Mind over matter in the works of Anne Bradstreet and Benjamin Franklin
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The quill pen and the printing press were two means of composing available to early American authors. They have different qualities; the pen is a more romantic and stylized, while the press is a practical and efficient industrial tool for the spread of knowledge. However, both the pen and the...
Tangled claims and tensions in Heidegger's rectorate address
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
In the following paper we will undertake a close analysis of “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” Martin Heidegger's address to the University of Freiburg upon assuming the rectorship at the school. Though space constraints dictate that we cannot explicate and critique the...
Linguistic adaptation, English instruction, and the second generation Latino immigrant
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Linguistics & languages
Since colonial times, the U.S. has been a nation both divided and united by its ethnic and linguistic diversity. Benjamin Franklin himself regarded the German minority of Pennsylvania as linguistically and racially inferior, yet also printed the first German newspaper in Philadelphia (Baron,...
Plato's differing accounts of body and soul
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
In both the Phaedo and Republic 4, Socrates offers an account of the nature of psychological conflict in the context of a discussion about the soul. Different conceptions of the soul and body emerge from these accounts, each of which takes on a markedly different tenor. I will exposit and...
Exploring Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot's revisions of "the waste land"
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
How might T.S. Eliot's poem, which has come to define the modernist movement, be different if instead of bearing the title, “The Waste Land”, it is called “He Do the Police in Different Voices?” This paper will not seek out any definitive answers as to the meaning of the...
Death of a salesman
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tragedy is defined in literature as “the fall of a worthy, usually noble hero or heroine” and would rely basically on a protagonist who started in a high status in society and would eventually have a downfall as the story progresses ("Tragedy."). Traditional tragedy is composed of...
How does Steinbeck portray gender, in his novel : 'The grapes of wrath'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
In the novel, Steinbeck skilfully creates a complex communal structure, through which the genders are portrayed. This community has a harsh and realistic nature. Many tragedies and disappointments threaten the family as they move through life, Tom kills a man and goes to prison, Rose of Sharon...
Satan of paradise lost
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Throughout more than three hundred years of criticism on John Milton's Paradise Lost the character Satan has been a subject of controversy for many reasons and from many perspectives. Despite being God's adversary, Milton shows his readers a satanic character with many faces, experiencing...
Seamus Heaney's politically poetic voice
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Seamus Heaney is one of Ireland's most prolific poets. He has published thirteen major volumes of poetry to date, and shares the honor of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature with fellow Irish writers William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and George Bernard Shaw. In his poetry, Heaney...
Homosexuality and deceit within "The Children's Hour"
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman is a cautionary play of how small lies can lead people into ruin and self-destruction. The central issue of homosexuality driven by deceit is the cause of turmoil on the lives of the people of Lancet. A whispered lie of a homosexual relationship between two...
Taking virtue seriously
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
In the present paper I will examine Cicero's charge in De Finibus that Epicurean theory does not, as it were, take virtue seriously. I will then lay out two Epicurean responses to Cicero's objection. I will show that the first response - that Epicurean theory may both take virtue seriously and...
Adolescence and growth development
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In the realm of mother and daughter movies, “White Oleander” touches base on so many topics in its attempt to create beautiful chick flick as an adaptation of the popular novel that Oprah herself had recommended. The movie itself was moving and it is credible with its drive to create a...
On necessity as a defense to homicide in Regina v. Dudley and Stephens
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
The present paper asks and addresses the questions: what principles, if any, distinguish Regina v. Dudley and Stephens (RDS) from scenarios in which necessity ought to be a defense to homicide? Were Dudley and Stephens guilty of murder? After laying out the relevant facts of RDS I will answer...
Female protagonists in the sound and the fury and as I lay dying
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
“The following Ralph Ellison quote is often found on the book jackets of William Faulkner's novels: “For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our...
Points of intersection: A handful of dust and St. Mawr
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
In Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust as in D.H. Lawrence's novel St Mawr, a common rhetorical layer discusses the search for life's meaning, which in many aspects mirrors Ellington's experience of finding agreeability in music, as well as the sensation of childishness. In A Handful of Dust...
The spirit of Thoreau
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Henry David Thoreau was an essayist and philosopher who played a major role in the moral consciousness of the United States during the decades leading up to the Civil War. An influential and revolutionary thinker through both his writings on transcendentalism and his ideas of natural...
Petrarch's rime sparse
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The reader of Petrarch's Rime Sparse is compelled as early as the first sonnet to impose narrative onto the poems. In Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono, a poet-figure emerges and addresses the reader as he reflects on what he calls his primo giovenile errore. Finding herself at such an...
Is "Sicilian truth" an oxymoron?
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo is by no means the kind of text that invites the reader to take it lightly and straightforwardly. The subtle irony running through the piece constantly implores the reader to interpret and re-interpret various scenes and the characters within them—in...
Circumstance in Jane Austen's early novels
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Circumstance and money figure heavily in Jane Austen's first two novels—Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice—particularly in the way these social and financial considerations impact marriage. They can cause multiple problems, thwarting passionate romance, such as in the cases...
Teaching themes of empathy through children's literature
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As Christians we are called to treat all individuals with understanding and compassion, extending to them the same unmerited favor that God has extended to those who follow Him. But how do we extend a sense of understanding to those whose personalities and experiences are quite different from our...
Real-World relevance of fantastic creation: An examination of "High Fantasy" and the goals of literal and historical writing.
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Literature
For the most part, fantastic or otherwise impossible methods of storytelling are ignored in the world of modern and classical literature. In order to accurately appreciate the quandary of the modern “Fantasy” author, one must be aware of the commonplace practice of division and...
Troilus' unwilling free will
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” consistently and emphatically stresses the absolute nature of courtly love and its proclivity to incite moral responsibility with relation to one's sense of free will and personal obligation. Chaucer toys with the notion of Troilus' free will versus his...
Denial: Internal struggle of a homosexual
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
James Baldwin's” Giovanni's Room” explores the internal struggle of a homosexual in denial. The main character, David, faces an internal conflict that eventually destroys every relationship he encounters in his personal life. His own struggle with his sexuality began at an early age and...
The Wife of duplicity
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The Wife of Bath's Tale, from Geoffrey Chaucer's “The Canterbury Tales”, was a veiled social critique. Her tale was a treatise of social commentaries on the role of gender, the church, and nobility in society. Geoffrey Chaucer used the duplicity of his character, The Wife of Bath, and...
Sermon 8 on the plagues of Egypt and the ten commandments of the law
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Augustine was greatly appreciated by his respective community for his teachings on Christianity and the profile of the Christian identity. His resources were not limited to only the New Testament Scriptures but avail other writings to further fulfill such teachings. The Jewish Scripture, or the...
Tool or trifle: The moral question of style
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
“You know not what hurt you do to learning that care not for words, but for matter, and so make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart.” (Roger Ascham) I am thirteen. Almost every afternoon I shove a book in my pocket, a hat on my head, and I wander out into the scurry-flurry of a...
Myth, the age of irrationalism, and the cult of celebrity.
Essay - 10 pages - Philosophy
Ancient and primitive cultures demonstrate the use of myth as an epistemological basis, but historically they have been replaced by Rationalism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the insufficiency of reason for the task we give it has become more and more evident, until at last...
Augustine and the vast interior: A discussion on Christian Asceticism
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Augustine's Confessions are built upon the twin poles of a search for God and a search for self. These twin poles are also twining poles because Augustine proclaims that one can only understand self in light of God and that one can only find God through self-knowledge. In one of his sermons,...
Death of a Salesman: Tragedy or not?
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The great authors of old, such as Aristotle, Sophocles and Homer, all wrote incredible tragedies that immortalize the classical notion of a tragic hero. But what of today? Are there no tragedies that occur in the society of today? Where is Oedipus Rex in the world of the twentieth century? In...
But the sun also rises
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In Ernest Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises, both the title and epigraph create commentary on the attitude of the characters. By using both a Gertrude Stein quote and a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, Hemingway shows how his generation was viewing life and, in contrast, how his...
