Throughout the history of literature, popular writings have helped to shape and form the structures and syntax of the modern languages that we know today.  Modern languages are constantly changing and evolving as a result of spoken or colloquial phrases being used in popular literature.  Through literature, these terms are spread and become familiar to the general population of speakers, and this can cause such drastic changes in the structure of a language that it may become unrecognizable after only a few centuries.  The two best and most dramatic examples of literature that has caused an evolution of the language in which it was written are the works of Shakespeare and Dante's Commedia.  Both Shakespeare and Dante, through their literature, dramatically changed the English and Itali

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Why Recreate Art?

Roots of Sky-EvolvingFrom Walt Whitman

            Thereis a very small portion of formal education that focuses on the unconscious.  I have studied Walt Whitman in high school, under the label of transcendentalist.  However, through this class, I now understand Whitman’s writing style much better.  While most novels or literary pieces we read are reflective of the conscious mind, “Leaves of Grass” uses metonymy, specifically unconscious associations. 

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Frames of mind and ideas about existence are probably not truly transmitted or passed down in an evolutionary manner, however they seem to be passed down culturally, and sometimes become apparent in a way that is parallel to reemergence in biological evolution.  Both Walt Whitman, or his narrator, in his poem Leaves of Grass, and Erik in Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American express transcendental ideas.  Although these books were written more than a century apart, Whitman’s ideas about universality and oneness reemerge at the end of Hustvedt’s novel.  In biological evolution, physiological elements may reemerge after having lost use, especially if they were kept in an organism after not truly being successful when they originally emerged.  Similarly, in cultu

Old and New

-by Katie Randall

 

When you sink deeply into sleep it has you,

And pulls you through dreams you remember for moments... or years... or not at all.