The difference between sentences that are evaluated by linguistic significance alone and sentences that are evaluated by linguistic significance and other circumstances
Essay - 16 pages - Linguistics & languages
Significant differences among sentences of natural language certainly occur. It is not a matter of theoretical philosophy or theoretical linguistics but simply common sense. The difference I would like to focus on is the one between sentences that are evaluated using linguistic significance alone...
Fascism, communism and totalitarianism
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
“Fascism was the first mass-mobilizing development dictatorship that provided a frank, complete, and relatively coherent rationale for totalitarianism." Actually, Mussolini's doctrine of delayed industrialization was the first to openly affirm “the reality of production and the...
Ernest Gellner: Nations and nationalism
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism , which was published in 1983, is a core reading for the study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European history for it cleverly conceptualizes notions -namely nationalism and nation-state- that are essential components of that period. The course...
Is "To Kill a Mockingbird" (by Harper Lee) a novel about racism?
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Writing To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has chosen to make a description of the Deep South during the Great Depression of the 30's through the eyes of a young girl, leaving us uncertain about the qualification of this novel. Indeed, reading the biography of the author, the reader realizes that...
France and the United States: Two different approaches to feminism
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Feminism is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “the belief that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men” . However, there is not a single definition for feminism. This notion is rather complex and controversial, and it cannot be fully comprehended in...
Dr. Seward's blind rationalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Seward, young British physician and unreliable narrator, embodies late-Victorian scientism and rationalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Irony in Seward's portrayal reveals much of the author's criticism of the late-Victorian scientific establishment. Although Seward sees himself as...
Literature review on virtual tour technology
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
Numerous developments in virtual technologies show up in modern world creating for people more and more comforts and possibilities. Different kinds of visions that we may see with the help of virtual tour technology, have elevated the status of virtual environment to the level of pop...
The universal human rights concept and its roots in Western political thought
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Commitment to the idea of cultural relativism is usually seen as precluding the acceptance of the idea of universal human rights. But is relativism against universalism a false dichotomy? Can we construct a “differentiated universalism” or a “non-ethnocentric universalism”?...
The Australian Strine
Essay - 17 pages - Philosophy
Having spent my eight-month-stay between Sydney and Brisbane, respectively State capitals of New South Wales and Queensland, sharing Australians' life, and having also travelled a bit to other cities and States of the East Coast, I feel I must share my affection for this vast, exciting...
Incidents in the life of a slave girl, by Harriet Jacobs
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The novel Incidents in the life of a slave girl is an autobiography written by Harriet Jacobs in 1861. In this book, she relates various events of the life she had when she was a slave in South Carolina. She confides in the reader and gives details of the difficulties she had to face in her...
The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
The original idea of the Ku Klux Klan was born in the late 1865, in the minds of six young men -John Lester, James Crowe, John Kennedy, Richard Reed, Frank Mc Cord and Calvin Jones- in the quiet town of Pulaski, Tennessee. They were Confederate soldiers during the Civil War and were bored with...
King Lear, by William Shakespeare: My experience of reading Shakespeare
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Reading in Original version a Shakespeare play was in my mind a kind of challenge. I read quite a few of Shakespeare's plays in the past, but they were translated in French. I had heard so much about Shakespeare's wonderful style, the beautiful English language he used that I wanted to...
The role of NGO's during wartime: humanitarian vs pacifist ideals
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Since the beginning of modern humanitarian action during wartime (with the birth of the ICRC), the question of the NGOs' role on the battlefields has been the subject of an important controversy, opposing humanitarian to pacifist ideals. Indeed, pacifists' main point was to denounce the...
Essay on Hemingway's book: "The Sun Also Rises"
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Published in 1926, The sun also rises is considered as one of Hemingway's best novels. It depicts the circle of American expatriate writers living in Paris in the 20's. Through drinks, rides in Montparnasse, fiestas in Spain, the relationship between Brett and Jake and the remaining...
The emotional and psychological reader's response in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Blue Hotel"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
"The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane are two short stories which, beyond the colour references in the title, try to develop certain psychological responses within the reader. I will attempt to show how through two different points of view for...
John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": Chapter 3
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The chapter under study is an extract from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Situated at the beginning of the novel, chapter 3 offers a very detailed description of a land turtle trying to reach the other side of the highway. Its journey is described as a very slow and painful one, full...
Discuss the portrayal of city life in a group of works
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In this essay, we will look at how artists portray city life, how they make the most common things in our lives becoming special and how they transform reality into art. Indeed, everyday, ordinary life often becomes special under their brushes. Some of them like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec liked...
Action is character, FS Fitzgerald
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
In real life, what we do is supposed to reflect our personality. What we are - to the others - is first and foremost what we do and what we look like : we are judged by the others through the prism of our physical appearance and of our own behavior. Doing something "reprehensible" according to...
The Fantasy in 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson, was an immediate success and had been revisited a number of times since its first publication in 1886. It can be considered as the Gothic tale par excellence. The Gothic genre started in the middle of the Eighteenth...
Choderlos de Laclos's : Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses has been the object of four main cinematic adaptations, all very different from one another or from the source text itself. These films are Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (1959) by Roger Vadim, Dangerous Liaisons (1988) by Stephen Frears,...
The War (Marguerite Duras)
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Marguerite Duras was born near Saigon in Indochina in 1914. Her parents went to the French colony as teachers. She left Indonesia in 1932 to study political science and law in Paris. His childhood in Indonesia had a great impact on Duras and brought unity to her work. As she was living in Paris...
"The innocent anthropologist" Notes from a mud hut - a book of Nigel Barley By Penguin Travel Library (1983), Penguin Books
Book review - 12 pages - Literature
A respectable anthropologist, British Museum's curator, Nigel Barley is yet distinguishable by two aspects from his eminent colleagues. First he chose for his thesis to study "Old English material in published and manuscript form" (11), involving the disapproval of many ‘purists' of the...
Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare's criticism of the XVIIth century's anti-feminism
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
like in his other Roman plays like Julius Caesar, Shakespeare used in Antony and Cleopatra the description of the Roman society to describe his own society. But in this play the main point of analysis was not politics but the place of women in the society. During the XVIth and XVIIth centuries,...
Wuthering Heights - The Ending (An Attempt at a Commentary)
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
The passage, being at the very end of the novel, follows directly Heathcliff's death and stages the final events of Wuthering Heights. Prior to it, Nelly Dean gives her brief account of Heathcliff's death and funeral. Then, we are presented with her conversation with Lockwood who, in turn, puts...
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The scene takes place in a clearing, close to the Salinas river, “a few miles South of Soledad”, at dusk. Two men come (the two main characters), one following the other. The first one is George and the second one Lennie. They are ranch workers who travel together from a ranch to...
Moral and Overman - Study based on: Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer By Friedrich Nietzsche
Essay - 8 pages - Philosophy
“There are more idols than realities in the world. […] This time it is not contemporary idols but eternal idols that are being touched here with the hammer as if with a turning fork”. This “revaluation of all values”, an expression that Nietzsche would use numerous times...
Commentary on an extract from O. Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" chapter 2
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
This passage takes place in the middle of chapter II, in which Lord Henry has just been introduced for the first time to Dorian by his friend Basil. During this scene of first encounter Lord Henry made an impressive philosophic speech about one's self and soul, moral influence, virtues and sins,...
Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis - The beginning
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
The beginning of the New Atlantis is, in the first place, an account of a long voyage across the Pacific, undertaken by a crew of 51 sailors. At the same time, it serves as a brief introduction to two different peoples - the sailors on the one hand and the Bensalemites on the other. The passage...
Are forgiveness and a search for the truth a better solution to heal the minds and bodies of the victims of wars than externally imposed tribunals? - published: 15/01/2009
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Even after a settlement is reached and a peace agreement is signed, this is by no means the end of the conflict. For a conflict to really end, healing the minds and the bodies of the victims of wars are necessary. Indeed it is the necessary first step to reconciliation to appear and people who...
A comparative account of the French and the English versions of one Beckett's text
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Translation is usually studied from another language to ours, in order to consider changes that have to be made. With Samuel Beckett, it is interesting to analyze the process of translation from French, which is not his mother tongue, to English. In fact, Beckett was, in the 50's, one of the rare...
