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A Structuralist Analysis of a Poster Ad

Hotel Camino Real

At first glance, this poster ad reveals to the audience a door attached to a rock-solid wall. the poster ad comes with a caption that says: "Too many stories in every corner." The viewer might only see - through its denotative meaning - a wall, and a simple, yet age-old passage to somewhere that is unknown. But looking at its connotative meaning, this ad wishes to convey to the audience that staying in this particular hotel is like living through time. Thus, the "too many stories in every corner."

HANDS by Sherwood Anderson

A Psychological Analysis

The story centers on a man nicknamed Wing Biddlebaum who was once an esteemed professor in a city university; but a tragic event has made him flee the city and his students to live a life in seclusion in a small town where no one else might recognize his face except his aunt. The people of that wee town had come to know  Biddlebaum as a man with restless hands. They marvel at his seemingly tireless hands that were capable of completing a great number of tasks like picking forty quarts of strawberries a day when he doesn't beat them on wood or keep them hidden in his pants' pockets.

Using the Psychological approach to analyzing this literary piece by Sherwood Anderson, Biddlebaum's behavior is explained. The narrator mentions him as a man who shows his emotions through the movement and sweep of his hands. When the protagonist was still a professor, he used to caress his students - who were all male - whenever he imparts them with a great chunk of knowledge and wisdom. This way, he also showed them his love for teaching and for them: as his students. His hands wold travel, rather unconsciously, to tousle his student's hair, rub his back, etc. But his behavior was later on misunderstood by parents and soon, by the his co-teacher and students to be a sexual act. This tells the reader that Biddlebaum's hands might have found their way to his students' private parts to ensue the 'caressing'.

Because of this tragic incident that Biddlebaum decided to live an anonymous life in a seemingly anonymous little town. Psychologically speaking, his decision to get away is a form of 'isolation'. And deciding to keep his past to himself and to never let anyone see his hands nor allow himself to get lost in the moment and caress someone, is a form of 'repression'.

'Design' by Robert Frost

A Deconstruction Analysis

"I found a dimpled spider; fat and white,On a white heal-all, holding up a mothLike a white piece of rigid satin cloth --Assorted characters of death and blightMixed ready to begin the morning right,A snow-drop spider; a flower like a froth,Like ingredients of a witches' broth--And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What brought the kindred spider to that height,What had that flower to do with being white,The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?If design govern in a thing so small,Then steered the white mother thither in the night?What but design of darkness to appall?"

One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost often questions and meditates - through his poems - universal themes and this poem, Design, is no different.

'Design' might have opened in a subtle scene where a spider, a flower, and a moth are its central characters. The picture that the poem brings to the mind's eye of the reader is that of the beauty and intricacy of creation - and to appreciate it. He even suggests, quite explicitly, to the reader that such beauty is designed and that a 'creator', whose wisdom exceeds man, owned the hands that wove such intricate, special, and individual designs to every creation: from the biggest and incomprehensible down to the microscopic. Later on, however, a dark cloud descended upon this bright observation. The speaker of the poem then questions the role of the 'creator' in the doom of the 'creations'.

Analyzing the poem using the Deconstruction approach, we can see these binary oppositions in an implicit manner: life and death/ creation and destruction; light and darkness; predator and prey.

Fantastic Approach

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA

The Fantastic Approach to analyzing literature is used when analyzing literary works set in a world where the occurring events have no logical explanation. Todorov is a prominent critic of the said approach. Fantasy –which is a genre– was made famous by prominent writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; and the Fantastic Approach looks upon the elements of this particular genre.

Hotel Transylvania is a 2012 American 3D computer-animated comedy, fantasy film by Sony Pictures Animation set in a modern age where Count Dracula and his family of ghosts and monsters are considered nothing but myths.  But, in the movie, the Count and his band of merry and once terrifying creatures are dwelling in secrecy, from the townsfolk, in the vampire’s castle in Transylvania. The once fun and peaceful leadership and “living” of Dracula is disturbed when a human has stumbled upon his palace-turned-hotel.

The Fantastic Approach has two major classifications: marvelous and uncanny. Each of the two is branching out into different types. Hotel Transylvania, the movie being criticized here, belongs to the Pure Marvelous type. As the word ‘fantasy/fantastic’ was defined, the events in the film can be nothing but truly fantastic – they have no logical explanation. The character of Dracula first winked into existence on a classic novel written by Brahm Stoker in the late 1700s. The viewer knows by critical thinking that vampires, the Boogey Man, werewolves and the likes, cannot simply exist in reality.