Three The Hard Way: Jocasta, Antigone, and Ruth Dead Resurrected
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
In a flash one day it occurred to me that babies did not come flying out of a stomach which could magically reseal itself, as I had been thinking all of those years prior. I saw something (perhaps a woman, perhaps one with child), and suddenly I knew everything. It was a moment of realization...
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four: When the future meets the past
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Freewill has always been an attribute of humanity that is to be protected at all costs, as freewill plays an important role in defining who we are. Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four go to great lengths to show the effects of loss of individuality when governments take control of the...
The Challenges of Religion in Seventeenth Century Poetry
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Poetry has often been used as a vehicle to depict the complex aspects of religious life. Religion has always played a crucial role in the cultural development since the earliest times of mankind. Literature constituted an excellent means to express the feelings shared by the religious world....
'Black like me' by John Howard Griffin
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
'Black Like Me' is the account of the experiences of a white man, the author, who considered himself an expert in ‘race relations', but who had no real experience of how black people lived, so decided to change his skin pigmentation and travel in the South as a black man. This book...
The Gardens of Oxbridge and Fernham in the first chapter of 'A Room of One's Own'
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
This paper analyzes the first chapter of 'A Room of One's Own', and specifically the gardens of Oxbridge and Fernham. Virginia Woolf uses these two gardens to support her comparison between the status of men 'and women. In effect, they symbolize order versus chaos, rigidity versus...
Willful Monsters: Differences in attraction to Short Story Writing
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
As storytellers, Kelly Link and Aimee Bender each bring a distinctive sense of punch and personality to their writing. Both tackling short stories, they are able to create unique worlds within a few pages that draw in their readers and deliver fresh perspectives through the strangest of stories....
The Destruction of Responsibility: Cromwell vs. Charles II
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
With England left as a leaderless country following the trial and beheading of King Charles I, the country was eagerly searching for a resolution to its problems. Oliver Cromwell emerged as England's leader from the Revolution and strove to have a close, relatable relationship with the English...
Oscar Wilde & the Unwritten Melodrama
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Victorian melodrama not only served as a literary genre, but it was used to define and reflect on the values of society. Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan takes the expectation of contemporary melodrama, as defined by Peter Brooks. Though the play is based on melodrama and, at times, overly...
Differences and Similarities between two Creation Myths
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
As its title suggests, a creation myth is the lavish story that lays the groundwork for the life of an epic figure, as manifest through history. The creation myth commonly establishes a trend that becomes commonplace for the subject throughout his or her life, a trend that is based upon and...
The Aesthetics of Comics - 'Transfiguration of the Commonplace'
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
In his work 'Transfiguration of the Commonplace', Danto asserts that philosophy, as a system of thought, is a unique subject-matter in which not everything is appropriate to its nature of inquiry (Danto, Section 3, p. 54). Art, however, he contends, has proven, throughout the ages, to be...
'The Stranger' by Camus - A review
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
In 'The Stranger', Camus expresses his philosophy of the absurd. 'The Stranger' was Camus's first novel, depicting the story of an emotionally detached, unaffected, and seemingly amoral man, Meursault. When first reading the novel, Meursault may seem like an amoral character,...
'Siddhartha', by Herman Hesse, and the 'Metamorphosis', by Franz Kafka: A review
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
'Siddhartha' by Herman Hesse, and the 'Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka, are both novels which portray the protagonists, Siddhartha and Gregor, as obedient members of society who undergo momentous, life altering transformations. Both transformations considerably affect the...
Madness Redefined: Plath's Demystification of Insanity in 'The Bell Jar'
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' depicts the mental-breakdown of a privileged and educated young woman in 1950s American society. To this day, the literary merit of the novel remains a topic of intense debate. The majority of critics seem to take the stance that its overall worth lies in the...
"The Wanderer" by W. H. Auden
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
What could a layman think about such a poem? When one tries to understand a poem, it is in fact a whole work that must be understood; a whole thought that has to be reached. Whether we are studying a poem by W. H. Auden, E. Bishop, W. B. Yeats, or A. Sexton, it is impossible to understand it...
Death as reality: A response to Christopher S. Glover's critical analysis of Don DeLillo's White noise
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In this essay, I will systematically dissect Christopher S. Glover's categorization of Don DeLillo's White Noise as an example of Baudrillard's third stage of simulacrum while presenting an alternate interpretation that suggests the novel actually represents a deviation on...
The misdiagnosis of postpartum depression in the 19th Century and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written in 1892, was originally published as a work of Gothic fiction. Through a biographical analysis - and the author's own admission - we now know that the story contains many real elements drawn from the author's own...
A close reading of The ascetic in a canoe
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Through his essay, The Ascetic in a Canoe, Pierre Elliot Trudeau attempts to describe his personal relationship with nature, through imagery, visualizations and deep descriptions of Canada's natural environment. Nature is shown as a companion in the otherwise vast openness. Nature is the great...
A radical faith: The Bible versus Orpheus and poetry - An analysis of Emily Dickinson's poem 1577
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Emily Dickinson's poem 1577, “The Bible is an antique Volume-,” the speaker questions blind adherence to Biblical belief and ultimately proposes the adoption of a new faith. Through skeptical tone and understated form, the poem elegantly demeans the Bible's authority as the sole...
Much ado about nothing: The power of perception in Shakespeare's comedy
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Although American culture places great emphasis on the silver screen, the medium has its limitations. Among them are a relatively short length of time in which to work, a broad audience with a short attention span, and several conventions to be observed when making a film in terms of plot...
The restless heart: The theme of scattered humanity in Augustine's Confessions
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
At the very beginning of his Confessions, Augustine states “[men's] hearts are restless till they rest in [God].” However, because of how he views the human condition, Augustine explains that man is continuously “scattered” by his own impermanence and is always moving through...
The middle finger that is Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
By the time Churchill dropped the iron curtain across Europe, America was giving up on the idea of a cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union. Foreign policy was being dictated by such blatant anti-communist and anti-Russian works as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, as well as the...
The mythological supports of Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, existence made up of binary oppositions, replacing one another in a never-ending cycle. The most prominent--and the most basic-- of these oppositions is that of life and death. Through an exploration of various mythological allusions made in the play, the...
The enigma of 5.1.19 in Richard III
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Richard III as a historical play is interesting because of its large focus on questions of the supernatural. The play considers, or forces the reader to consider, such ideas as the power of prophecy and dreams, ghostly interactions, pre-destination, divine intervention, and so on. The...
The ambiguity of motive in Chaucer's Canterbury tales
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
The reality presented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is one that is skewed by both Chaucer, the writer, and his fictional persona of humble narrator, who is the only source of information in the poem. The resulting overlay of these different perspectives and the reader's dependence on...
The effect of the pilgrim's purpose in Chaucer's Canterbury fabliaux
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
According to Robert E. Lewis in his “The English Fabliau Tradition and Chaucer's ‘Miller's Tale',” the heyday of the French fabliaux lasted from “the late twelfth century to the 1340s.” In addition, as Lewis goes on to point out, the French genre appeared in several...
Victorian morals in Dracula
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Two of the most compelling and interesting themes and elements of Dracula are the themes of “life as a positive and perpetual entity”, and the fleeting, sinful and worthless nature of a life centered around earthly pleasures and indulgences. The theme of the perpetuity of some kind of...
The Handmaid's tale
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Margaret Atwood's “The Handmaid's Tale” is described as a classic dystopian novel, presenting the subjugation of women under a theocratic totalitarian social framework in a fictitious future. Atwood's dystopia takes place in the Republic of Gilead and the narrator is the central...
Midwestern poets
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
There were five famous Midwestern poets in the 20th century. The five were Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsey, Edna St. Vencent Millay, and Sara Teasdale. Sandburg, Masters, and Lindsey were from Illinois; Sandburg, Millay and Lindsey were first recognized in Harriet Monroe's...
Modern poetry and imagism
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Perhaps modern poetry can be traced back to one man, T.E. Hulme. He defined classical and romantic poetry, which helped distinguish what modern poetry really was. Before modern poetry was considered “modern poetry”, there was classical poetry, and there was romantic poetry. In order to...
Harriet Monroe
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Harriet Monroe was born on December 23rd, 1860 to Samuel and Amelia Monroe. She was born in Chicago, where she spent most of her life. Her father was a lawyer, and she spent most of her time in his library reading his poetry books. She studied at Dearborn Seminary in Chicago. She wrote a sonnet...
