Storytelling in Beckett's collected shorter plays
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
"The exposition of the story and its communication by suitable means of estrangement, constitute the main business of the theatre; everything hangs on the story; it is the heart of the theatrical performance" (Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre). Thus it is observed that, in...
What is an American?, from Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
A Frenchman by birth, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735?-1813) soon transformed himself into Hector St. John as part of his quest to become an epitome of the American farmer. Leaving his mother land around 1754 as a pioneer to French Canada, he finally settled in America in the...
Twelfth night, William Shakespeare, Acte II, scene V
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Written in 1599 and first performed in 1602, "Twelfth Night?, like other Shakespearean comedies, presents us with a blend of realism and a fanciful atmosphere. The main plot deals with the love triangle between the countess Olivia, her suitor the Duke Orsino, and Viola, a shipwrecked young woman...
Critical Commentary on Paul Verlaine's Une Grande Dame
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Paul Verlaine was born in 1844 and died in Paris in 1896. His work ?Une Grande Dame' is, therefore, an orthodox Petrarchan sonnet, as was typical of the poetry composed from the sixteenth century onward. In this document, I shall be studying form, imagery and vocabulary in particular, but...
The shining
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
By choosing to produce ?The Shining' Stephen King's masterpiece, in 1980, Stanley Kubrick tackled one of the most bounded and codified cinematographic genres: the fantastic mode. Kubrick produced the film just after the relative failure of Barry Lyndon, and this time, it was a huge...
Repetition, Re(-)presentation and Interpretation in Beckett's Shorter Plays
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
When one reads Beckett's works for the first time, one cannot but be stricken by the overabundant repetitions the text is replete with. There seems to be a real compulsion of repetition in various forms- in Beckett' plays. This is most evident in his shorter works. During this seminar, we...
Coriolanus (act two, scene one)
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's play Coriolanus is a political tragedy, which exposes the events that took place in Rome in the early days of the Republic. This play is set up around 490 BC, at a time when the city was divided by a conflict between the Patricians and the Plebeians because of shortage of grain....
Commentary upon Mary Shelley's statement: "What terrified me will terrify others"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Creature in itself is not what is the most terrifying. Indeed, in her dream and in the novel afterwards, if Doctor Frankenstein is afraid at the sight of his creature, it is also its coming to life which creates fear: how can an amount of bones, skin,...
Women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In The Canterbury Tales, women appear either as storytellers or as part of the tales themselves. We must therefore make a clear distinction between the women of the pilgrimage and the characters mentioned in the tales. The former are supposed to belong to the real life, if we agree to play the...
Young Goodman Brown's despair
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
Evil is mankind's nature: How the use of religious symbolism of faith and the devil caused Goodman Brown's despair from within, in the story of Young Goodman Brown, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's only natural that our curiosity has caused some, to fall victim to form evil and temptation. Goodman...
Irrelevant cynicism
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
In John Gardner's Grendel, the Dragon's most important character trait is his complete and limitless knowledge of the past, present, and future, producing his biting and relentless sarcasm and his ability to understand the complete and utter irrelevance of the daily exploits of Grendel and...
Character analysis: Okonkwo
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Okonkwo is the main character of the book “Things Fall Apart,” by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. This character is a hero to his village, a clansman, warrior, farmer and family man. However, no one is ever perfect. As Aristotle said, a tragic hero is defined by a noble or heroic person...
An Upheaval by Anton Chekhov
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
“An Upheaval” by Anton Chekhov is a story about a young girl, Mashenka Pavletsky, who works as a governess for an upper-class household. Mashenka, who once felt herself superior to the lady of the house, has had her room searched because her boss, Fedosya Vassilyevna Kushkin, had lost a...
The magician's nephew: Perception shaped by the imagination
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
C. S. Lewis wrote seven stories that made up The Chronicles of Narnia. All of the seven stories have characteristics that pertain to “perception shaped by the imagination”, a subheading of Colin Duriez's A Field Guide to Narnia. Of the seven stories I am going to focus on The Magician's...
The Lion King on Broadway
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
The lights went out and everyone grew immediately quiet. Music from the side of the theater began to play. With the first note I was all Goosebumps. Suddenly an orange/yellow circle appears from the center of the stage. It rises perfectly as though it is the rising sun. A single voice is heard...
Summary of Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut is the fictional story told by Leon Trout, the ghost of a man who died during the construction of the ship “Bahia de Darwin.” Trout observes the passengers of this ship as they make their way on the “Nature Cruise of the Century.” Excited to travel...
Comparison and contrast between Rober Lawell's "Man and Wife" and Gretel Ehrlich's "A match to the heart"
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
It was 1959 when Robert Lowell completed an amazing set of poems included in a collection named “Life Studies”. The most conspicuous among them - “Man and Wife”, tackles the problems of personal tragedy. The main accent is put on the troubled marriage, as the author reviews...
Heroism in Beowulf and Macbeth
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Grendel first appeared in Herot, the mead hall of the king of the Danes, Hrothgar. Disturbed by the feasting and celebration taking place in the evenings by Danish warriors and heroes, who often met in the hall to tell exaggerated tales of glory and drink mead, Grendel stole in during the night...
Literary analysis of "The Dead"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
James Joyce was born on February 2nd, 1882, in Dublin. His lifelong obsession with his own Irish culture, and the local city of Dublin, inspired many of his works. In particular, Dubliners, a collection of short stories taking place in Dublin, published in 1914, testifies to this obsession....
Domination and submission in Jane Eyre: An essay on power play
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In a manner of speaking, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre reinvents the concept of romance. One hardly expects a sordid tale of domination and submission from a sickly country girl, yet Bronte dabbled experimentally with the idea of feminism and power play in her hugely successful first novel. Jane...
In the hands of Yankees: Fitzgerald's "The Ice Palace" as a Northern American captivity narrative
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The effective removal of the American Indian from North America failed to kill off the American tradition of captivity narratives established by the primarily female Anglo-American authors of Indian captivity narratives. In these memoirs of life among the “other,” Anglo-American women...
The Church's Grasp: Captivity in Joyce's Dubliners - published: 12/04/2010
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is easy to recognize when one is held captive by the unfamiliar, but the crippling effect of familiar forces is not so easily realized. Throughout American captivity narratives, typically female Anglo-Americans are ensnared by Native Americans, the “other” of early Anglo-American...
The prose style of an author
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
What is so compelling about Faulkner's work is his gloriously bold approach toward form and content. He embraces the dark side of humanity, through the characters of Jason, Caddy and Quentin, refusing to deny or disguise its existence and in doing so redefines despair, it is no longer, '...
Representations of history and regeneration by Pat Barker
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Barker has chosen to tell the tale from the viewpoint of the patients and staff of a war hospital, which treats mainly psychiatric injuries caused by battle. Straight away we are dealing with issues of masculinity. These patients have been discharged, not for receiving injuries in the line of...
What role did women play within Anglo Saxon culture?
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout history, the position of women in society has fluxed dramatically. It seems quite clear from looking at historical evidence that most of this movement has been a decline, rather than an improvement in the social attitudes towards women. In Anglo- Saxons times, women were valued members...
Shylock and Lear: society's outcasts
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's use of the outsider, one excluded from society especially through the removal of his identity, serves to portray the cruel and selfish aspects of humanity. In The Merchant of Venice and in King Lear, the substandard treatment and lack of sympathy Shylock and Lear encounter,...
Jean- Paul Sartre, "Huis clos", Lecture plurielle
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Basing your essay on specific extracts from the play, would you say that, according to Shakespeare, fate determines man's action, or that man is always free to choose his own course of action? According to masters of literary theory, a tragedy draws the destiny of extraordinary people fallen...
American writers in Paris: Anaïs Nin - Houseboat - ; James Baldwin - Equal in Paris -
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
“Houseboat” is the initial short story in a collection entitled Under a Glass Bell, published in 1944 by Anaïs Nin. It presents us with the complex relationship the artist carries on with Paris - a relationship made of both attraction and repulsion. It also gives us an insight into the...
Witches in Popular Children's Fiction: A look at the portrayal of witches and witchcraft in select works of fiction since the 17th century
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Witches are very interesting group of people to read about. They have been at odds or different from the main-stream culture, and their practices and doings have been shrouded in secrecy and mystery, and evil-doing. For these reasons, witches make interesting characters in fictional stories, and...
Critical analysis of 'A Lesson before Dying'
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Ernest J. Gaines wrote the novel, 'A Lesson before Dying' in which he highlighted the problems faced by the blacks during the 1940's in the South. However, the contextual time for the novel covers a whole century into until 1964. He writes about the complete devastation faced by the...
