Conrad vs. Achebe: The question of racism in Heart of Darkness
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Joseph Conrad said, “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” Only too well does this portray the harsh reality depicted in Heart of Darkness, one that Chinua Achebe defines as profoundly racist. Achebe's points...
The different views of life in a good man is hard to find by Flannery O'Connor
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Flannery O'Connor was born in Georgia, the same state that she wrote about some twenty years later in A Good Man is Hard to Find, as she describes with thoughtful imagery the grandmother's fierce objections to her family traveling to Florida. Having lived through the fifties, O'Connor was...
Memory Panel Contribution
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
There are several different scientific classifications of memory. The type that memoirists most often use is delineated thus: Long-term -> Declarative -> Episodic. Declarative or explicit memory requires conscious recall, which is what memoirists attempt when writing a scene from memory....
Race Criticism Analysis
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Sandra Milloy's race criticism of The Sound and the Fury focuses almost exclusively on Dilsey and draws conclusions from her flawed interactions with two families: the white Compson household and her own African-American one. Milloy sees Dilsey as one of the most celebrated black mammies in...
Response to "When You Are Old"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Upon reading “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats, one may think that it is just the lament of an old woman; this may be true on the surface, but a more in-depth reading will show that it is actually a heart-felt love letter from a former lover. When the poem is dissected and...
Football, Mead-Halls, and Bards: Perpetuated Gender Roles from Anglo-Saxon Literature
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In modern times, men and women in America are divided by their stereotypical gender roles. Women are inferior to men; they are interested in domestic issues and should make the men in their lives happy. Men are chauvinists; they enjoy “nights with the guys” and feel a stronger...
The "Supreme Court of Justice": Religion and the Suppression of the Lower Classes in Freud's "The Future of an Illusion"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Though humans have “raised [themselves] above [their] animal status” (5), the fact remains that a fear of nature, a far superior force, is inherent in mankind. Left to his own devices, man is unrestricted, susceptible to outside destructive forces and his own animalistic instincts,...
Lovers and Epistles: Progressivism and Feminism in the Poetry of Lady Mary Wortley Montague
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of London were a time of formality and conservatism, especially among British women. But even in her early teens, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went against the flow of society and taught herself Latin, according to the editors of the Seventh Edition of the...
On Birds and Planes
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “The End of Admiration: The Media and the Loss of Heroes” Peter H. Gibbon details his reasons as to why there is no longer a great American hero. Over the past few decades, the public has gone from hailing political leaders and champions of peace to idolizing pop icons instead....
Plan B Sounds Good to Me
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Lester Brown's book, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, touches base with most of, if not all of, the issues that are threatening our planets modern living style. The book aptly named, giving a second plan, one that differs from how civilization is...
William Butler Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins as Innovators
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In literature there can be two major types of innovation, innovation in style and innovation in content. At the turn of the 18th Century innovations were huge as writers were creating what we now refer to as modernist poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats are two of the central...
Addicted and in Withdrawal
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Wuthering Heights is the story of two families that live on the moors in England and how the two families entwine themselves and is about the love and relationships that occur between them and their two estates. There is one relationship in particular, that is the derivative of most of the action...
The Ultimate Usefulness of Freedom
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Kant's views on social and moral progress have always been described as being “ahead of his time,” probably because of the emphasis on freedom in many of his works. According to Kant, freedom is absolutely necessary for any kind of progress. Freedom is almost always tied to reason, and...
Owning Perfection: The Struggle between Science and Nature in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark."
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In many love poems written to praise the beauty or virtue of a woman, the woman or the woman's love is often seen as a material possession or a thing to be owned. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Birthmark,” the woman is seen as something to be improved upon and perfected. Love is not only...
The Trojan Women
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Euripides' Trojan Women exemplifies the cruelty and painful consequences of war, and how they affect women by leaving them powerless and without choices. Several episodes in the play illustrate this loss of choice and power, the death of Astyanax, the sexual slavery of Cassandra and Andromache,...
Poet, Humanist, Revolutionary: The Good Morning Revolution poems of Langston Hughes.
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
At the time, Hughes was in the Soviet Union, touring its various countries and struggling to put together the film “Black and White” with some fellow writers and actors. The manuscript Hughes sent Van Vechten that spring was some of Hughes' most radical work. It praised Soviet...
The Transience of Identity and the Unpredictability of Surveillance in City of Glass
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Through the use of the character Daniel Quinn, author Paul Auster is arguing against the idea that identity is static and also against the idea that surveillance is perfect. This paper explores the complex life of Quinn by taking a good look at every character that he tries to become. It starts...
Alisoun, Dorigen, and the Conventions of Women
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Domestic and social propriety are the most important concerns of wives of the era exemplified in The Canterbury Tales. Volumes of texts -- also known as deportment books -- are used to expound on domestic and social propriety and to teach young women the expectations of women in general, and in...
When China Ruled the Seas
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When China Ruled the Seas is a discourse on the histories of China's naval prowess. The book begins with early Chinese history, detailing China's first ships, and the somewhat disputable evidence of China's colonization and exploration of places such as Japan, North America, Australia, and the...
Universal Science Fiction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to Jane Donawerth in Frankenstein's Daughters, the only way for women to write science fiction, is for them to change the rules. This is certainly the case with Octavia Butler's “Bloodchild”. In Butler's Nebula award winning short story, Butler tells the tale of Gan, a young...
Japanese Culture
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Although the books, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima, are completely different works, both have uncannily similar characters. Each main character from these two books has at least one character in the other book who shares some of their...
Medea
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When first comparing the play Medea and Aristotle's Poetics, many people feel that the lead character, Medea, breaks every requirement for being a tragic character. But when we take a step back and view Medea at a different angle, we see that she does actually fit every aspect of Aristotle's...
The Effects of Christ
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
One of the central themes of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is love. Stowe felt that love could bring an end to the evils of slavery, and be a redemptive force. There is one character in this novel that embodies complete, unfaltering, and unconditional love: this character is Eva...
What's Your Perspective?
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Most experienced readers do not have a hard time discerning authorial intent within an individual work or analyzing themes within that piece. Herman Melville's Benito Cereno however, provides a challenge. Melville intricately weaves this story so that no single interpretation fits, and it forces...
Sexual Taboo: Vampire Myths and Stories
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The belief in vampires has been around for most of recorded history, dating back before the bible and Ancient Egypt to Babylonian demonology and very early Sumerian mythology . Although, it was never the mythology that we think of today; in those times it was a belief rooted just as strongly as...
Antigone Commentary
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Sophocles wrote three plays about Thebes and while the tragedy of Antigone is chronologically the third and last of these, it was ironically written first out of them. It opens up, giving little background, with the two sisters Antigone and Ismene discussing their two now deceased brothers in...
Postmodernism: Moving Toward Transcendence
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The conception of a utopian society has both motivated and haunted countless civilizations since the dawn of time. Sublime and intangible, the aspiration to reach a “perfect” society is arguably the heart of one of the world's most significant movements; modernism. Proponents of...
An Animal's place in America
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In 1975, an Australian philosopher by the name of Peter Singer first published his controversial book Animal Liberation. It has since become widely known as the beginning of the current “animal liberation movement” in America. The book preached the virtues of vegetarianism and vilified...
The Good-Morrow
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
“The Good-Morrow” is a story written by John Donne that talks about two lovers finding each other, and realizing that nothing in the world ever has or will matter. I believe that the lover's Donne is speaking about are himself and a lover of the past. However, the poem is not just about...
Masculinity in The Woman in White
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The novel, The Woman in White, “seeks to revise recent accounts of the model of male identity posited by the first sensation novel”(Ablow, Par. 4). In The Woman in White, the author, Wilkie Collins, presents masculinity through the character of Marian Holcombe at a time when femininity...
