Power and Sexuality in "Leda and the Swan" and "Goblin Market"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Duality and opposition are forces that play beneath the surface of both William Butler Yeats' “Leda and the Swan” and Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market”, two poems that focus on sexuality while incorporating animal figures as holders of power, both sexual and otherwise....
All in the Family: The Economics of Interpersonal Relationships in the Gulag
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The synopsis on the back cover of Alexander Solzhenistyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich claims that it is “the harrowing account of one day in the life of a man who has conceded to all things evil with patience, dignity, and enduring strength.” Like so many others, the author...
The Epileptic Loophole: Self-control and the Judiciary in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Epilepsy and the punitive system—two seemingly unrelated items that Fyodor Dostoevsky juxtaposes in order to make a point about Russia and the futility of the judiciary. In his giant oeuvre The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky exemplifies the tension between rational and irrational behavior by...
Hospitable Hosts, Educated Elites: Relativism vs. Absolutism in the writings of Alberuni and Ibn Battuta
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In exploring nations and cultures outside of their own, Alberuni and Ibn Battuta encountered ideologies, customs, and practices that stood in opposition to the beliefs and ways of life they personally upheld. Faced with foreign behavior and thought, the authors found themselves in a position to...
Harold Pinter and the absent 'Center'
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
At the very beginning there is the structure. The structure is a skeleton, the premise, the base on which the flesh is arranged, systematically, so that a body maybe created. It may not always make itself palpable but if there is a structure then there must also be a center. A structure without a...
Nietzsche and the Mother: A Contrast to Kantian Enlightenment
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
To what extent does Nietzsche impose his ideals on the reader or create an open and flexible world-view? Upon closing his arguments in On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche imagines a reader asking him “'What are you really doing, erecting an ideal or knocking one down?'” (95). He...
Heteroglossia and Shelly's Frankenstein
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to M. M. Bahktin, heteroglossia is the use of different novelistic modes of expression (authorial speech, narrators, inserted genres, speech of characters, dialogue, etc.) to express and represent the diversity of social speech types and a diversity of individual voices. Mary Shelly's...
Society Woman: Days of a Russian Noblewoman
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The memoirs of Anna Evdokimovna Labzina, a noblewoman during the reign of Catherine the Great, might be expected to contain numerous references to the salon of St. Petersburg and the fashions of the time. Titled Days of a Russian Noblewoman, her account is remarkable for its religious tone and...
Subplot and Plot: The Commentary of the Madhouse on the Castle in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In the seventeenth-century Jacobean revenge tragedy The Changeling, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley present two seemingly separate worlds in both location and action. The main plot is characterized by the locale of the castle in Alicante, ruled by Vermandero. This setting is centered on the...
The Absent Wife and Mother as the Source for the Downfall of a Family and Kingdom in Shakespeare's King Lear
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In King Lear, Shakespeare incorporates a theme that is prevalent in many of his other works, that of family structure, specifically, absent wives and mothers. The nonexistence of King Lear's wife and his daughters' mother also implies the absence of a Queen and a female political figure to...
The Workshop
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Writing is not for the faint-hearted. Writers do the hard work of expelling ignorance, trying to change the way people think while taking in every chance to learn about the lives of others. The business of fiction is people, but in order to write about people, one has to understand them well....
Symbolism in "The Chrysanthemums" and "A Rose for Emily."
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Writers employ a wide variety of devices to further enhance the nature of their works. Whether through eloquent description or profound repetition, certain aspects of an author's technique lend a stronger reflection of the theme or idea behind the simple story. The effect can be likened to an...
The Scarlet Letter : Exposition
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
America's Declaration of Independence gives all men an equal and unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness and this right cannot be usurped by any other principle unless the latter is governed by free will. However, because free will is subject to individual beliefs and happiness occurs in a...
Anne Fadiman: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
When I'm old and gray, I probably won't remember very well every book that I've read. In fact, upon recollection, the contents of each novel will most likely be condensed to a single descriptive sentence; for textbooks, a verb and noun will do (i.e. Napoleon loses). As insignificant as that...
The Sufferings Endured by Griselda and Custance in The Clerk's Tale and The Man of Law's Tale
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In both The Clerk's Tale and The Man of Law's Tale, the major female characters, Griselda and Custance, find themselves in positions of immeasurable suffering, and both meet their challenges with immeasurable virtue. These tales are meant to act as moral ones, didactic stories about the ideal...
Morality and the Relationship Between the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Based on his proclaimed ‘theme,' Radix malorum est Cupiditas, the Pardoner seems a worthy teller of a moral tale, but based on his description of himself and his work, he seems the least able of the pilgrims to truly appreciate morality. His Prologue offers a picture of a man completely...
Chaucer's Presentation of Marriage and Love in The Wife of Bath's and The Franklin's Tales
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In both the Wife of Bath's Tale and the Franklin's Tale, the Breton lai romances of the Tales, as well as in the Wife of Bath's Prologue, Chaucer explores the roles and rules of love and marriage for the medievals. Through the Wife of Bath's Prologue, he presents the vast body of anti-feminist...
Uncontrollable Urges: Women's Frightening Presence in Classical Athenian Drama and it's Reflection on Athenian Society
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
In classical Athenian society, anxiety about gender roles abounded, as women were regarded dichotomously as pillars of purity as well as receptacles and originators of filth, both moral and physical. Many ancient sources, often funerary monuments or epitaphs, praise individual women for their...
Comedy in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: 'Moral' Pilgrims and the Stories They Tell
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Viewed in a certain light, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales offers a realistic slice of life from a diverse cross section of fourteenth century English society. Represented among the travelers are members of all three estates, the church, nobility and peasantry, as well as the middle class,...
The Trees: Jupiter and Mercury Destroy the City of Phrygia
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Rife with evil, the town needed to be destroyed. Piety had built Phrygia, but gluttony, unfaithfulness, and greed had razed the now repugnant country. Disgusted by the drinking orgies, sexual perversions, and absence of worship, Jupiter and Mercury watched from the Heavens. Phrygia's time had...
Investigating Madness Within Power Structures
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Kafka's The Metamorphosis is full of power structures that dictate the actions of each character. Each character finds him or herself in a role of accountability and responsibility that dictates how he or she acts, particularly towards other characters. Gregor, for instance, is accountable to his...
Eying Down Sanctuary: A Study of the Effects of Representation upon Readers
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Laura Tanner, in her Intimate Violence, points out that, while reading, one becomes detached from victims of violence in particular texts such that the reader is able to observe the act of violence without suffering its consequences (Tanner, 9). While Tanner is correct in her assertion that...
Sex With Necks: An Investigation of Phallic Imagery
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In literature, the vampire bite is often interpreted as a symbol of coitus between the vampire and his or her victim. However, when one takes a closer look into the anatomy and functions involved in the sex of particular blood-sucking scenes found in vampire literature, it becomes clear that the...
Stein's Translation of Art to Literature
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Because Gertrude Stein works within the medium of writing instead of painting, it is easier for her audience to view her separate from Cubism or Post-Impressionism though it still stands that they influenced her. She shares many values and ideals held by the members of those two painterly...
A Contrast of Lovers An Analysis of "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Is it better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all? When considering the abstractness and relativity of love, poetry is an art form unrivaled. T.S. Eliot and Andrew Marvell, each poets of incredible vision, analyzed love in two entirely different lights while concurrently capturing...
Faust and Nature: A Look Goethe's Faust
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The thinker's woe at his own ignorance, despite some great deal of learning, has been a common literary predicament since the Age of Reason. While many of the mathematicians and scientists kept insisting upon the reducibility of existence to laws, educated men of other fields have not always...
Reflection on Lowell's "For the union Dead"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Robert Lowell opens his poem, For the Union Dead, with an image of destruction, despair, and the loss of something that represents his youth. This opening stanza sets the tone for the rest of the poem. For the Union Dead is ultimately more discouraging than inspiring. Its disheartening tone can...
The American History of Race & Gender in Literature
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout the course of American history, the literature of the nation has served to reflect the social climate of the time in which it was written. Society's values in regards to both race and gender have thus been contextualized in history by American writers. In some cases, American literary...
Dr. Faustus and Eve's Sins and Judgments
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Milton's Eve and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus were duped into spiritual doom in pursuit of knowledge, both seeking knowledge bought power at the expense of their spirit. Doctor Faustus sells his soul to Satan, exchanging it for knowledge of magic, while Eve ignores God's command not to eat the fruit...
Chinese Mythology, Religion and History: Look At The Journey to The West
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Often times, there is a distinct line between fact and fiction - between history and mythology, and even religion. However, in many of China's classic novels this line is blurred to the point of non-existence. A perfect example of this is Wu Cheng'en's The Journey to the West. Wu Cheng'en...
