Fraud: A night-time adventure leads to more trouble than expected
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Adventures in the middle of the night were something I was always very fond of. For the most part they never seemed to get me into much trouble; I just coveted the feeling of being able to sneak out of my house without getting caught. For a fifteen-year-old, it was definitely a thrilling feeling....
Bartleby: A Christ-figure
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance,” concludes the lawyer in Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Arp and Johnson 589). This statement rings true, as any reader of the enigmatic short story will find himself or herself equally aggravated by the strange...
The Fall of Greece, The Rise of Rome
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Greece: City-States in Conflict The Peloponnesian War was waged mostly between Sparta and Athens, although both had outside allies. After Sparta defeated Athens, the balance of power should have shifted to leave Sparta in the role of empire-builder, but the Spartans were unable to unify the...
The Making of the Lady of Shalott's Soul
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott” is the story of an isolated woman who breaks free of her prison in order to enter the world around her. Through the use of vivid imagery and the strategic placement of words and phrases within the narrative structure of the poem, Tennyson builds a...
Bakhtin's Dialogism In The Big Sleep
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin is a philosopher and theorist who defies easy categorization. He has been associated with Marxist Literary critics, Russian Formalists and structuralists. While he has elements in common with all three, he also differs greatly from them in fundamental ways. His works and...
Emasculation: Are Men in Control or Women
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States, along with much of the world, saw great strides made in the feminist movement. The rights of and respect toward women were beginning to take an upward momentum, and at the same time, traditional ideas of masculine infallibility...
The Troubles With Banking: Implanting Submissiveness, Instilling Patriotism
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Paulo Freire's “problem-posing” instructional method in his essay “The ‘Banking' Concept of Education” is an essential educational technique. Freire's proposed approach to education not only calls for change in educational practices, it also holds greater sociopolitical...
'An Other of the Other' in Emile Zola's Nana and Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening'
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Emile Zola and Kate Chopin both present texts that depict the fall of a heroine. Nana and Edna Pontellier Naturalistically represent archetypal women of the late 19th century; Nana, as a courtesan, represents the rising lower class, and Edna representing the upper-middle class. Despite the...
The Question of Morality Film Noir
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Moral ambiguity is a central theme in John Huston's film The Maltese Falcon (1941) and in Billy Wilder's film Double Indemnity (1944) and James M. Cain's novel by the same title. The films and novel follow characters whose motives are questionable and morally problematic. This essay will discuss...
The Issue of Hope and Redemption in Film Noir: Living Day-to-Day in the Present, or Living for the Future?
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The films Out of the Past, Force of Evil, and Double Indemnity are narratives that contain similar noir themes. All three narratives follow troubled male characters who must sever ties with their pasts in order to move forward to a hopeful and happy future. Two of these characters succeed,...
Book review: An analysis of the narrative voice in Richard Ford's "Wildlife"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In Wildlife, Richard Ford employs Joe, a sixteen year old boy unsocialized and unfamiliar with the world around him, to tell the story of his parent's marriage. Having moved to Great Falls, Montana after living in four other towns, Joe is forced to navigate through a new town, as well as through...
Technical Aspects and the Drive of the Protagonist in Run Lola Run
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In Tom Twyker's film Run Lola Run, Lola is a character kinetically driven by her love for her boyfriend, Manni, and her desire to save him. This drive takes her on three separate but similar journeys, with fate and timing to decide the outcome. Lola's drive to find a hundred thousand marks...
Adelina's character in The Queen by Pacheco
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
We live in a society where many people are seen as outcasts. The majority of our society sees themselves as superior and try to suppress those not like them. In Jose Emilio Pacheco's “The Queen,” Adelina is seen as an outcast and is tormented by those around her. Her family and...
A Study of Shakespeare's Ophelia
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout theatre and drama history, we read about and study the great men that have dominated stages and plots. We analyze all of their speeches, actions, and intentions, but can the same be said of women? While women are studied in dramatic context, it is certainly not with the same...
Poems on Pleasure
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Modern literature has often attempted to put poets into categories, based on the type of literature that they have written for the world. Shelley and Coleridge were regarded as a few of the most prominent Romantic poets, due to the vivid imagery and immense emotions that their works convey. Their...
The Deceit of Ghosts
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The concept of family t presently, as the world has grown smaller, children no longer have and loyalty to family has been a virtue in nearly all times and cultures of this world. Albeithe need to embrace their parents as they once did. Yet in Ibesn's play Ghosts, the parent-child relationship is...
Behind the Murders
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Patricia Highsmith's short stories exemplify her interpretation of the human condition. However, her stories tend to involve characters with very extreme emotional conditions which ultimately cause them take surprising actions, those being the typical climaxes of Highsmith short stories. In...
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Bartolome De Las Casas was a Dominican Monk of Spanish descent, best known for his moving work A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, which details the barbaric actions of the Spanish conquistadors in their relations with the natives of the New World. Even though it was written in the...
Lily and Becky: A Flower and a Weed
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair was published in book form for the first time in 1848, and was available in serialized editions one year prior. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth was published in 1905 making it highly likely that Wharton was aware of Vanity Fair and the main character...
The Sound and the Fury Review
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
William Faulkner was one of the most influential writers of his time. He was a pioneer author and some even consider him to be the only true modernist fiction writer who composed in the 1930's. In that period he wrote many works that became famous, including novels such as: As I Lay Dying,...
"Ligeia," "The Raven," and "The Cask:" Poe's Untrustworthy Narrators
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “Marginalia,” published in 1844, Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “To be thoroughly conversant with a Man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.” His outlook on humanity was somber at best, and is a theme that we see flowing through a large...
The Person of Gaius Caligula: A Study of the Man, and An Attempt to Discern Fact from Fiction
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The historical figure of Gaius Caligula is one that has been mythologized, vilified, and misconstrued over the course of time. At this point in time, thousands of years after his historical reign over Rome, it is hard to tell what is fact and what is fiction regarding his life and his actions....
Fallen Leaves
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Environmentalism is a concept that has been long argued on many fronts. There is a large rift between those who scream for the need to protect our planet and those who could not care less. Now, with the planet moving closer and closer to possible biological peril, we find ourselves stopping to...
Isolation in the Scarlet Letter
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is not uncommon for authors to manifest their personal experiences in their works. Nathaniel Hawthorne himself spent numerous years in seclusion. The diverse characters in Hawthorne's timeless tale of adultery and sin, do so as well. The various forms of estrangement are experienced to...
Freudian Psychology and Euripides's The Bacchae
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Freudian psychology follows the notion that it can dissect the human mind into various parts and pieces that can be interpreted even if the individual doesn't realize what any of the messages mean. In literature, Freudian psychology can be utilized to understand themes, characters, or actions....
Mothering Desires in LeFanu's "Carmilla"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
William Veeder's essay “Carmilla: The Arts of Repression”, claims that LeFanu's “Carmilla” attempts to explain the two-sided nature of human life through what he describes as “dualisms.” He says that humans attempt to find the side of these dualisms they wish to...
Okonkwo's Telling Duality
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the definitive post-colonial, African novel, focuses on a character who is in constant struggle with his tribe and with himself. Okonkwo, a purveyor of masculinity in his society, has many reasons for his actions in the novel. The continuing cultural violence...
Existence and Absence of Individualism
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
There are many ways you can define a human being; through the volume of their voice to their everyday habits. Another is handwriting and when looked at in detail it can be a definition of one's self. I will discuss how handwriting and the means you go through to create it can show who you are....
From Tall Tale to Political Expression
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
If you read Washington Irving's tale of time, Rip Van Winkle, and Mark Twain's story of deceit, The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, you will find a ball of fantasy and tall tales with truth and logic buried in the middle. In comparing these two tales, one must look at what exactly a...
A hero's journey through life
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Joseph Campbell's Hero Cycle is an idea that anyone can relate to and be able to recognize. There are many stories throughout time that use this in their composition. Stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz format their structure around it. George...
