Mimetic rivalry in 'Envy' and 'Safe conduct'
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Mimetic desire is the desire of an object, not because of a rational choice to fulfill one's own needs, but instead because that object fulfills the needs of a rival subject. It is meta-desire, desire of someone else's desire. Mimetic desire develops out of an attempt to imitate the rival...
J.M.W. Turner: Incendiary change
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed vast transformations in Europe, as the notions of a voice for every citizen and the power of the common people became powerful stimuli for change. Although the move away from unchecked monarchical power was...
Evil: Destroying from within
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
American literature in the nineteenth century was a journey in exploration of previously hidden aspects of the human psyche and this involved surpassing the boundaries of regular fiction to mystery and fantasy. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were pioneers in the subgenre of dark...
Dialectical inquiry and the divided line
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In Republic, Plato (using Socrates as a literary mouthpiece) examines the nature of justice and describes the ideal city as being ruled by philosopher-kings. In Books VI and VII, the philosophers engage in a discussion of the qualities of true philosophers and the process through which these...
Sufficient to have stood: Temptation in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Perelandra
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
Original sin has a curious, irresolute connection to human freedom. God?s fundamental gifts to His children?reason, imagination, free will?are the very things that give men the desire to sin as well as the ability to resist. This combination makes the Fall of Man a paradoxical event, one that...
Pay a ticket, value life: Theories of drama in our town
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Thorton Wilder's Our Town remains a classic work of existential ideas and American theater because of its universality. While the play does take place specifically in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, this specific small-town life is a metaphor not even for our own towns; rather, Thorton Wilder's...
Fitzgerald and Borges: The desire for the absolute
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald?s The Great Gatsby and Jorge Luis Borges?s ?El Aleph? can be said to share a structural framework or paradigm which takes the form of a paradox. This paradox concerns the fact that desire is at once finite, because it becomes substantialized in an object, and infinite, because...
Imagination and Self-Transformation in Puig's El beso del la mujer araña
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
One of the first things to strike a reader of Mañuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña is its narrative, or rather, textual structure. The novel is composed of numerous different discourses, including film narrations, footnotes, surveillance evidence, dialogue, subjective thoughts, etc. Most of...
Victorian Gothic literature
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
All was dark and silent, the black shadows thrown by the moonlight seeming full of a silent mystery of their own. Not a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate; so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass...
Mary Magdalene in alternative Christian texts
Thesis - 9 pages - Literature
The most common portrayal of Mary Magdalene has been as a prostitute, though even the Roman Catholic Church, which invented that story, has conceded that it is not true. The second most common portrayal of her has been as the woman who was present at the crucifixion and went to the tomb....
The making of a saint: the early life of Mother Teresa
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Of all the modern people canonized as saints by the Roman Catholic Church, Mother Teresa was the most famous. She was widely admired for her dedication and her charity and almost as widely criticized for her doctrinaire approach to religion. This paper will examine her life before she began...
More than they bargained for
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The process of maturation from childhood to adulthood, or “coming-of-age,” is a unique experience that often shapes the way that an adult will conduct his or her life in the future. In literature, a Bildungsroman outlines the transformational experiences of a young person as they...
Plato as a proto-feminist: Tendencies towards the development of feminist thought
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
The idea of Plato's Republic being one of the true first pro-feminist arguments seems to have some steam in modern times. However, there seems to be major flaws with these theories. The fact that modern feminism is not grounded in Platonic feminism is perhaps the most striking issue. For, if...
Plato's Republic V: Women as rulers- A feminist proposal
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
In Book V of Plato's Republic, Plato argues that women should be rulers, raising questions as to whether Plato was an early advocate of feminism. However, an examination of the argument he provides in the text of the Republic does not support this claim, and Julia Anna's' scholastic work...
A streetcar named Desire, "Repetition"
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
In most of the classic plays we studied in high school, numerous events and rebounding occurred one after the other that enabled the plot to move forward. At the end of the play, the situations used to evolve and the characters' lives had often changed. However, in this work, the final situation...
Je hasarde une explication: écrire, c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi.' (Jean Genet - epigraph to La Place) Is this the case for Annie Ernaux's narrator?
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
In Annie Ernaux's La Place, the theme of betrayal is so prevalent that one could say it is the basis of the book. I think it would be fair to say that “écrire, c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi” when looking at Annie Ernaux's narrator. The narrator feels that she has betrayed...
A critique of the Dystopian novel
Thesis - 17 pages - Literature
The Dystopian novel is a strange subspecies in literature. While it shares many aspects with the traditional science fiction novel, it is rarely categorized with science fiction. Whereas it might satirize the Utopian socialist fantasy of the perfect society, the satire is usually exchanged for...
The wilderness in American fiction: Hemingway and Faulkner
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Growing up during a time in American history when much of the country was still an unspoiled wilderness, it is no wonder Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both show a particular awe for nature and a preoccupation with wilderness as a symbol. Wilderness is an important theme in Hemingway's...
The use of borders in Richard McCann's "My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame"
Thesis - 12 pages - Literature
Carroll Knolls—the setting of Richard McCann's “My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame”—is a world defined by borders; it is divided by property lines, lot spaces, fences, gates, doors, and all other manners of boundaries and barriers. The author infuses the...
The Odyssey in Song of Solomon
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon has a small but important feature that distinguishes it from its predecessors: unlike Sula and The Bluest Eye, its protagonist, Milkman, is male. While Sula and The Bluest Eye center on female characters, and locate themselves in domestic spheres, Song of Solomon...
Reinventing Myth, Recasting gender: Myth in Morrison
Thesis - 12 pages - Literature
As an African American woman writer, Toni Morrison's relationship with myth is complex and multilayered. In an interview with Charles Ruas, Morrison calls myths the “nourishing stories”(115) that we are raised on. Myth educates future generations about values and strategies for...
A room with a view: Narrating intersubjectivity in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse
Thesis - 23 pages - Literature
The outcry in 1942 was definitive: Virginia Woolf wrote novels without characters. According to D.S. Savage, Woolf's characters are completely incoherent, “void of internal definition” that would distinguish one character from another or from the world that surrounds them. According to...
Reading note on Kant's perpetual peace
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1724. He studied philosophy, mathematics and physics at the University of Königsberg, and became a renowned teacher and scholar thanks to his works on reason, knowledge and judgment. Indeed, he intended to explain rationalism, and therefore...
Dreams in story of the stone
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
“Last night Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly, spirits soaring he was a butterfly (is it that in showing what he was suited his own fancy?), and did not know about Chou. When all of a sudden he awoke, he was Chou with all his wits about him. He does not know whether he is Chou who dream...
Graphic novels
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
For this project I chose to focus on graphic novels that have a lead female character. I chose graphic novels because I feel that most teachers don't want to use them in their classrooms and I believe that most young adults would be interested in reading them in school as many of them do on their...
Incorporating multicultural literature
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
“Multicultural education is for everyone regardless of ethnicity, race, language, social class, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and other differences” (Neito, 2000, 4). For many teachers the idea of incorporating multicultural literature into their everyday English...
The escape from Alcatraz
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Alcatraz, America's most infamous maximum security prison was designed to be escape proof. But on a clear, cool night in the summer of 1962 three prisoners did make it off the island and then vanished without trace” (Discovery Communications). It is still a mystery today if the prisoners...
The master book
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Creating a novel can be one of the most frustrating tasks for a writer to do. In the essay below, I will concentrate on the writing styles of six writers' from different writing genres, including technical writing, academic writing, and fiction writing. Comparisons will be drawn in regards to...
Gregorius : Medieval blockbuster
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Gregorius is a complex poem from the middle ages, written in an original and new poetic idiom which reveals many unique characteristics of the period. The theme that seems most significant, and which will be discussed in this essay, is one that would engage both a lay audience, and the socially...
Is Antigone or Creon the winner of the debate between them - A discussion of Anouilh's Antigone as modern tragedy
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Which character in Jean Anouilh's modern adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy, Antigone, Antigone or Creon, presents the stronger argument in their debate concerning the best way to deal with the dilemma of whether or not burying Polynices, Antigone's brother, is necessary or wrong, from a...
