"Harlem" and "Harlem [1]" by Langston Hughes
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In two poems entitled “Harlem (A Dream Deferred)” and “Harlem [1],” Langston Hughes conveys his strong personal opinions and emotions about racial tension and racial issues in America during the first half of the twentieth century. Though each poem concentrates on Hughes'...
The reality of perceiving environment
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens presents the reader with exactly what its title expresses—thirteen distinct perspectives all involving a blackbird in some form. These perspectives each provide a kind of brief snapshot into thirteen unique realities....
Erupted states, Corrupted hearts, Disrupted narratives: Sleep and Sleeplessness in Hamlet and Macbeth
Essay - 12 pages - Literature
In so many plays, Shakespeare's night crawls with offending shadows. Though the witching hour sees graves' tenants off to their malicious machinations, humans take refuge in cozy beds. Sleep can thus protect mankind from wandering evils, but further yet, sleep is a rejuvenative force than can...
Self-awareness: The problem of the self in the work of Samuel Beckett
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
We find ourselves in some deeply existential quandary: a problem beyond inquiry or conclusion; a problem that extends into the void of time and space; that avoids the very title of "problem". We are confined to a box, in Endgame, we are on a dead tree stump off an abandoned road, in Godot, and...
The young Shakespeare and his contemporaries: reconstructing convention in taming of the shrew
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
One purpose of theatre is perhaps to reiterate social phenomena and bring to light aspects of our identity, as an individual, culture, or audience, that have been passed as unquestioned tradition from times when they made sense. The Taming of the Shrew is one such work that presents an...
Review and reinterpretation of Mrs. Dalloway
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Through Space and Time: Reality and Experience in the Modern Age “This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” (Woolfe 9). Modernism marked the collapse of structures that had defined the individual and the relationship of that...
"I Am We": The duality of being one - published: 29/08/2008
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Who am I? Asked, the response begins: “I am…,” followed by the concept upon which the individual forms his or her identity. America has built itself upon this exchange; accenting the importance of the “I,” of the individual, and his or her ability to construct his or her...
Experience and emptiness in Gary Snyder's "Mountains and Rivers without end"
Essay - 20 pages - Literature
Language orders our experience of reality. It establishes a scale of binary opposition dictating where one ends and another begins, clearly defining the relationship between what is and what isn't. This relationship grounds our notion of self and creates the framework through which we interpret...
The nature of being and expression in the story of Christ
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
History is a story. A man, a woman is a narrative. With each moment of our beings, we sift through the scattered array of images and experiences woven through our discourse to create the illusion of a coherent, cohesive self. And, despite our attachment to this image, reality remains fluid. We...
Stephen Crane and the Red Badge of courage
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Born in 1871 to a Methodist preacher and social leader, Stephen Crane started his short, but compelling life in the Civil War torn society that was America- or more specifically, Newark, New Jersey. His parents held a belief, commonplace in their era, that valued God, acknowledged free will and...
Mind over matter in the works of Anne Bradstreet and Benjamin Franklin
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The quill pen and the printing press were two means of composing available to early American authors. They have different qualities; the pen is a more romantic and stylized, while the press is a practical and efficient industrial tool for the spread of knowledge. However, both the pen and the...
Exploring Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot's revisions of "the waste land"
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
How might T.S. Eliot's poem, which has come to define the modernist movement, be different if instead of bearing the title, “The Waste Land”, it is called “He Do the Police in Different Voices?” This paper will not seek out any definitive answers as to the meaning of the...
Death of a salesman
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tragedy is defined in literature as “the fall of a worthy, usually noble hero or heroine” and would rely basically on a protagonist who started in a high status in society and would eventually have a downfall as the story progresses ("Tragedy."). Traditional tragedy is composed of...
Satan of paradise lost
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Throughout more than three hundred years of criticism on John Milton's Paradise Lost the character Satan has been a subject of controversy for many reasons and from many perspectives. Despite being God's adversary, Milton shows his readers a satanic character with many faces, experiencing...
Seamus Heaney's politically poetic voice
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Seamus Heaney is one of Ireland's most prolific poets. He has published thirteen major volumes of poetry to date, and shares the honor of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature with fellow Irish writers William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and George Bernard Shaw. In his poetry, Heaney...
Adolescence and growth development
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In the realm of mother and daughter movies, “White Oleander” touches base on so many topics in its attempt to create beautiful chick flick as an adaptation of the popular novel that Oprah herself had recommended. The movie itself was moving and it is credible with its drive to create a...
On necessity as a defense to homicide in Regina v. Dudley and Stephens
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
The present paper asks and addresses the questions: what principles, if any, distinguish Regina v. Dudley and Stephens (RDS) from scenarios in which necessity ought to be a defense to homicide? Were Dudley and Stephens guilty of murder? After laying out the relevant facts of RDS I will answer...
Female protagonists in the sound and the fury and as I lay dying
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
“The following Ralph Ellison quote is often found on the book jackets of William Faulkner's novels: “For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our...
Points of intersection: A handful of dust and St. Mawr
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
In Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust as in D.H. Lawrence's novel St Mawr, a common rhetorical layer discusses the search for life's meaning, which in many aspects mirrors Ellington's experience of finding agreeability in music, as well as the sensation of childishness. In A Handful of Dust...
Petrarch's rime sparse
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The reader of Petrarch's Rime Sparse is compelled as early as the first sonnet to impose narrative onto the poems. In Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono, a poet-figure emerges and addresses the reader as he reflects on what he calls his primo giovenile errore. Finding herself at such an...
Is "Sicilian truth" an oxymoron?
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo is by no means the kind of text that invites the reader to take it lightly and straightforwardly. The subtle irony running through the piece constantly implores the reader to interpret and re-interpret various scenes and the characters within them—in...
Circumstance in Jane Austen's early novels
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Circumstance and money figure heavily in Jane Austen's first two novels—Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice—particularly in the way these social and financial considerations impact marriage. They can cause multiple problems, thwarting passionate romance, such as in the cases...
Teaching themes of empathy through children's literature
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As Christians we are called to treat all individuals with understanding and compassion, extending to them the same unmerited favor that God has extended to those who follow Him. But how do we extend a sense of understanding to those whose personalities and experiences are quite different from our...
Troilus' unwilling free will
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” consistently and emphatically stresses the absolute nature of courtly love and its proclivity to incite moral responsibility with relation to one's sense of free will and personal obligation. Chaucer toys with the notion of Troilus' free will versus his...
Denial: Internal struggle of a homosexual
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
James Baldwin's” Giovanni's Room” explores the internal struggle of a homosexual in denial. The main character, David, faces an internal conflict that eventually destroys every relationship he encounters in his personal life. His own struggle with his sexuality began at an early age and...
The Wife of duplicity
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The Wife of Bath's Tale, from Geoffrey Chaucer's “The Canterbury Tales”, was a veiled social critique. Her tale was a treatise of social commentaries on the role of gender, the church, and nobility in society. Geoffrey Chaucer used the duplicity of his character, The Wife of Bath, and...
Tool or trifle: The moral question of style
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
“You know not what hurt you do to learning that care not for words, but for matter, and so make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart.” (Roger Ascham) I am thirteen. Almost every afternoon I shove a book in my pocket, a hat on my head, and I wander out into the scurry-flurry of a...
Death of a Salesman: Tragedy or not?
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The great authors of old, such as Aristotle, Sophocles and Homer, all wrote incredible tragedies that immortalize the classical notion of a tragic hero. But what of today? Are there no tragedies that occur in the society of today? Where is Oedipus Rex in the world of the twentieth century? In...
Modern tragedy-The crucible
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In the history of the theatre, tragedies have always existed as a window to human nature. They depict man at his best, ready to sacrifice everything, even his life for the cause. The different types of tragedy include Sophocles's Greek tragedy, Shakespearean romantic tragedy, and modern...
American art : An interface with the modern art
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout the history of art, different movements arise as a result of the social, political, economic, and emotional state of mind that both people and nations are experiencing at a given time. Modern art and postmodern art are no two exceptions to these circumstances and have come to be for...
