Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1917
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The text to be commented upon is a poem written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 entitled Anthem for doomed youth. It is a petrarchan sonnet, a sort of diptych with two different parts which hinges upon lines 9 and 10. The title is a key for the interpretation of the sonnet which is an ideological poem, a...
Artaud's theatrical principles
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Artaud stated that ‘theatre is first ritualistic and magical, in other words bound to powers, […] and whose effectiveness is conveyed through gesture, directly linked to the rites of theatre which is the very practice and the expression of a hunger for magical and spiritual...
Structure and texture in the "Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
The Good Soldier is a novel written in 1914 by Ford Madox Ford and published in March 1915. This novel is considered as the best book of pre-war period. It is also considered as a modernist work, and in fact, many modernist innovations, as well as impressionist ones, are present throughout the...
Analysis of Samson Occom through 'A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The book A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue is an aid to learning the Hebrew language, bettering one's ability to speak, read, and write. As the first book he owned, A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue was especially significant to the Mohegan Samson Occom. Occom purchased the book on a trip to Boston in...
Vision in the prologue and battle royal scene of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
The most predominant theme in a noel full of them—Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man—is that of vision. More specifically, in Ellison's novel, how characters in the novel see the world reflect the prejudices and inaccurate perceptions of the society in which the protagonist lives. The...
Transformations of literature: Augustine's 'Confessions' and Virgil's 'Aeneid'
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Both St. Augustine's Confessions and Virgil's epic The Aeneid marked a new direction in literature for the West. Each one was inspired by the works of previous authors, but was willing to forge a new literature for their times. In the Aeneid, Virgil established Rome as indebted to the...
The theme of isolation in Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis concerns a traveling salesmen named Gregor Samsa who “[awakens] from unsettling dreams one morning” and “[finds] himself transformed into a monstrous vermin” (Kafka 7). Gregor is late for work, and he gripes about his joyless job; he...
Unity and divergence: The literary philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in opposition to the English romantics
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Many of the words used by S.T. Coleridge to express his critical philosophy of literature are familiar. He writes of metaphysics as well as aesthetics, beauty and pleasure, and above all, unity. His definitions of these terms, however popular the terms were, are in many ways remarkably different...
Reasonably wrong: The underground man's inferiority complex
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
In Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, desire is shown to be a more important force of human nature than reason by observing how the Underground Man makes decisions. Understanding that he suffers from an extreme case of inferiority complex is instrumental in being able to decipher the...
The effects of knowledge on happiness and freedom
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Upon reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Oedipus the King, The Crying of Lot 49, and Dostoevski's “The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man”, I find that a common theme links their ideas together. As the four stories progress, the main characters all receive...
Frankenstein and King Lear: A look into religion, politics and literature
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Religion has foundation in our lives whether we choose to identify it or not. By recognizing the literary works of Mary Shelley and Shakespeare, we can intellectually inherit the limitations of our power as human beings and the important role the Judeo-Christian God plays in our political, social...
Common reading proposal 'Tell them who I am: The lives of homeless women' by Elliot Liebow
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Many colleges and universities have implemented common reading programs for college freshmen. Many times, it is up to the libraries discretion as to what book is chosen for this program. Sometimes libraries themselves initiated the common reading program, other times it was a joint effort to...
Jihad vs. McWorld: The new world disorder
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Jihad vs. McWorld was written by Rutgers University Political Science professor Benjamin R. Barber. The author is widely regarded one of the nation's foremost scholars on democracy. He has written Strong Democracy, in which he explains that economic liberalism is the basis for and cause of...
Out of the garden: Examining the true origins of Genesis
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7 (Holy Bible, King James Version). Ever since that first breathe, man has been questioning the ways of the Lord. Laws, teachings, and...
Racial stereotypes and their role in the concept of Manifest Destiny by Justin Herndon
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The modern connotations of the concept of “Manifest Destiny” are generally of two diverging camps; One is a romanticized image of devout pilgrims, such as the Mormons, who left the crowded and sinful cities of the East for the freedom of the West, hoping to find a new promised land, or...
Just vengeance or righteous follies; which Hamlet did you see?
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
William Richardson describes Hamlet's character as one “moved by finer principles, by an exquisite sense of virtue, of moral beauty and turpitude.” (Hoy 147) Richardson goes on to say that a man like Hamlet “will find [his sense of moral excellence] a source of pleasure and of pain...
William Blake's "Wall of words" on circular reasoning
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
“And the salt ocean rolled englob'd.” (Blake Pl. 28.23) The previous line comes from one of Blake's prophetic works, “The First Book of Urizen,” and is very typical of a Blake ending. More than a century before Stanley Kunitz was born, Blake had mastered the technique...
How Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' contributed to the evolution of feminism
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Kate Chopin was an integral part of the evolution of feminism, providing early 20th century readers with feminist literature that is still highly respected and studied today. Although it is easy to approach her work, and all such work, work with textual evidence supporting a claim of the author's...
Heaven and hell: Aldous Huxley opens the doors of perception
Book review - 9 pages - Literature
Unlike any other mammal on earth, man possesses the unique ability to traverse various levels of the mind in order to alter and create his own perceptions of reality. Unlike any author in modern literature, Aldous Huxley charts man's explorations into the realms of the mind in his books The...
The logic of justifying utilitarianism actions in Koestler's "Darkness at Last"
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
Arthur Koestler in Darkness At Noon, explores the utility of totalitarianism through the fictional life of Nicholas Rubashov, a lifelong, loyal member of The Party who has recently been hauled into jail under dubious charges. Rubashov has spent his entire life promoting the Utilitarian and...
American Jews and politics in the selected works of Philip Roth and Joseph Heller
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The works of Joseph Heller and Philip Roth are frequently inhabited by American-born Jews. In The Counterlife Roth discusses the association between the American born “Diaspora Jew” to the State of Israel. In Plot Against America it is the reaction of a Jewish family to governmental...
Books that shaped our history of the Vietnam War
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As long as there is war, and as long as the printing press continues to exist, there will be books about war. Yet as media proliferates, the content of these books changes dramatically. With the dearth of eyewitness accounts of earlier wars, save the journals and varying forms of correspondence...
Perfecting the Human race: Creator, thy name is Man
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Since many believe the notion that a higher power than man, “God,” created mankind, it is assumed that this undertaking can only be performed by God, and therefore anyone else attempting such a task would be blaspheming his efforts. The Promethean myth challenges that the creation of...
The Bell Jar
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In the Bell Jar, Plath explores the marginalization of women. Her fiction, grounded in her own experience, permeates with that experience, revealing not only her commentary, but positions devolved into their most rudimentary parts, as to give the reader a backdrop to view them in greater relief....
Radical poetry: William Blake and the fight against oppression
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The industrial revolution. The term conjures up images of unstoppable progress, the advancement of mankind, economic expansion, and technological achievement. At the same time, it also drags up such sights as the oppression of the common man, dehumanizing working conditions, and dreary and...
Asserting women's intellectual legitimacy through coercive subtlety: An analysis of the narrative voices of Anne Bradstreet and Susanna Rowson
Case study - 6 pages - Literature
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women in America were dominantly expected to be ethical, simple-minded, and largely uneducated members of their community. As a result, female writers would often face strong social scrutiny based on this governing gender subordination because of...
Alice in Plato land: The allegory of wonder
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
For millennia, philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Wittgenstein have argued over the nature of reality, its objectivity and apprehendability. Alice in Wonderland explores the nature of reality using logic, philosophy, and mathematics. The device of the rabbit hole, which establishes the...
Privilege does not pacify: Phillis Wheatley's writing protests slavery despite status
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Phillis Wheatley was brought to New England in 1761 to be a slave. While not every detail of Phillis' life is known, she is considered to have had a good life for someone who was legally property. The Wheatleys encouraged her education and later her career as a poet. After learning to read,...
Peyton Place: The Author, the bestseller and the legacy
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Artistic masterpieces can evolve from any genre. Pablo Picasso's abstract paintings are revered by some as just Leonardo Da Vinci's telling portraits are. The same principle can be applied to works of literature. Frontier adventure stories and political solutions written in the form of science...
Self reliance as a means to discovering identity
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
According to Ralph Ellison, identity is the American theme. This sentiment explains why his highly acclaimed novel, Invisible Man, features a nameless protagonist trying to discover who he is. Ellison also insists that “the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who...
