The Black Pages book review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In the poem “I hope You Believe Me”, Heru strives to teach about the oppression faced by people of African descent through metaphors. Heru's poem has three strengths. It is provoking, articulate and subtlety reflects on various black thoughts on oppression. The poem is provoking due to...
Observing the life and times of a 'Kaffir Boy'
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Emotion and sensitivity engulf the reader into the world of this powerful memoir that rightfully and adequately portrays the story of a youth coming of age in apartheid South Africa. On all levels the main character in Kaffir Boy, Johannes was demeaned by whites for being African with a tribal...
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...
Descartes' views on mind, body and substance dualism
Thesis - 2 pages - Philosophy
French philosopher Descartes makes it very clear, when making the comparison between body and mind, two substances which he calls the ‘thinking thing' (res cogitans) and the ‘extended thing' (res extensa), that these two parts of the human experience are very different. In this sense,...
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...
Critical review of the series: Twilight
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Janice Radway's article, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” Radway analyzes a group of suburban housewives who tend to read romance novels as an escape from their everyday lives as wives and mothers. Similarly, the popularity of the teenage vampire book...
Feminism in France and in the United States of America: A comparison
Thesis - 14 pages - Philosophy
This comparative study arouses already some stakes to this first word. How do we define feminism in a strict way that is stripped of any subjectivity? To define this controversial word appears not only useful but also a necessary starting point to this essay. According to Le Petit Robert,...
Essentialism and dependence: Modal and non-modal Mereolgies
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
In the study of Ontology, and more specifically the study of mereology, essentialism and dependence, or ontological dependence, are perennial issues, which pop up. In the case of the former issue, essentialism, this is merely the study of the essence of an ontological object. In the case of the...
Artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind
Thesis - 15 pages - Literature
Vladimir Nabokov boasts an impressive resume. As a writer, critic and scholar, he perfected both his own craft, and his ability to analyze the work of others. Similarly, within his texts, he focused a great deal of energy on the manipulation of his readers own reactions, earning him a reputation...
Life as a weed
Thesis - 14 pages - Literature
On a bright sunny day in Brooklyn is where our story starts, where heat dazzles its inhabitants, where street thugs and hustlers hide in their street shops and apartments to avoid the blazing sun. Schools are closed; it is mid-July, the heat of New York City streets boiling even the most...
The work of Carl Gustav Jung
Thesis - 12 pages - Philosophy
In this essay we will explore whether the work of Carl Gustav Jung has been built upon. Alternatively the psychology that Jung built may have been close to entirely his own with little contribution from others. Or perhaps a great deal of additional work will have been contributed from others....
Analysis: Catherine Hall on Victorian domestic ideology
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
This chapter by Catherine Hall examines one particular factor she identifies as being crucial to the creation of the Victorian middle-class ideal of womanhood. Since the “angel in the house” was already established as a precept by the 1830s and '40s, the author seeks farther back in...
Tragic consequences: Themes of alienation in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
A contemporary Boston physician responded starkly to The Yellow Wallpaper. “Such a story ought not to be written,” he said. “It was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” What is it about the descent into madness that is so disturbing to read? Accounts of people behaving...
Critical review: Terrorist
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
This story explores the roots (or some of the roots) of Muslim discontent in America, showing how people who are chafing at what is essentially a culture clash can internalize this into hatreds and resentments justified with polemic and intellectual rationales. The contrast between Islamic...
Charlotte Gilman and Victoria Woodhull
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Bookish Charlotte Gilman, with the deft turn of phrase, and flamboyant Victoria Woodhull, shunning social convention: on the surface these are two very different women. But in fact, they were near-contemporaries who influenced important issues of their day and helped fuel dialog and debate about...
Postmodern and psychoanalytical approaches to Lolita
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Considering how multifaceted Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is, it is possible to apply to it a variety of literary theories, all more or less fruitfully. In this paper, I will consider the postmodern and the psychoanalytic approach. We will find that Lolita is very much a postmodern text, despite...
Modernistic theories of elevation and society
Thesis - 2 pages - Philosophy
To be remembered by history as a “thinker,” one must think some fairly formidable thoughts. Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Foucault, some of sociology's most seminal thinkers, tackled one of the most complicated human problems: what is modern society, and what makes it tick? In Manifesto...
Modern theories of culture and society: Marx's relevance
Thesis - 2 pages - Philosophy
Although Karl Marx's philosophies were formed in and about industrial Europe in the late 1800's, his fundamental ideas are still relevant to capitalist countries today, both on microscopic and macroscopic levels. The Marxist interpretations of how the capitalist system affects global trade, the...
Buddha and Buddhism
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
Buddhism is the faith that has changed the lives of millions of people over the world. It all began in a small kingdom in North East India, in Sarkya. The founder of Buddhism was the Prince Siddhartha Gautama, now called Lord Buddha. Buddha means ‘enlightened one'. Siddhartha in his young...
Understanding and living of Plato and Descartes'
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
Both Plato and Descartes have a lot to say about human nature. One aspect of the subject that stands out most for me are the discussions of how a person knows and understands things, or one might call it, "what is the nature of understanding?" Related to that is the subject of what a person is...
A review of the book "Techniques of the Observer" By Jonathan Crary
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer grants a theatrical still modern point of view on the ocular culture of nineteenth century. In this book he has re-approached the complications and plights of visual modernism and social modernity both. Extroverting conventional ideas the author has...
Moral philosophy: Moral and immoral actions
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
Morality is a difficult concept to even define. At its heart, it is an attempt to determine the correct way to act. Of course, the difficulty in this is that we must deal with the idea that people do not agree upon what constitutes moral and immoral actions. From here the main problem is to...
God and advertisement
Thesis - 6 pages - Philosophy
The image I have chosen to critique is the atheist bus advertisements in Britain These advertisements caused much controversy and created a stir because they promoted anti-Christian statements. What these advertisements carried on them was “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and...
Socialism and Islam
Thesis - 10 pages - Philosophy
Socialism is the term used in many countries. This word has come from the word society. Some Muslims think that the Socialism is fundamentally the same as Islam. They say it is just another name of social justice. They have this opinion on the basis of the fact that: it stands for the...
A Proppian analysis on the narrative of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
In the 1920`s Vladimar Jakovlevic Propp, the chairperson of the Department of Folklore at Leningrad University, examined a whole series of Russian folk tales and came to the conclusion that every story contains similar themes and each theme follows a distinct pattern. From this analysis, Propp...
The poems of Gary Soto
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Throughout the three texts, A Fire in My Hands, Neighborhood Odes, and Where Sparrows Work Hard, Gary Soto uses small and normally insignificant items as the focus of many poems in these texts, celebrating them with odes and sharing the stories behind them in narrative poems. He does this in...
Christianity: From realism to modernism
Book review - 5 pages - Philosophy
The aspect of Christianity is often a theme that is woven into literature. Lessons about the power of God and the miracles of Jesus Christ provide evidence for readers of the importance of God in a person's life. One specific author, Gustave Flaubert, wrote three short stories, “A Simple...
