In Tommy Orange’s There There, several unique characters show acute awareness of their “otherness” as members of a minority American culture, yet struggle to uncover their personal identities. In “Phenomenology of Spirit,” German philosopher Georg...

The graphic novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel opens with a series of panels portraying how she and her father used to play airplane. At the same time, Bechdel makes a connection between them playing airplane and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. It...

In Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, the characters’ attitudes towards their sexualities are shaped by their identity-forming processes. Sula and Nel, despite their similarities, have clashing beliefs about sex due to the vastly different female role...