable,” (4). Other than their status as the two (nearly) unavoidable parts of any human life, sex and death are a jarring combination. What’s being implied as the connotation? Repression? Violence? - I think it’s both, and both ideas get explored more throughout the novel. The novel shows an ugly underside of American life, particularly in the realm of women’s lives, marriage, and sex, as well as the progression of feminism and shifting power dynamics, showing the first of inklings of sexual liberation and setting the stage for a more postmodern idea of sex. I said “(nearly) unavoidable parts of any human life” earlier, but in the setting of the novel it is truly unavoidable, practically a burden for the women. Mother’s relationship with father, Evelyn Nesbit’s sexuality and relationships, the little girl’s existence in the Lower East Side, and Emma Goldman’s spelling out of the economics of marriage are all examples of the inescapabl...
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Final Thoughts: A Post in Four Chapters

I. The Intersection of Arts and Cultures With the end of the semester comes reflection, and after spending four months reading a variety of literature, I have a lot to reflect on. Particularly in the last weeks, as we finished The White Boy Shuffle and watched Sorry to Bother You. On top of that, I watched a film called Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (which is not black media, but is connected in many ways to The White Boy Shuffle), and read the poem “Somebody Blew Up America” in class. And all of these things have been connected, leaving me with similar questions. And the way I’ve consumed all of these things is deeply affected by my own life, but they’ve also affected how I’ve gone about living my life. And they will continue to do so. So in honor of the film Mishima, here’s is a four-part sweeping comparison of these artworks and a contemplation of their impact. As Gunnar increasingly takes suicide more seriously, he reads a lot of Japanese literature, courtesy of Yoshiko. He r...
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Esther and Holden: A story

As the composer Igor Stravinsky said, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit,”. This is at least how I, and undoubtedly some of you guys, felt about this project. You’re given a pretty limited set of requirements for what you can write, established characters, setting, et cetera. But within those limits, I found it all of a sudden a lot easier to write something. The combinations and possibilities were extremely fascinating. My story is from Esther’s perspective ten years later, in 1963, when she’s a writer and return to New York City. She meets Holden and they get to know each other a bit. It’s a story that looks at both of them ten years on, but now in the context of the 1963 political crises and culture (although part of the story is that things haven’t changed that much yet). My goal was to follow Esther’s thoughts over two days with Holden, and see where it goes. It's titled In Open Air, sort of "the opposite...
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