From Tall Tale to Political Expression
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
If you read Washington Irving's tale of time, Rip Van Winkle, and Mark Twain's story of deceit, The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, you will find a ball of fantasy and tall tales with truth and logic buried in the middle. In comparing these two tales, one must look at what exactly a...
A hero's journey through life
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Joseph Campbell's Hero Cycle is an idea that anyone can relate to and be able to recognize. There are many stories throughout time that use this in their composition. Stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz format their structure around it. George...
Conrad vs. Achebe: The question of racism in Heart of Darkness
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Joseph Conrad said, “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” Only too well does this portray the harsh reality depicted in Heart of Darkness, one that Chinua Achebe defines as profoundly racist. Achebe's points...
The different views of life in a good man is hard to find by Flannery O'Connor
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Flannery O'Connor was born in Georgia, the same state that she wrote about some twenty years later in A Good Man is Hard to Find, as she describes with thoughtful imagery the grandmother's fierce objections to her family traveling to Florida. Having lived through the fifties, O'Connor was...
Memory Panel Contribution
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
There are several different scientific classifications of memory. The type that memoirists most often use is delineated thus: Long-term -> Declarative -> Episodic. Declarative or explicit memory requires conscious recall, which is what memoirists attempt when writing a scene from memory....
Race Criticism Analysis
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Sandra Milloy's race criticism of The Sound and the Fury focuses almost exclusively on Dilsey and draws conclusions from her flawed interactions with two families: the white Compson household and her own African-American one. Milloy sees Dilsey as one of the most celebrated black mammies in...
Response to "When You Are Old"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Upon reading “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats, one may think that it is just the lament of an old woman; this may be true on the surface, but a more in-depth reading will show that it is actually a heart-felt love letter from a former lover. When the poem is dissected and...
Football, Mead-Halls, and Bards: Perpetuated Gender Roles from Anglo-Saxon Literature
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In modern times, men and women in America are divided by their stereotypical gender roles. Women are inferior to men; they are interested in domestic issues and should make the men in their lives happy. Men are chauvinists; they enjoy “nights with the guys” and feel a stronger...
The "Supreme Court of Justice": Religion and the Suppression of the Lower Classes in Freud's "The Future of an Illusion"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Though humans have “raised [themselves] above [their] animal status” (5), the fact remains that a fear of nature, a far superior force, is inherent in mankind. Left to his own devices, man is unrestricted, susceptible to outside destructive forces and his own animalistic instincts,...
Lovers and Epistles: Progressivism and Feminism in the Poetry of Lady Mary Wortley Montague
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of London were a time of formality and conservatism, especially among British women. But even in her early teens, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went against the flow of society and taught herself Latin, according to the editors of the Seventh Edition of the...
On Birds and Planes
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “The End of Admiration: The Media and the Loss of Heroes” Peter H. Gibbon details his reasons as to why there is no longer a great American hero. Over the past few decades, the public has gone from hailing political leaders and champions of peace to idolizing pop icons instead....
Plan B Sounds Good to Me
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Lester Brown's book, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, touches base with most of, if not all of, the issues that are threatening our planets modern living style. The book aptly named, giving a second plan, one that differs from how civilization is...
William Butler Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins as Innovators
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In literature there can be two major types of innovation, innovation in style and innovation in content. At the turn of the 18th Century innovations were huge as writers were creating what we now refer to as modernist poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats are two of the central...
Addicted and in Withdrawal
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Wuthering Heights is the story of two families that live on the moors in England and how the two families entwine themselves and is about the love and relationships that occur between them and their two estates. There is one relationship in particular, that is the derivative of most of the action...
The Ultimate Usefulness of Freedom
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Kant's views on social and moral progress have always been described as being “ahead of his time,” probably because of the emphasis on freedom in many of his works. According to Kant, freedom is absolutely necessary for any kind of progress. Freedom is almost always tied to reason, and...
"With their tongues cocked and loaded:"The power of language and dialect in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Zora Neale Hurston was a cultural anthropologist for her own culture. She spent much of her life recording the stories and saying of the people around her, both in Harlem and abroad in the American South. She poured her energy into representing people the way she saw them, or heard them, as the...
Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant on the Improvement of Society
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
n the Preface to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes, “The last thing I should promise would be to “improve” mankind.” Although it was not Nietzsche's aim to improve life for the majority, it was the main focus of many of the writings of his predecessors and contemporaries....
Owning Perfection: The Struggle between Science and Nature in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark."
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In many love poems written to praise the beauty or virtue of a woman, the woman or the woman's love is often seen as a material possession or a thing to be owned. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Birthmark,” the woman is seen as something to be improved upon and perfected. Love is not only...
North, by Seamus Heaney
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
In 1975, Seamus Heaney came out with his fourth book of poetry, North. Although the third volume, “Wintering Out” foreshadows many of the same themes, it is North, according to several critics that develops these themes, and establishes a turning point in Heaney's poetry. According to...
The Trojan Women
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Euripides' Trojan Women exemplifies the cruelty and painful consequences of war, and how they affect women by leaving them powerless and without choices. Several episodes in the play illustrate this loss of choice and power, the death of Astyanax, the sexual slavery of Cassandra and Andromache,...
Poet, Humanist, Revolutionary: The Good Morning Revolution poems of Langston Hughes.
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
At the time, Hughes was in the Soviet Union, touring its various countries and struggling to put together the film “Black and White” with some fellow writers and actors. The manuscript Hughes sent Van Vechten that spring was some of Hughes' most radical work. It praised Soviet...
Progressing Toward the End of Spirit: Hegel on World History
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
Although Hegel's concept of spirit can sound like a purely metaphysical concept, more simply it is the ultimate force of our wills. Hegel believes that the wills of individuals, (which are inherently free wills,) that make up a nation are a kind of collective consciousness, which has an ultimate...
The Transience of Identity and the Unpredictability of Surveillance in City of Glass
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Through the use of the character Daniel Quinn, author Paul Auster is arguing against the idea that identity is static and also against the idea that surveillance is perfect. This paper explores the complex life of Quinn by taking a good look at every character that he tries to become. It starts...
Alisoun, Dorigen, and the Conventions of Women
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Domestic and social propriety are the most important concerns of wives of the era exemplified in The Canterbury Tales. Volumes of texts -- also known as deportment books -- are used to expound on domestic and social propriety and to teach young women the expectations of women in general, and in...
The Ideas of Confucius
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Confucius lived through a time of social change in China. Society was moving away from the old values, and towards more selfish pursuits that he felt were immoral and unjust. To this end, Confucius taught others what he felt were the core values of ancient Chinese culture, and in effect changed...
When China Ruled the Seas
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When China Ruled the Seas is a discourse on the histories of China's naval prowess. The book begins with early Chinese history, detailing China's first ships, and the somewhat disputable evidence of China's colonization and exploration of places such as Japan, North America, Australia, and the...
Universal Science Fiction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to Jane Donawerth in Frankenstein's Daughters, the only way for women to write science fiction, is for them to change the rules. This is certainly the case with Octavia Butler's “Bloodchild”. In Butler's Nebula award winning short story, Butler tells the tale of Gan, a young...
Japanese Culture
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Although the books, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima, are completely different works, both have uncannily similar characters. Each main character from these two books has at least one character in the other book who shares some of their...
Medea
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When first comparing the play Medea and Aristotle's Poetics, many people feel that the lead character, Medea, breaks every requirement for being a tragic character. But when we take a step back and view Medea at a different angle, we see that she does actually fit every aspect of Aristotle's...
The Effects of Christ
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
One of the central themes of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is love. Stowe felt that love could bring an end to the evils of slavery, and be a redemptive force. There is one character in this novel that embodies complete, unfaltering, and unconditional love: this character is Eva...
