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...
Hobbes's account of religion/nationalism and terror management theory
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
Throughout Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes makes repeated reference to the primacy of human consciousness in provoking individuals to subject themselves to the rule of a sovereign. Specifically, the ability to conceptualize oneself as a discrete entity with a past and (imaginable) future, combined with...
The hobbesian state of nature: A prisoner's dilemma?
Thesis - 7 pages - Philosophy
In his 1651 work Leviathan, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argues in favor of a societal structure in which individuals must waive a portion of their natural rights to an ?artificial man? in order to avoid battling with each other. Most famously, Hobbes declared that this condition of war was...
Aristotle's teleology and the doctrine of the four causes
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
In Aristotle's Physics, he presents his teleological theory of nature as comprised of changing materials which are to be understood in terms of the factors that brought them about, particularly their final causes (i.e. the function that they ultimately exist to serve). In his view, wisdom is...
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...
The decay of magic: Karen Tei Yamashita's postmodern fable
Thesis - 6 pages - Philosophy
In her satirical, surreal debut novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Karen Tei Yamashita asks us to believe in magic. She puts forth five original miracles at the beginning of the story: a lucky man named Kazumasa who happens to have a sentient ball floating around his head; feathers that can...
A review of Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher
Book review - 11 pages - Literature
Tom Perrotta, the reigning bard of American suburbia, can inspire compassion for the most unlikely of subjects. In Election, he humanizes heartless, bitchy Tracy; in Little Children, he measures out kindnesses to Larry the violent racist as well as Ronald the convicted sex offender. But in his...
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...
Historical analysis of the Shakers
Thesis - 8 pages - Philosophy
The early Shaker belief system rested on an understanding that Christ's second coming had arrived. The founder of the sect, Mother Ann Lee, experienced a mystic vision of Christ while imprisoned. This vision was of the Christ and his church on earth. The early Shakers believed Ann Lee was the...
Construction and development of anthropology
Thesis - 10 pages - Philosophy
Often times, especially in ideological disciplines, there is a great gap between theory and practice. Not all theories apply to lived experiences and not all lived experiences can be summarized in theories. Nevertheless, this paper seeks to construct an ideal relationship between anthropological...
Phallocracy in Alan Moore's "From Hell"
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Alan Moore offers a diagnosis of reality that portrays misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism, and governmental tyranny as demonic forces. Moore uses the graphic narrative medium as a means to communicate the demonic nature of these systems of power. In Moore's work on Swamp Thing, he created...
The anti-apocalyptic Markan community
Dissertation - 7 pages - Philosophy
Apocalyptic literature often is ignored when constructing theology and ethics. Theologians and ethicists ignore scriptural images of otherworldly beasts and supernatural beings. Prophesy of cosmic suffering and references to apocalyptic literature are not calculated in the work of most...
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...
The origins of Freemasonry
Thesis - 7 pages - Philosophy
Freemasons have been a focus of interest for centuries, partly because of their secrecy, and partly because they have been linked to esoteric and secret knowledge. One of the most common questions asked about Freemasonry is, how did it begin? It may surprise some that this question is hotly...
A fractured fluency: Amy hempel's exploration of grief
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
Amy Hempel's story “The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” appears to be a bleak depiction of human selfishness and avoidance in the face of death. A woman visits her dying friend in hospital, but instead of staying to offer comfort, she departs abruptly, leaving her friend crying in...
Religious analysis of death
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
Many controversies arise from the interaction between human ideas and religious thought. One of the issues that create much confusion among religious scholars, as well as the average man has been death. Since it is believed that there is no turning back, death raises many questions, and creates...
The religion card
Thesis - 5 pages - Linguistics & languages
Marx's theory of the trajectory of the dialectic relationship between the bourgeoisie and proletariat argues that internal homogeneity within each class is a crucial prerequisite to class action/revolution. This is because internal homogeneity gives rise to class consciousness within each class;...
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...
Ethnographies in context and as fictional representations
Case study - 9 pages - Literature
Empirical observation and objective analysis are some of the core tenets of sound scientific inquiry. These processes lead to the recording of data and presentation of findings which confirm or disprove hypotheses, thus renewing the drive for further studies. Particularly in the social sciences,...
Linguistic diversity in Europe: Strength or weakness?
Case study - 5 pages - Linguistics & languages
In 1919, after many debates, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George concluded that the Versailles treaty would be written both in French and English. Since then, English has imposed itself in diplomacy, economic exchanges, Medias and so on. Nowadays, it seems that this language has gained...
The drama of discrimination in Henry James' The Ambassadors
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Ambassadors is clearly a novel: the novel is free, and has the most elastic form. We could be tempted to say that there is no drama in the work. In fact, drama has different meanings. First, it is the name of theatrical plays of a particular kind or period. Secondly, it can mean a situation...
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The theme that interests us is the quest for identity in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim. The book was written in 1901 and the plot takes place in India during the time of the British colonization. Kim presents several quests: a quest implies that the protagonist has to seek something noble, like the...
Critical evaluation of the respective interpretation of cultural relativism as explained by Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
The moral relativism denies that any moral code has universal validity, and ethical propositions do not reflect absolute and universal moral truths. Morality is relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances. The idea of relativism is not new. Protagoras, a Sophist, claimed...
Robert O.Paxton: The anatomy of fascism
Book review - 5 pages - Philosophy
Many authors have proposed definitions for the question “what is Fascism?”, but most of them failed to give a complete definition. The historian Robert O. Paxton answered this question for the first time by focusing on the concrete: what the Fascists did, rather than what they said. To...
