Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: themes and analysis
FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley. Four pages of text, brilliantly written with an eye for detail and analysis based on gender, sexuality, and various other interesting approaches. TOPIC: Do the monster's eloquence and persuasiveness make it easier for the reader to sympathize with him? Why do you think most film versions of the story present the monster as mute or inarticulate? Great stuff.
Analysis of "The Gryphon" short story
Misunderstandings are the essence of tragedy. Nowhere is this true than in the short story Gryphon, in which a fourth-grade teacher gets sick and a substitute teacher, Miss Ferenczi, appears before his class the next day. She is poorly qualified and appears to have psychological disturbances the students recognize quickly, although none of them knows what to do about it. At one point, she recounts seeing a gryphon -- "an animal in a cage, a monster, half bird and half lion" -- while traveling in Egypt. She tells the fourth-graders other wild tales, which only some of them believe. "She lies," says one kid on the school bus afterward. Eventually, after her eccentric behavior reaches a strange climax, one of the fourth-graders tells on Miss Ferenczi to the school principal, and she leaves by noon that day. In this story, Baxter's descriptions of children's collective and individual intelligence are utterly convincing; told through the eyes of a student, the story evokes a childhood experience one is not likely to forget through repeated use of striking animal imagery.