Donne's Angel and Marvell's Mistress
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Donne's song “Air and Angels” and Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” are both love poems. However, they are poles apart in their definitions of love. Donne sees his beloved as a mysterious presence whose body merely gives shape to the love he has felt before. Marvell sees the...
Meatball and Callisto: Two responses to entropy
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Pynchon's “Entropy” begins at a party that has lasted 40 hours. Everyone knows parties don't last that long - or at least, they shouldn't. Meatball's party has continued far too long and is about to disintegrate. This deterioration is linked explicitly to the law of entropy, which is...
Sheep's guts and the vernacular of the human soul: Music as a dramatic force in the works of William Shakespeare
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
This paper will provide a brief exploration into: the different types, styles and musical “conventions” that were utilized in Shakespeare's plays; the different ways that music was used as a dramatic force in the plays; and finally, Shakespeare's influence on the development of...
The duality of the "New Woman"
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream—the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. By 1925 he was known primarily as the historian of the Jazz Age (which he named) and chronicler in slick...
William Blake: The divine image
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
“For all must love the human form. ” William Blake simply, but beautifully, claims as fact in his poem A Divine Image, taken from his Songs on Innocence. Poetry, elicits emotion. The beauty of poetry is that it can be interpreted; the meaning is held entirely by the reader. Here, a...
Magic and enchantment as a tool of love in Shakespeare's A midsummer night's dream
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
“The course of true love never did run smooth. ” This, one of the most famous lines from Shakespeare's romantic comedy, A Mid Summer Night's Dream, no truer words have been spoken as Shakespeare leads the audience through a story of fantasies and misunderstandings. The story follows...
David J. Francis, Uniting Africa: Building regional peace and security systems
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
“Africa today is faced with a stark choice, either unite or perish. ” So opens David J. Francis' intriguing study on the state of African nations in relation to one another. Frances spends a great deal of attention outlining the serious social and economic problems facing the African...
Jenny and the patriarchal voice in Rossetti's poem
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
“Asleep, poor jenny, hard and fast,--/So young and soft and tired. ” Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jenny is smooth and flowered poetry. Lines such as the selected portion above are sprinkled throughout each stanza. The poem is widely recognized as a classic. Questions regarding the speakers'...
Rose and Flo
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
“Rose thought of her own family as straddling the river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. ” Throughout the stories, throughout her entire life, Alice Munro's main character, Rose, in Who Do You Think You Are? struggles to grasp her identity. In many ways, Rose defines herself...
Comparison and differences between two selections from Lermontov's a hero of our time and Gogol's dead souls
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Mihail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol were two of the premier Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Both helped to expose and shape how the outer world understands the vast and historically intriguing Russian continent. Lermontov's creation of the character Pechorin is widely read as a...
Catcher in the Rye and dead poets
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
The Dead Poets Society, at its very core, transcends the message that art is meant to be lived and is meant to inspire. While the back-story of The Catcher in the Rye speaks more to the place of art in society, than the story itself does. In the Dead Poets Society, students willingly choose to...
Old stories of love and tragedy
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet largely pulls from a traditional tale, written and copied for decades before Shakespeare took his pen with an effort to adapt. Shakespeare's version, unquestionably the most famous, tells the story of love but, more, it tells of the tragedies to which that love...
A special education, learning to teach a disabled student
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
A Special Education: One Family's Journey Through the Maze of Learning Disabilities is the author, Dana Buchman's explanation about how her family coped with having a child who suffered from severe learning and developmental disorders. It is a tremendously interesting look at the topic because...
Culture and order: all sweetness and light - published: 25/03/2010
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
“Culture and Anarchy,” Matthew Arnold's series of essays comment on the status of culture throughout the late nineteenth century. Arnold saw culture as the “pursuit of total perfection. ” It was then, he believed, the practice of all to accept that perfection and further...
He just wanted to play bass: The story of Jaco
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
“I can see its not going to be easy being me, ” in a forewarning tone of eventual doom, John Francis Pastorius III described the weight pressing down on him, through expectation. In the 1995 biography Jaco: The Extraordinary And Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, ‘The World's Greatest...
Familial construction in Christopher Carrington's 'There's no place like home'
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
In Christopher Carrington's No Place Like Home, the author tackles the very difficult question of what comprises a family. The question posed, liking a thread throughout the book as it attempts to be answered, is what are the issues facing gay and lesbian parents as they choose to construct a...
The relationship between Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Through the course of the novel, Jane strives to define the concept of propriety for herself that is at odds with her natural “virulent passion.” Her impassioned outbursts are both a central struggle through her youth and an engaging facet of her more mature personality. Jane is taught...
Like the rich and poor together: Gender relations revealed through class differences in Italian American literature
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Since the early Italian American experience is largely polarized between the worlds of labor and the family, consequently, the role of class and gender are not easily avoided in Italian American literature. In the memoir Rosa, the Life of an Italian Immigrant, and Pietro DiDonato's Christ in...
Justice in the Eumenides
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout his trilogy, the Orestia, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, explores the theme of retribution, as one family member kills another, raising question of whether or not their actions are a form of justice, or revenge. Aeschylus seems to present a clear dichotomy between the two...
Fate vs circumstance
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Fate, a doom or fortune that depends on one's destiny gives man the idea of a future that is certain and firm. Fate has been the blame of man's circumstances hence giving man the discouragement of taking full responsibility for his actions. In Faust and The Sorrows of Werther, Goethe creates two...
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,...
Horatio: A man of virtue
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's Hamlet, known for its examination of deception and betrayal, presents a set of characters trapped in a web of lies and murder. The ghost of Hamlet's father, who puzzles and eventually drives Hamlet to madness by placing the burden of revenge on his shoulders, defines the problematic...
The victimized villain: Shylock
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare portrays Shylock as a ruthless, greedy Jewish villain and thus establishes a barrier between him and the other predominantly Christian characters. Throughout the play, this alienation, as a result of Shylock's resentful character and bitter actions, and the...
The Count of Monte Cristo
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
A classic tale, The Count of Monte Cristo has been adapted to many forms of media. One of the more recent retellings is the 2002 film version starring Jim Caveziel as Edmund Dantes. A main reason The Count of Monte Cristo has proved to be so popular and enduring as a story is that it is a...
A means to an end: Reconsidering the use of stereotypes in the graphic narrative
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
After reading the first fifty-two pages of Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, one may wonder if the reviews that appear on the back are even referring to the book on which they are printed. While Derek Kirk Kim proclaims, “As an Asian American, American Born Chinese is the book I've...
America: No place for free blacks? Navigating "freedom" in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Since my first experience with Uncle Tom's Cabin in high school and in further studies, I've struggled with the question of abolitionism and the societal value of the African-American characters in the novel. More broadly, one of the reasons I enrolled in this course was my interest in...
The politics of race and female empowerment in wide Sargasso Sea
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Miscegenation, an act that was illegal in America until the 1967 ruling of Loving vs. Virginia, is not uncommon in literature and not limited to the human species. We know of Moses marriage to an Ethiopian woman (King James Bible, Numbers12:1); in the Arabian Nights we know of King Shahryar's...
Split personalities and an odd love triangle in Ford's The Broken Heart
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
John Ford's The Broken Hear t has been said to be written as homage to Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and to his love affair with Penelope Rich. While this could be true, Ford offers a similar love triangle between Orgilus, Penthea, and Bassanes. Orgilus and Bassanes have clear parallel roles to...
Classical cannibalistic myths: Revenge as an appetite in Titus Andronicus
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Vengeful acts, especially in Renaissance drama, are often countered by a more heinous act of violence. Titus Andronicus plays by this common rule with its climatic scene involving a mother forced into cannibalizing her children. The mode of this final vengeance is inevitable due to the fact that...
The plot against people: Critical analysis
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In “The Plot Against People,” Russell Baker writes about inanimate objects and the three major categories they can be classified in; those that don't work (A), those that break down (B), and those that get lost (C). The way this essay works is that Baker describes various objects with...
