Modern Love And Hannah Selinger's Use Of Love

My topic for the Anthology Project is love and lust. I chose this topic because I’m a sucker for romance. I love romance novels, movies and etc. I thought this topic would come easy to me, but I had a lot of trouble finding texts in the QCC database and especially finding books in the library because most of the ones I was looking for have been taken out already. I ended up having to go to the public library closest to me to find some of these texts. For texts such as “The Storm”, I wanted it to look clean so instead of scanning the actual book, I found a text version online. Essays were very difficult for me until Professor Murley suggested I go to the New York Times database and search “Modern Love”, after that, all I had to do was go through

Although this story doesn’t apply to me specifically, I have many acquaintances that have had a similar circumstance. This story represents Hannah Selinger’s unrequited love for her roommate, whom she had fallen in love with but he never shared mutual feelings. She expresses her story with bundles of imagery so that responders are able to vividly picture exactly what she is going through. An example of this includes “He was two years older than me and possessed the kind of natural good looks that made me nervous.” (Selinger, 26) Figurative language is used vastly throughout this text in order to convey emotion along with adding interest to the story. “…and kissed him goodbye in the forgiving October air,” (Selinger, 29) Selinger uses a combination of a metaphor along with the personifying of the month of October conducive to portraying this experience in a more passionate way, which not only captures the audiences’ attention, but allows them to really put them into her shoes. Furthermore, her use of rhetorical questions throughout this text is used not only for the audience to understand her thought process at the time, but to also challenge them. “Who was I, anyway? A friend? A roommate?” She doesn’t just ask herself, but involves the audience so that they can be more personally

She gets terrified and self-conscious and runs away because she thinks that he is only staying with her because his devotion felt more like a curse than actual love. In this piece of text you can catch heaps of similes and metaphors like, “Those calves, I swear, like bricks” (Rassette, 31), “He kept his dreams of us tucked away, hoarded them like those gas-station receipts he jams into the back pocket of his jeans” (Rassette, 32), “He’s charming, but in a dusty way, like the chimes of an old clock” (Rassette, 34), “Now I felt shriveled and curled, more like a fetus feasting on a conjoined twin than a mother growing a son” (Rassette, 31); this quote can also fit into the imagery category, even though it’s a bit too gory for readers to read about love. I picked this piece of text because it is one of those cliché stories where there is always a happy ending. It is also told in first person point of view, along with the other two