One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest : A Study of Tragic Characters Using "Cool-Hand Luke"
Tutorials/exercises - 7 pages - Literature
Arthur Miller once wrote that the reason so few tragedies exist is because the world is in lack of heroes and the common man thinks too little of himself to be otherwise. The reluctance to be anything more than ordinary is attributed to the inherent assumption that heroes can only come from...
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...
Charles Dickens Essay : Philosophical, Psychological, Sociological Issue
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
A great burden for human beings is to carry ourselves the way we want others to see us. Though each governed by a private set of beliefs, no man is an island for a reason, as we are subject to natural instinct, which compels us to strive for acceptance by others in society. However, though one...
Othello and Ethics of Care
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
While considering the time period and by closely evaluating how events and people play against each other, Shakespeare's Othello can be considered a full bodied and consummate feminist work. In fact, Shakespeare's close and dramatic critique of a system of absolutes in a patriarchal military...
The Violence of Childhood
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Being an adult usually implies that you have a power of perspective, that is, to see things in a larger system and then to understand these things as being symptomatic of this system. Naturally, children lack this ability and their sense of reality is tenuous and fragmented, and many times their...
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...
The Price of the American Dream
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Great Gatsby relates Nick Carraway's experiences with a disillusioned assortment of wealthy individuals following his move to West Egg, the "less fashionable" counterpart to East egg, the home of antiquated affluence (5). In this harsh region of unlikely opposites, the 1915 Yale graduate...
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 Necessary Female Perspective in To Kill A Mockingbird
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
If a producer was to make an adaptation of Harper Lee's, To Kill a Mockingbird and wanted to extricate Miss Maudie's role from the film, not only would the dynamic of the characters be irreparably damaged, but the film would also be excluding one of the most powerful humanizing forces in the...
Sal Paradise and the False Dream of America
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
American literature reveals a counter-culture of identity which undermines and even contradicts the popular optimism of national identity. Part of this undermining takes place in the ideologies of American literary characters, or in their “imaginary relationships…to the real conditions...
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...
Hamlet: Playing a Role
Case study - 3 pages - Literature
One of the most prominent themes in “Hamlet” is acting. Its uses and abuses are constantly remarked on by Hamlet and other characters. Hamlet's view of play-acting is a complicated one; sometimes he admires it, but at other times he is disillusioned with the fakery that playing demands....
Melts in your Mouth: A Look at Humbert Humbert's Lolita
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Humbert, throughout Lolita, creates an inescapable defeat through his interactions with Lolita and his antagonist, Clare Quilty. These interactions contradict his early confidence in possessing Lolita. These characters consciously threat Humbert's exclusive relationship with Lolita. Their...
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 Earle Perry Charlton Story
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The Earle Perry Charlton biography, the Charlton Story, is about one of America's greatest entrepreneurs, in the early 1900's. The book chronicles Charlton's life from birth to death, and explains in detail his business relationships and tactics. Overall the main topic of the book was how...
Courtly Romances: Literature or Theatre?
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Literature
The definitions of theatre and, less specifically, performance, have been in constant flux since theorists set about trying to create them. Oscar Brockett, in his History of the Theatre, opens his text with the statement that “performative elements are present in every society, no matter...
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...
Fate versus Free Will: Dave Boyle
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The explicit mention of fate occurs only once in regard to Dave Boyle in Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, but the battle between fate and free will in his life is evident throughout the novel. Dave Boyle, a tragic character, has little free will to change the pre-determined forces that have shaped...
Breaking Through the Trappings of Stereotyped Femininity
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Edna Pontellier is a victim of the mother/whore duality, unable to escape the conditions of her culture that prevent her from being capable of self-actualization, and so walks into the ocean and never comes out again. This is the conclusion to Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, in which she...
Post impressionism in To the Lighthouse
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
Very little endures in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; by the third book most of the characters have died tragic and largely overlooked deaths, or they have disappeared almost without mention. Only two characters, the neurotic philosopher Mr. Ramsay and the lone artist Lily Briscoe are...
The Liminal Period in the Cinderella Fairy Tale
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In “The Little Glass Slipper”, Cinderella is undergoing what anthropologist Victor Turner, in his theory regarding rites de passage, would regard as a transitional period between being a girl under the protection of her mother and a woman under the protection of a husband. During this...
