Indigo Light
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues examines the ways in which people strive to escape from stifling conditions and find a more peaceful home within themselves. Set in the Harlem ghetto, the story depicts the strained relationship between Sonny, a heroin addict and his brother, a teacher. The narrator...
What I Talk About When I Talk About Carver
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Some might insist that Raymond Carver's short stories prove hopelessly post-modern—and that may be. However, his work remains the first that ever pulled me out of the writing into a deep pondering of the reality he creates in junction with the kind of people that compose the society in...
A Fine Balance of Potential and Kinetic Energy Establishes Relationship
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In Dream Work, Mary Oliver's poetry delivers a balance of potential and kinetic energy. One poem in particular, “Starfish,” demonstrates that establishing clear relationships within a poem lies in regulating both passive and active language. However, before establishing a relationship,...
Choosing Language that Avoids Sentimentality Elicits Emotional Resonance
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Avoiding sentimentality means writing to fight cliché and elicit emotion through originality of language. In Dig Safe, Stuart Dischell presents poetry that resonates emotionally without breeching melodrama. One poem in particular, “Children of the City,” demonstrates that a careful...
A Narratological Analysis of Marabou Stork Nightmares
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Marabou Stork Nightmares gains its narratological interest from its use of a strange ANP and a variety of ENPs. On the basic level, the narrator is intradiegetic and homodiegetic, writing with internal focalization throughout the novel. However, there is plenty of innovation in the use of this...
Reactions to a Life and Death
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The account of Jack Turner's life, as shown in William Warren Rogers Sr. and Robert David Ward's August Reckoning, demonstrates the drama that occurred in Choctaw County, Alabama in the late 1800s. Jack Turner, a well-known Republican leader and freed slave, was lynched after being accused of...
More Than a Title
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Webster defines “mother” as “a female parent.” While in some cases that may be all there is to a mother, more commonly, a mother has many more qualities than simply being “a female parent.” One mother in particular who has an array of qualities is Amanda Wingfield....
The Search
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Through the evolution of the vampire novel, the search for knowledge and information remains a unifying theme that characterizes the genre. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Stephen King's Salem's Lot, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, this quest for understanding about vampires and their...
The Uncovering of Granny's Disappointments
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Katherine Anne Porter makes Granny sound like she has not done poorly for herself. In reading the first couple of paragraphs of the short story, Porter makes it known that Granny doesn't have it easy. Life is hard on her. On the surface,...
Sample College Entrance Essay That Was Successful
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
I've always had an odd love for language and literature. I am intrigued by words: the way they look on paper, the sounds they make when spoken, their countless meanings and connotations, the feelings they evoke. I'm fascinated by unusual syntax, which I like to experiment with in my poetry. It...
The Evolution of The Joy of Cooking
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In 1931, while most housewives were raising children and trying to maintain order and a strict budget in the Great Depression era United States, Irma von Starkloff Rombauer (1877-1962) was facing a dilemma. Following her husband's 1930 suicide, the St. Louis widow was forced to find a way to...
Marx's Concept of Class Struggle in Zola's Germinal.
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
To discuss this topic fully, one must first examine the ideas behind Marx's “class struggle.” For Marx, class struggle is the social and economic conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeois classes. This conflict is constant and inevitable in a society in which one class—the...
Failure of Religion in Moby Dick
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Herman Melville crafts Moby Dick as a microcosm of American society in the pre-Civil War era. Melville's microcosm of society is often an allegorical and ironical society in that, while his characters speak to the state of the microcosm, their words have an implication on the state of the real...
The Politics of Reticence and Paralysis
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Why are we sometimes unable to speak to others? In our societies, why are we sometimes unable to communicate - or, communicate truthfully or effectively? We are thrown into cities, let's say, teeming with unimportant people, blank faces, uncaring, hurrying, where sounds of movement and presence...
An Examination of the Pre-Revolutionary War Pamphlet The Alarm. Number V
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
1. The Alarm. Number V is the last of a series of five topical essays published by Hampden, Pseudonym, in 1773. Each of the five essays was published in the month of October. Number V, like the prior Hampden essays, was published in New York, only once, and in only one edition. This is one of...
Masculine Physicians and Prescribers: Assignations for Women in Daisy Miller and "The Yellow Wall-paper"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Both Henry James' Daisy Miller and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-paper” depict male characters that are unable to understand their female counter-points. In Daisy Miller, the suitor Winterbourne fails to comprehend Daisy's true character, and in “The Yellow...
On Contemporary American Literature and Subversions of the Canon
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Toni Morrison's claim that “Canon debate . . . is the clash of cultures” rings true to me. This statement can be looked at in a few ways. One can look at it and say that Morrison is referring to a hypothetical debate between cultures on what works should be included in a canon....
A Fever and Fervor in John Donne's Elegy
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Donne's poem “A Fever” is an elaborate blend of narrative designs. Donne uses the venerable poetic device of elegiac stanza to express mourning for the (anticipated) death of a lover from a fever. There is an explicit surface meaning to this poem as well as implicit sub-textual...
Ambivalence and Photography: Resistance or Exchange in Edward Said's After the Last Sky
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In his essay Picture Theory on the relationship between photograph and text, W.J.T. Mitchell refers to concepts he coins as the “rhetoric of resistance” and the “rhetoric of exchange and cooperation” (Mitchell, 41). The terms “rhetoric of resistance” and...
Innocence Lost: The Soldier Poets of World War I
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Before the Great War, "it had been almost fifty years since any major European power had attacked any similar country" (Childs 40). England did not remember what war was really like; the people knew nothing except for the romantic notion of war. They believed that to fight for one's country...
A Comparison of Shakespeare's Villains Aaron and Iago
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare is known for creating memorable characters, and his villains are often especially intriguing. Aaron and Iago are both villains in revenge tragedies by Shakespeare. In Titus Andronicus, which is believed to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, even though most of the characters are far...
A Comparison of Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
"The Eolian Harp" and "Ode to the West Wind," both poems by two of the most celebrated poets of their time, each fall under the category of the "greater romantic lyric," as termed by M. H. Abrams (77). Both are written in the first person and are about the same length; Shelley's is six lines...
"Richard Cory"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In Edwin Arlington Robinson's short poem "Richard Cory," the speaker tells of a rich gentleman who, to the collective shock of the community, commits suicide for unknown reasons. The poem begins by describing this gentleman, Richard Cory, as slim, graceful, and friendly. Even though he is...
"Do I Dream?": The Role of the Nightmare in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
According to Elizabeth MacAndrew, author of The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, the gothic novel is “[. . .] a literature of nightmare. Among its conventions are found dream landscapes and figures of the subconscious imagination” (3). Maggie Kilgour, author of The Rise of the Gothic...
Animal Analysis: The Role of Pigs in O'Connor's "Revelation"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
"Despite her brief life and relatively modest output, [Flannery O'Connor's] work is regarded as among the most distinguished American fiction of the mid-twentieth century," writes Michael Meyer, author of The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature (317). One of the many reasons her...
Two Common Purposes of American Literature
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Two common purposes of early American literature are didacticism and introspection, and a minor purpose is entertainment. Most works written in this time period fulfill one of these purposes, and many fulfill more than one. Works from Franklin, Rowson, and Emerson can be labeled as mostly...
How to Start and Run a Small Book Publishing Company by Peter I. Hupalo
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The author of this book, Peter Hupalo, self-published his first book, Thinking Like An Entrepreneur in 1999, thus beginning his company, HCM Publishing. This book appears to be the second book he has self-published, though he does not mention how many books by other authors he has published. I...
Travel Magazines: What Readers Want
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The retail industry is flooded with products and services, all vying for market share and revenue. In order to succeed, the different firms must carefully understand and analyze the market they are in. They must ask questions about their rivals and the structure of the industry, as well as make...
Towards New Grand Narratives in Postmodern Fiction
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
In Niel Brügger's essay “What about the Postmodern?” Brügger relates Lyotard's idea of the narrative of emancipation, writing that “[in such narratives] it is not only important to legitimate denotative statements, which fall into the sphere of truth, but also to legitimate...
Love: Better Lost or Unfulfilled?
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
While unrequited love is typically viewed as among the most torturous emotions one can imagine, when compared to experiencing the decay of a once fulfilled, true love, the ever-longing heart may have its merits. Thomas Hardy's “Neutral Tones” attests to the misery of love gone sour,...
