Annie Kapur
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šš½āāļø Annie
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The Best Works: William Faulkner
William Faulkner is one of my favourite writers in the world. From a young age, I was interested in Faulknerās divine writing style, his southern gothic atmosphere, his Shakespearean and Biblical-scaled tragedies. Most importantly, I think I was interested in his characters the most. Faulknerās works are known for being filled with intense darkness, destruction and the danger of humans when they are taken out of their natural environments. A satire on the heavy industrialisation of the USA during and after the times of the Civil War, Faulknerās writing was often heaped in darkness, tragedy, well-written and almost poetically style prose along with characters that you couldāve seen coming from either a Shakespeare Play, the Bible or a 18th Century Opera. These almost Byronic heroes tend to take the Hamlet-like form and often end up worse than they began. Death overtakes in many cases and the natural world around the character is harmful, turned against them, as they move through the world and get out of their habitats, they long for release from this new, self-destructive lifestyle that brings them nothing but greed and misery.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
The Best Works: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Biography Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorn was one of the key 19th Century American Writers of the Dark Romantic Era. But, he wasn't always the great writer that we appreciate him as today, he started off somewhere else.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
"The Aeneid" by Virgil
Itās been about nine or ten years since I first read Virgilās āAeneidā and thereās a strange reason behind why I even read it in the first place. I found it in a beautiful copy at a bookstore. It was clothbound and patterned. The reason I actually picked it up was because I was watching a strange cartoon on the internet the previous day that was all to do with romans, I canāt remember exactly what it was but when I opened āThe Aeneidā, the cartoons reminded me of the ones from the video - just drawn a billion times better. My first reading experience of āThe Aeneidā was actually really strange because I remember trying to bullet point exactly what was happening all the way through the book and yet, I didnāt really understand what happened at the end because it didnāt really end at all. This book really ended up changing my opinion on the possibilities for poetry. It was a whole new poem with a great amount of drama. It was an epic in every sense of the word and I loved it so much that I ended up reading it every year since. I studied it for my undergraduate dissertation and I even got some people in to it online as well. Itās a brilliant poem with some great characters and history.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
July 4th: A Celebration of American Literature
American Independence Day is a great day, even though I am not American and nor do I live in America, I like to see how our friends across the Atlantic are celebrating this auspicious occasion. Filled with fireworks, party foods, gatherings of friends and family, this is set to be incredible day complete with unforgettable memories and happiness all around. American Independence Day is obviously the day where America celebrate being free of their overlords in Britain and became their own country, their own power and their own land. I think itās a brilliant day to celebrate the works of fiction and nonfiction that came out of America due to its rapidly changing scene. From the late 1700s to the present, the USA has undergone so many changes in their artistic movements and so many social reforms that it is difficult to really count where one ends and another begins. I would like to celebrate alongside our friends across the Atlantic by offering a book set in every state of the USA. From the Southern Gothic to the Jazz Age, from the Harlem Renaissance to the 80s Transgressive Era and from Civil War Literature to the Post-Modern Destruction of the American Dream. American Literature has so much to offer us in terms of characters like the loveable George and Lennie from Steinbeckās āOf Mice and Menā or the regrets of characters like Thomas Sutpen from Faulknerās āAbsalom, Absalom!ā, the terrifying prospect felt by John Unger in Fitzgeraldās āDiamond as Big as the Ritzā and even the innocence of one of the most beloved character from any American Literature Work ever, little Scout Finch of Harper Leeās āTo Kill a Mockingbirdā. From fiction to nonfiction, poetry and back again, American Literature is endless in its surprises and innovationā¦
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
"Miss Ravenelās Conversion from Secession to Loyalty" by John W. De Forest
This book represents the way in which learning from each other can be a struggle especially in the midst of a war. But, the American Civil War is more than just war politics and a class struggle, it is also about race and slavery and humanity. There is also a great amount of violent language and the exploration I did into this book was to do with the way in which the characters talk about the war and what the reader learns about the view of the war throughout the novel. We get firsthand character judgements and a range of differing opinions to the way in which the war impacts the younger generation - both positively and negatively. When the reader encounters more humane characters, they are in no way perfect or even progressive for our own day, but when it comes to the American Civil War and the other characters who are brilliant examples of the racially insensitive and the racially abusive stereotypes, it makes the progressive characters obviously look more progressive than they actually are. Thus, we have this range of different characters that mostly depend on the way in which other characters too are viewed in the book.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
10 Books: Fallen Women
Fallen Women in literature actually has its own genre concerning women who gain agency through marriage and love affairs etc. and then, have their secrets found out or are violently mistreated and so, fall from this agency back down to either abject poverty or even worse, death. The literature of fallen women were most famous during the 1700s and 1800s with women being seen as more than alive for their agency in the 1900s and 2000s. Be that as it may, we can find fallen women in literature even in early eras of artistic movements. In Ancient Greece, we have the Orestian Trilogy and Sophoclesā Theban Plays which both contain fallen women, and in Shakespeare we can find fallen women in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and even in aspects of Julius Caesar. The fallen woman sub-genre has been around for ages throughout literary history, but became more and more famous in the decadent eras of the 1700s and 1800s partially because of the adornment of women of the aristocracy. The scandal that was created around women of the richer classes who required to hold themselves with decorum but ended up becoming involved with acts of degeneracy and the such. Readers were very much used to tragedies involving men and so, from the decadent courts of the Enlightenment and Romanticist Era we get women becoming more involved in tragedy, most obviously inspired by the richness and vulgarity of the Baroque and Rococo Styles. Towards the 1900s and 2000s, the āfallen womanā sub-genre became more complex as instead of just having a rich woman who gains agency and falls into tragedy - we get a more complex story. We still have a woman either coming into riches or being above a certain social class, but then, we have a number of turns: familial tragedy, love stories, backdrops of war and sometimes the woman fell from grace before the plot line began and now, she is attempting to redeem herself. It certainly comes into the modern and post-modern eras with style and poise.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
The Best Performances: Margot Robbie
Margot Robbie, I feel, is an often underrated actress. Her range is incredible and her ability to portray characters with a thorough often romantic nature is her forte. As she turns thirty, Margot Robbie already has quite a lot under her belt, being nominated for an Academy Award for her role in "I, Tonya" (2017) which I felt she wholeheartedly deserved but unfortunately didn't win. However, Robbie has also been known to portray comic book characters with Harley Quinn becoming a cultural phenomenon pretty quickly. Margot Robbie has not only proved that she is more than just a pretty face, she is also quick-witted, intelligent and often very down-to-earth, humble and confident in her nature - arriving at interviews with the prime focus of keeping interest on her growing career.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
"Le Morte d'Arthur" by Thomas Malory
When I was a little girl, like a lot of other small children, I liked reading the Arthurian Tales in childrenās form. There were so many of them: The Sword in the Stone, The Knights of the Round Table, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Lancelot and Guinevere etc. But the best thing is that as I grew up, they got more and more sophisticated until I was fifteen and found the two volumes of Le Morte dāArthur by Thomas Malory. It was like discovering a diamond after having nothing but crystals - there werenāt very many words for having the real thing in my hands. I am going to admit I read both volumes in the same day because I just couldnāt put it down. It was everything Iād ever wanted - an adult book made from the books I read as a child. This book completely changed me and changed what I thought about the childrenās stories of my younger days. They really did come from other things. That was all a well and good theory until we got on to the fairy tales and Charles Perrault. Then it just got creepy and weird.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte
It has been a number of over ten years since I first read āJane Eyreā by Charlotte Bronte. I was going to be thirteen and it was fairly cold outside (my birthday is in the winter). I was reading āJane Eyreā for the first time because it was on a reading list I had found listed next to āPride and Prejudiceā by Jane Austen - another classic. The way in which I discovered my copy of the book was simply by going to my local bookstore and reserving myself a copy (it was fairly popular and the book had sold out at that time). When I first read the book, it absolutely took me away. It made me cry, it gave me hope, it made me sad, it made me cry again and then finally, when it was all over - I could sob to myself happily in peace. It changed my whole life that book did. It was like reading something that was specially written to hit you right in the heart and make you feel every inch of the characterās emotions with them. Every bit of her anger and resentment, all of her rage and then, all of her calm and sorrow. Eventually, you can feel her happiness as well.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
A Filmmaker's Guide to the Best Performances: Katharine Hepburn
For over six decades, Katharine Hepburn was one of the most popular and most talented leading actresses in Hollywood. Born to incredibly wealthy parents in Hartford, Connecticut, USA - Hepburn was mostly known for her amazing talents to play any such character that she wanted with a great amount of accuracy. Her intelligence was often put together with a personality made of steel and she moved Hollywood's image of females forwards by her amazing fearlessness. The AFI called her the greatest actress of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
"Memoirs of an Anti-Semite" by Gregor Von Rezzori
This novel is told in five separate episodes of one manās experiences growing up and being told that anti-semitism was the normal way of thinking. Since our narrator is an aristocrat, he has some obvious class prejudices which include anti-semitism towards the poorer Jewish folk. Slowly, but surely, he seeks to learn that his prejudices were wrong and actually, there is no difference between him - a rich and worldly man, and a working-class Jewish person. He realises this through various friendships, relationships and even complex meetings involving Jewish people in which he finds not only sympathy and rage, but also confronts himself in this rage - asking himself why he thinks about them in this way. As the narrator confronts his past, we see prime Jewish characters of complex natures such as Wolf Goldmann, the hearty child of Dr. Goldmann who only seeks to make a friend but often struggles to assimilate into a more āEurocentricā lifestyle. We also see the Jewish woman in which our narrator falls in love with. But, in hiding and concealing her Jewishness, he ultimately leaves her for her fakery. There are also many more in which the narrator has to confront why exactly it is that Jewish folk hide their Jewishness but then expect nobody to realise. He analysis this over and over again, looking both ways at how this is a product of being racially stigmatised and how this is also a deceit on the part of the Jewish folk who choose to conceal themselves. As we go through the book once more, we find that the confrontation that the narrator has with himself looks deep within his own personal prejudices and develops some contradictions and hypocrisies before he can attempt to rectify things that he had once believed that now, seem absurd.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
