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...
But the sun also rises
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In Ernest Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises, both the title and epigraph create commentary on the attitude of the characters. By using both a Gertrude Stein quote and a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, Hemingway shows how his generation was viewing life and, in contrast, how his...
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...
Fitzgerald and modernism
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout periods of literature, Modernism has revolted against former social standards and subject matter that is both prohibited and restricted in conversation and literature alike. The early 1900s were a time when writers were determining for themselves what they deemed to be important and...
The path to freedom
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
This book as a whole does not tell a story; that is, the trace of events and the overall course of Irish independence don't go from beginning to end and tell. Rather, each chapter depicts a significant time period in the history of Ireland that Collins, the author, witnessed. Everything is more...
Edgar Allan Poe: The relationship between symbolic imagery and the human psyche in "Metzengerstein" and "A Tale Of The Ragged Mountains"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best known authors in American literature. John Kehoe (1997) discusses Poe's life in his brief biographical article “Edgar Allan Poe.” Kehoe explains that Poe is considered to be one of the major literary figures of the Romantic Movement that existed...
Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" and Elie Wiesel's "Night": A literary analysis and comparison of Holocaust literature
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The Holocaust of the 1940s is one of the most abominable periods in world history. Approximately eleven million Jews lost their lives during World War II due to Nazi genocidal policy enforced by Adolf Hitler. Jews were beaten to death, starved, burned in human crematoriums, enslaved, and...
Mind control and nineteen eighty-four and brave new world.
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Dystopia is, “an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.” (Dictionary) In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, we are introduced to two different dystopian societies. Mind...
Literature's ladder
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Each age of British Literature- from Romanticism to Post-Modernism, can be seen as a rung on a ladder that ushered in the next age. As each age instigates, encourages, and nourishes change and progress, a new age is ushered in. And just as one can not get to the top of the ladder without the...
Facing adversity : Women and religion in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Alice Walker's “The Color Purple” is one of the most well known novels in contemporary literature. This book places the author among the top literary canon of American writers. Since its first publication in 1982, the novel continuously gains both positive acclaims and ambivalent...
Unifying mankind through asexuality and abstraction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The unprecedented bloodshed, terror, and violence that blanketed Europe during World War I left the people at the War's end saddened and detached, and the world, “chaotic and fragmented” (Tepper, p.79). Over ten million people had died, had been slaughtered, not counting those who...
Portrayals of traditional and contemporary views on marriage in Postwar Vietnam through modern Vietnamese literature
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Marriage is a historically worldwide phenomenon. However, different times and cultures hold distinct views towards marriage. What constitutes a traditional or untraditional marriage varies greatly from culture to culture and even from time to time within a particular culture. Examining the...
The lady of Shalott" by William Holman Hunt
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
To begin, the referenced version of Hunt's The Lady of Shalott holds a history and meaning unparalleled to most paintings. Most significantly, this was the final painting completed by Hunt before passing away in 1910 (Stilo, par. 2). The finished product of this painting is derived from its...
Take that Baudrillard: The absurdity of narrative and the possibility of meaning in Candide
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Voltaire has been said to have been mocking Leibniz's popular theory that “whatever is, is right,” (Pope, l.294) in Candide. While that is true, it only scratches the surface. The more significant fact is that the language and logic with which Candide satirizes Leibniz mock the very...
Empire of the Sun by James Graham Ballard
Book review - 20 pages - Literature
Jim, an eleven year old boy, and his parents are living in a wealthy European area in Shanghai during World War II. The novel begins the evening before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Most of the European families had already been evacuated from China, and there were many scrambling to get...
Humor as a Mask for Anguish in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
As the quote from The New York Times points out on the back cover of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou's novel is “Simultaneously touching and comic.” Through language, choice of detail, and the story itself, Angelou introduces humor and comic relief to a narrative filled...
Jo Shapcott's Mad Cow
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Jo Shapcott is considered to be a contemporary British poet with traits of a Desperado poet. I explore the literal and figurative meaning of the cow in some of her Mad Cow poems as well as the issues that have influenced the usage of this persona. The essay begins with a quote from the Sunday...
Coleridge and the Poetic Imagination:The Link Between True Life and True Poetry
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
There is no single theme that pervades every one of Coleridge's many poems, but a body of motifs relating to familial relationships and friendship imbue both his conversation poems, such as Frost at Midnight and The Eolian Harp, and his “mystery” poems, including The Rime of the Ancient...
Fruitless Labor : Love and Marriage in Joyce's Dubliners
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In his first novel, a collection of short stories meant to express the paralytic nature of turn-of-the-century Dublin, James Joyce establishes an image of the Irish urban center as a degenerate bed of unhappiness, deprivation, depression, and imprisonment. All of his characters face the daily...
Into the Darkness: Marlow's Discovery of the Relationship between Darkness and Civilization
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In his novel Heart of Darkness, published in 1902, Joseph Conrad explores the deepest reaches of the African continent, and at the same time, the innermost secrets of human nature. The novel is narrated mostly by Marlow, a seaman known for his “inconclusive experiences,” who has, over...
Cyrano de Bergerac hubris and hamartias
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
He has no mortal enemies; his only adversary is death and even then, defeat inevitable, he surrenders gracefully. There is yet forgiveness in his eyes as he is stripped of all dignity. He has nothing to lose except his pride and life; his pride he would take to his grave, his life he would give...
Mingled Voices: The Communication between the Contrary Natures of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In his “Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, books of children's poems” written and illustrated by himself, William Blake explores human perception and the contemporary social milieu, focusing on the transience of opinion and the variability of fact in two contrary states of...
The Rhetoric of the Personal and Pictorial: Portrayal of the Self and the Abstract in Young, Gray, and Collins
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Following the ethical and didactic works popular in the early eighteenth century, which offered a view of Man as an imperfect but scientific being in search of meaning in a universe created by a perfect God, a crop of poets emerged who wrote instead about “a preponderance of sentiment,...
The Poetic Practice of Alexander Pope: The Authoritative Voice of Reason and the Expulsion of Pride of Man
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Alexander Pope was a poet greatly concerned with perception: his perception of God and his fellow man, and how he was perceived by others, both personally and as an artist. Despite his physical maladies, he saw himself as a great poet, destined for the craft and blessed with true talent. Many of...
Political Aesthetes: Emily Mann's Execution of Justice and the Identity Crisis of Documentary Theatre
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
The documentary theatre, unlike conventional theatre, defines itself in terms of actuality, authenticity, and verifiability. Reality plays draw their power and identity from their use of “actuals,” authentic materials such as transcripts, interviews, testimonies, published documents,...
Not Worth Laughing About: Anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
As time changes, so do the interpretations of Shakespeare's dramas. Newer productions are supposed to appeal to modern audiences by reflecting current attitudes and cultural beliefs. Anti-Semitic viewpoints existed long before Shakespeare and his play, The Merchant of Venice, which is considered...
"A Hideously Difficult Task": An Exploration of American Racial Identity through the Works of James Baldwin
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In a style similar to other minority works of literature, James Baldwin's writing encompasses the recurring theme of identity—what it means and from where it originates. This theme stems from incomplete identity of the black American community. Baldwin's writings try to explain the...
Critical Analysis of "Goblin Market"
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Sylvia Plath once said, “The blood jet is poetry, and there is no stopping it.” This was true for many poets, and especially true for Christina Rossetti. Rossetti had poetry in her blood, art in her veins. When she first wrote “Goblin Market” in 1859, some critics...
