The Mind's Eye One Tribe Universal themes like birth, death, desire, betrayal, love, and loss appear in every culture and every time period.

The Mind's Eye

One Tribe

Universal themes like birth, death, desire, betrayal, love, and loss appear in every culture and every time period.Likewise, certain objects and character types also seem to transcend time and place, suggesting that deep down all humans are part of one tribe. The more we know about other cultures and other eras, the more connected we can see that we are.  Reach out in time and space to find the universals in literature.

1. Choose a culture that you know nothing about (Japanese, Samoan, Afrikaans, Cherokee, any culture).
2. Search online to find some poems and/or stories created by that culture, and read them.
3. Choose a time period in American literature Early American, Puritan, Colonial, Age of Reason, Enlightenment, Naturalism, Regionalism, Realism, Modernism, Post Modernism, Contemporary).
4. Read some poems and stories from that American time period.
5. Select one story or poem from your researched culture and one story or poem from your researched time period.
6. Find at least one universal theme, one universal symbol, or one archetype they share (The more similarities, the better).
7. Copy the literature (or the links to the literature) to a document.
8. Create a one- or two-paragraph analysis of the universal concept that the two pieces of literature share.
9. Support your analysis with quotes and examples.
10. Suggest why you think the universal themes, symbols, or characters you noticed are present across cultural and temporal (time) differences.