Essays on Courting

Doors in Lodato’s “Jack, July”

Of the many resources that a writer may employ to transmit his or her thoughts, metaphors are usually some of the most powerful. In this sense, Victor Lodato beautifully uses doors in his story “Jack, July” in order to represent the divide that the main character feels towards the rest of the world. They are constantly opening and closing, showing that he is wasting away the opportunities that life is giving him because of his drug use. Throughout the story, doors open and shut, mostly remaining in this latter state. This shows the difficulty that the main character has ...

In the past few years, there have been shocking frequencies of sexual and physical aggression in marriages, dating, and cohabitation throughout the United States and other countries of the world. As a result of the high frequency of aggression in relationships, many scholars and researchers have carried out many studies with the intent of understanding the phenomenon. The “Dark side of courtship” is an instance of a book that documents one of the studied on the subject. The authors use qualitative interviews and other data collection methods to explore the negative interactions between males and females who are dating ...

An Analysis

Katherine Min’s short story, ‘Courting a Monk’ deals ostensibly with how the narrator, Gina, met, courted and married her husband, but Min uses the story to explore issues of cultural identity, the nature of Buddhist belief, the tensions between her and her father, and, ultimately, the meaning of life. The story might be said, very broadly, to deal with the problems of how immigrants to the U.S.A. assimilate and how we define national identity. Throughout the story Min uses images of stillness contrasted with images of rapid and movement, and also uses people’s attitudes to words and language, ...