Flannery O'Connor
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Flannery O'Connor was the unmitigated master of her particularly esoteric craft of assaulting the all-devouring gray spaces of the humanistic spectrum. To those who merely make a skeletal browsing of her work or simply are first time readers may find her to be unnaturally grotesque in her stark...
Frakenstein
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of...
Dracula and Fear of Female Sexuality
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Bram Stoker's Dracula is undoubtedly one the most consciously sentient and hyperbolic literary incarnations of the excessive fear of women's sexuality that still survives with a vast legitimacy for its content today. Much like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the novel is satiated with the fear of the...
Book Review of Beloved by Toni Morrison
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is easy for cataclysmic traumatism to press to obscurity past history because of the weakness and shame of the human spirit itself. History is never a clean palindrome backward and forward, because during its recollection there is always an emotional motive, and nearly every motive is bruised....
All Quiet on the Western Front
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Eight and a half million people dead and another 20 million injured, it was a disaster unparalleled in human history. There was nothing great about this "Great War" except for the death and destruction. Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front describes the pointlessness...
The Battle of the Sexes in Ancient India
Case study - 2 pages - Literature
For time immemorial, mankind has been locked in a vicious and never-ending struggle against an enemy that is cunning, resourceful, and not above hitting below the belt; in short the one enemy that is capable of presenting a formidable challenge on every conceivable field of battle: womankind....
Upton Sinclair and "The Jungle"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
“The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair, was a revolutionary novel that changed American history, especially the history of the Chicago meatpacking industry. When the book was published in 1906, it aroused anger and disgust among the American public. The horrors of the meatpacking industry were...
Homer's Oddessy and Gluck's Circe's Power
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The Odyssey is filled with a large number of secondary characters that are, for the most part, very one-dimensional. Despite being very different in regards to themselves, as a whole they can be easily identified: they are briefly mentioned; they have limited dialogue; and they serve one of two...
Comparison: Everything that Rises Must Converge and Girl
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
“Everything that rises must converge,” By Flannery O'Connor, and “Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid are completely different texts that share a common theme. The story by O'Connor is about the feelings and emotions of a boy named Julian. He is strongly opposed to his mother's view of...
The Bluest Eye
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison explores racial tension in the town of Lorain, Ohio, immediately following the Great Depression. The novel follows the lives of a number of African Americans, including Claudia MacTeer, the narrator, Pecola Breedlove, the main character, and Pauline...
Clouds and Apology
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “Clouds,” by Aristophanes, and “Apology,” by Plato, Socrates is portrayed in completely different ways. In “Clouds,” Aristophanes attempts to ridicule Socrates and his followers, the Sophists. In his play, Aristophanes demonstrates that Socrates is corrupting the...
Portrayal of Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Horror stories are known to be misogynistic in their portrayal of women; Bram Stoker's Dracula is no exception. The novel offers a stereotypical, character archetype of the female in various forms: Mina Harker, Lucy Westenra, and the Succubi. The women are used to embody ideas and values of the...
Setting the Atmosphere in The Cask of Amontillado, The Masque of the Red Death and Pickman's Model and The Lottery
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
“It was a dark and stormy night…” Classic, word-of-mouth horror stories begin with this line. What is it about the “dark and stormy night” that should cause us, the reader, to feel anxiety and fear about the story about to be told? Horror stories cannot begin without a...
"Similarities in Dean Koontz's Hideaway and Bram Stoker's Dracula"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
To say there are similarities between the novel Hideaway by Dean Koontz and Bram Stoker's Dracula is an understatement - there are so many plot, character and thematic parallels, with very little derivation on Koontz's part it is nearly the same story. First, the character of Vassago, or Jeremy...
The Ecstasy of Grief
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
History thrives on contradiction. There would be no words to fill textbooks if world events and facts did not clearly oppose that which was taught the year before. The reasons behind wars alter like the tides, and entire countries burn to the ground to be built up again under a new leader and a...
The Degradation of Women in the Works of Ayn Rand
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
A common trend in American writing is to highlight gender differences. Authors appear compelled to hammer home the concept of women's suffrage, representing women as nothing but the weaker, fairer sex. In a way, it's almost a case of reverse sexism, proving the other side right by inversely...
Rush into the Secret House
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Romeo loved Juliet, Juliet loved Romeo, and in the end, they both died to prove it. Neither the Capulets nor the Montagues could understand such love, so neither could allow such love. Romeo and Juliet died to prove it. Yet centuries later, William Shakespeare's darker tragedy is still revered...
Scream: A Gendered Autobiography
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
One cannot discuss the concepts of gender without looking at the various frameworks in which it exists. In Paradoxes of Gender, Judith Lorber states that gender is “a process of social construction, a system of social stratification, and an institution that structures every aspect of our...
Original Imitation
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In a modern era of corporate tyranny and the disappearance of an independent creative market, the artistic longing for originality is often forgotten. Radio stations sell out to public opinion, Top-40 hits recycling the last generation of Top-40 hits, and the hand-published pages of timid...
Journeying Abandonment
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Dante's Inferno, while a fictionalized version of the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell, is in many ways an accurate portrayal of the doctrines of Christianity. However, this Hell he creates is a Hell the Bible never expected. Influenced by the growing mistrust of the Pope throughout his native...
Know Your Neurosis: An Analysis of Frank Bruno's It's OK to Be Neurotic
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
I picked It's OK to Be Neurotic: Using Your Neuroses to Your Advantage by Frank Bruno from the bottom row on the third book case in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble because the title on the spine was so obnoxiously bold and it was shelved at the wrong end of the alphabet. They say not to...
I Love Not Loving You
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Any author to have ever written, from poetry to prose to every other genre in-between has been confronted with one universal question: where do you get ideas for your characters? And really, the answer is just as universal. It is impossible to create a completely original character, for the...
Honor and the Honorable
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to newspaper headings and television reports, every man and woman who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 is a hero. Even three years later, memorials are still built, hymns are still sung, and candlelight vigils are still held in remembrance of the bravest individuals...
"Holocaust Literature: Humanity Reborn"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
If Holocaust literature strives to portray the paradoxical (the representation of the unrepresentable, the expression of the inexpressible), maybe it too is a paradox. Confessions of the unspeakable, the unthinkable in written word. And yet it exists, tangible, published. In memoir and fiction...
Fathering the Son
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
There is a lot to be said about love. It saturates literature, Hollywood, every means of creative output known to the history of this planet. There is something mysterious about it, something undiscovered. So desperate have populations been to answer the timeless questions of love that it can...
Gambling Art: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Custom-House Introduction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In the preface of the second edition of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne discusses the “unprecedented excitement” generated by the publication of his novel (5). Ironically, this public excitement, and more importantly, the ensuing public discontent, originated not in the novel...
Father, Forgive Them: A Review of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
There is a basic purpose to the literature of Holocaust survivors: to bare witness. Many believe they survived to perform such a duty, to fulfill such a debt to those who did not. As witnesses, they record living history, for they record the history of their own lives. But what happens when a...
A Modern Myth: Emily Dickinson and the Everyday Hero
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
One can wonder whether William Shakespeare's sonnets would be memorized in every classroom across the Western world if they were anything other sonnets. So inseparable are the two ideas that they barely have separate identities: Shakespeare's sonnets are accepted without question, and most...
To Run and Leap with Peasants: Idealism and Stereotype Formation in The Book of the Courtier
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In the sixteenth century, the ideal was inseparable from the ruling class: it was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, the aristocracy establishing itself as the ideal while simultaneously defining the ideal. The members of the nobility lived in tightly-monitored roles. Idealism was not about the...
The Serpent Underneath: A Lesbian's Defense of Lady Macbeth
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
“Dyke,” hiss the schoolboys, to the girls with grass-stained knees and dirt-streaked cheeks. To the girls who run faster, throw further, tackle harder than the prides of fatherhood manifest. A word, but so much more a performance. A stereotype, but so much more an expectation....
