Lolita in book and film
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
The difference between the character Clare Quilty in book and film of Lolita are huge. In the book by Vladimir Nabokov, Quilty is hardly seen or heard of until the very end of the book. However, in the film directed by Stanley Kubrick he is anything but subtle. The reasons for Kubrick wishing...
Hierarchies, judgment, and god in their eyes were watching God
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the world which she portrays is one revolving around hierarchal order. Hurston illustrates the city of Eatonville as a self-contained black community; however, the exclusion of white characters from the novel does not elicit a lack of...
The importance of conflict in the short stories we have read
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Conflict is the opposition of persons or forces that gives rise to the dramatic action in a drama or fiction, (Merriam Webster Online Dictionary). A conflict is the fire that drives a story; it develops the characters and draws the reader into the story. Without a conflict a story would be a...
Black Othello: A question of definition
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Is William Shakespeare's Othello really black? That depends. It depends on the specific definition of the word "black." Taking the word at face value in our contemporary society, the word tends to describe a specific cultural community of peoples derived from or near the continent of Africa....
Thaddeus Lowe and his work on aerial reconnaissance
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
His parents were named Clovis and Alpha Green Lowe. Only people with such idiosyncratic and anomalous names could name their child Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe. Consequently, his friends called him Thad (Sims). Born August 20, 1832 in Coos County, New Hampshire, Thaddeus Lowe was a...
Remate and autobiography in Islands in the stream
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
There are countless examples of the overlaps in characters, settings, and events that make the case for the connection between Hemingway and the characters he creates in his literature, and Islands in the Stream is no exception. Of particular interest for this essay is the author's...
Mario Conde, Hamlet, Padura
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
González traces out the minimalist treatment of historical time in Padura's Four Seasons, while also highlighting the “residue of trauma” issue that runs through Padura's novels. In addition, González makes a keen comparison between Padura's Mario Conde and Shakespeare's Hamlet as...
Morella, her name and the spirit-death game
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In chapter eight of González' “Cuba and the Tempest” (2006), the author takes an innovative look at Poe's Morella and extricates one of its hidden ideas, the More-of-Her complex. His founding wordplay based on the story's title to describe the theme may prove to be insufficient though,...
George Kennan's Crystal Ball
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
George Kennan (1904-2005) was an American advisor whose writings served President Truman and his administration. In his writings, “Sources of Soviet Conduct” and “America and the Russian Future,” both published in Foreign Affairs, he shed insight into the thinking and motives...
Alfred Hitchcock's 'Shadow of a Doubt'
Thesis - 1 pages - Literature
Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt is an indictment of the American middle class lifestyle. This is evident in two scenes which together act as a sort of point/counterpoint of lifestyles. One is the opening sequence of the movie, in which we as viewers are slowly introduced to Uncle Charlie,...
The water babies, Victorian literature and the depiction of childhood
Thesis - 13 pages - Literature
The social hierarchy of Victorian England perpetuated the involvement of the working class in poverty driven crime and with regard to the concurrent impact on children; Duckworth comments that “Crime and poverty were inseparably associated and most of the young who suffered gaol sentences...
Loss and suffering in Anglo-Saxon literature
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
Literary historicism is relatively modern concept of literary theory developed in the 1980s through primary exponent Greenblatt . The underlying basis of literary historicism is the study of literary texts in historical context and an attempt to better understand intellectual history through...
A contrast of depictions of growing up from Alcott's Little Women and Stevenson's Treasure Island
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
The coming of age narratives in Robert Stevenson's “Treasure Island” (1883) and Louise Alcott's “Little Women” (1868) juxtaposed thrilling stories with moral issues that were contextually uncommon in children's literature. Additionally, both novels were written in what has...
The Odyssey of Homer and the Aithiopika of Heliodorus
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Though the Odyssey and the Aithiopika, or Ethiopian Romance, were composed by two different men writing from different worlds and separated by a gap of many centuries, they share many of the same thematic, structural, and literary features. The Odyssey is a Homeric epic poem which is thought to...
Competing giants: The subversive counter-performance of the Soviet writer
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The early twentieth century poet Osip Mandelstam postulated that, “Poetry is respected only in [Russia] - people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for it.” Mandelstam, who himself fell victim to the Stalinist regime for his subversive prose, was...
Gilgamesh and Ramayana: The value of the epic
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
What is an epic? The epic is traditionally defined as a long narrative poem which relates the adventures, journeys and deeds of a central hero. These narrative poems are the oldest known works of literature and some, like Gilgamesh, even date back to pre-history - the time period prior to the...
Review of 'The dry salvages' by T.S. Eliot
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
“The river is within us, the sea is all about us” (line 15.) In his poem The Dry Salvages, T.S. Eliot uses the river, the smooth imagery of thin water, seeping through the countryside as an allegory of the quiet, which dwells underneath the surface of us all. The Dry Salvages is the...
Theatre presentation: Italian futurism and the theatre Itself
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
The futurist movement in theatre began around 1909 with Flippo Marrinetti's publication of the first Futurist Manifesto. Francesco Cangiullo, born in Naples in 1888. He was a poet playwright, theorist, and visual artist wrote several Futurist sintesi (which is a very short play). In 1914 he wrote...
Theatre of the absurd
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
The Theatre of the Absurd (French: Théâtre de l'Absurde) was a movement that happened in the late 1940's through the 1960's. The term was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of a book on the subject which was first published in 1961. Later there were 2 revised versions,...
To hell and back: A human's tale by Dante Alighieri
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
When asked to name the most influential authors in the history of literature, a person would most likely refer to authors whose acclaim is so great, one only has to say a single part of his or her name. Poets and playwrights, these authors composed works that transcend time and place and carry...
Shall we proceed: Fatalist fetishes in "Lift not the painted veil"
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Life is the most beautiful disaster. It is a dichotomous wrenching of mind and body, destiny and fate, knowledge and understanding, which by the very end—in those precious last moments, one is left only with the question… ‘Will there come a light, or just darkness'? If one wishes...
The Irish literature
Thesis - 9 pages - Literature
Who is Irish, who are the Irish, what makes an Irish writer Irish? Why does he/she have to be Irish, follow and become part of some tradition, this question of who/what is Irish runs parallel to whom and what is ‘I'? I can stand for identity in that it is I the writer (a writer, not this...
Comparative analysis of poetry
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Language is the most important aspect in poetry or rather the author's essential key to achieving their main objective - grabbing the reader's attention and keeping throughout the poem's entirety. Many poets are unsuccessful in doing so simply because they believe that poetry should be difficult...
Comparing narrative in fiction and nonfiction
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Fiction in definition is the works of literature whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact such as poems, novels and short stories (American Heritage Dictionary; 2006). Nonfiction is defined as works of literature comprising of narrative prose dealing with...
We are what we repeat: Repetition and identity construction in Derrida and Butler
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Philosophical and ideological traditions permeate everywhere from popular thought, culture, and subjective experience to science, literature, and politics. In past decades, critical thinkers have engaged in re-determinations and restructurings of philosophical traditions that presuppose or...
The hope of the poet
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Not until the end of his career as a poet, albeit a mere couple years, does Keats write perhaps his most illuminating lines, clearly communicating the end to which he aspires as a writer: ‘The poet and the dreamer are distinct / Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes / And that the height of...
Ben Edwards - The return
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
He was the best, once, now reduced to this. The decaying rooms of this dilapidated construction are not fit for humans to reside, just birds and perhaps the odd rodent. Walking through the huge floor to ceiling windows he heard the crunch of broken glass under his feet, vandals and time really...
This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona: A break with cultural assumptions of identity amongst contemporary Native Americans
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The following dissertation will focus on the short story, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” by Sherman Alexie. This document will outline continual themes on cultural assumptions regarding identity, and based on the perspective of the short story and its interplay, will...
The personal universal: Pronouns and identity in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Ralph Emerson's individualist essay, “Self-Reliance”, is an open forum of what is necessary to be independent and skeptical of the ideas of others. Emerson seems obsessed with what truly defines the character of a man, but this obsession seems to stem in part from his own example....
Murdering the past: Influence and immortality in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
On first reading, the majority of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories are concerned with death in a variety of different forms. Whether Poe is describing murder, the fear of being killed, characters previously deceased who return to life, or those who still live being buried prematurely, the subject...
