The Fall of Ulysses
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
In all its humor, 1984 ½ would have in actuality been a very fitting title for Terry Gilliam's Brazil. An invisible, all-powerful government, the struggle of the individual against the state, the apparent hopelessness, there is no doubting the similarities between George Orwell's dystopian...
The Ecstasy of Grief
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
History thrives on contradiction. There would be no words to fill textbooks if world events and facts did not clearly oppose that which was taught the year before. The reasons behind wars alter like the tides, and entire countries burn to the ground to be built up again under a new leader and a...
The Degradation of Women in the Works of Ayn Rand
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
A common trend in American writing is to highlight gender differences. Authors appear compelled to hammer home the concept of women's suffrage, representing women as nothing but the weaker, fairer sex. In a way, it's almost a case of reverse sexism, proving the other side right by inversely...
Self-fulfillment
Essay - 20 pages - Philosophy
The controversy surrounding self-fulfilling prophecies, while originally centered on proving their existence, has recently settled on the probability of such phenomenon occurring in a natural environment. While not directly cited in this resource guide, the original “Pygmalion Effect”...
Rush into the Secret House
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Romeo loved Juliet, Juliet loved Romeo, and in the end, they both died to prove it. Neither the Capulets nor the Montagues could understand such love, so neither could allow such love. Romeo and Juliet died to prove it. Yet centuries later, William Shakespeare's darker tragedy is still revered...
Scream: A Gendered Autobiography
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
One cannot discuss the concepts of gender without looking at the various frameworks in which it exists. In Paradoxes of Gender, Judith Lorber states that gender is “a process of social construction, a system of social stratification, and an institution that structures every aspect of our...
Punishment and the Damned
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
It can be questioned whether the Greek and Roman people ever believed in their own gods. However, even such questioning cannot undermine the didactic value of their religion. Greek and Roman mythology thrived on storytelling; bards assumed the role of primitive priests, teaching moral reasoning...
Original Imitation
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In a modern era of corporate tyranny and the disappearance of an independent creative market, the artistic longing for originality is often forgotten. Radio stations sell out to public opinion, Top-40 hits recycling the last generation of Top-40 hits, and the hand-published pages of timid...
Journeying Abandonment
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Dante's Inferno, while a fictionalized version of the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell, is in many ways an accurate portrayal of the doctrines of Christianity. However, this Hell he creates is a Hell the Bible never expected. Influenced by the growing mistrust of the Pope throughout his native...
Know Your Neurosis: An Analysis of Frank Bruno's It's OK to Be Neurotic
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
I picked It's OK to Be Neurotic: Using Your Neuroses to Your Advantage by Frank Bruno from the bottom row on the third book case in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble because the title on the spine was so obnoxiously bold and it was shelved at the wrong end of the alphabet. They say not to...
I Love Not Loving You
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Any author to have ever written, from poetry to prose to every other genre in-between has been confronted with one universal question: where do you get ideas for your characters? And really, the answer is just as universal. It is impossible to create a completely original character, for the...
Honor and the Honorable
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to newspaper headings and television reports, every man and woman who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 is a hero. Even three years later, memorials are still built, hymns are still sung, and candlelight vigils are still held in remembrance of the bravest individuals...
"Holocaust Literature: Humanity Reborn"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
If Holocaust literature strives to portray the paradoxical (the representation of the unrepresentable, the expression of the inexpressible), maybe it too is a paradox. Confessions of the unspeakable, the unthinkable in written word. And yet it exists, tangible, published. In memoir and fiction...
Fathering the Son
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
There is a lot to be said about love. It saturates literature, Hollywood, every means of creative output known to the history of this planet. There is something mysterious about it, something undiscovered. So desperate have populations been to answer the timeless questions of love that it can...
Gambling Art: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Custom-House Introduction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In the preface of the second edition of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne discusses the “unprecedented excitement” generated by the publication of his novel (5). Ironically, this public excitement, and more importantly, the ensuing public discontent, originated not in the novel...
Father, Forgive Them: A Review of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
There is a basic purpose to the literature of Holocaust survivors: to bare witness. Many believe they survived to perform such a duty, to fulfill such a debt to those who did not. As witnesses, they record living history, for they record the history of their own lives. But what happens when a...
A Discourse on Happiness for a Drug-Free Nation
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
For the most part, there are two desirable products of problem solving: personal pleasure and the happiness of others. This difference between selfishness and unselfishness has often defined moral decision making, the former being nothing less than sin and the latter being utterly commendable in...
A Modern Myth: Emily Dickinson and the Everyday Hero
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
One can wonder whether William Shakespeare's sonnets would be memorized in every classroom across the Western world if they were anything other sonnets. So inseparable are the two ideas that they barely have separate identities: Shakespeare's sonnets are accepted without question, and most...
A Better Fate: Mythology and the Creation of Meaning
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Mythology: the bookstore catalogue designation where religions go to die. When the believers cease believing in their gods, and when the gods cease believing in themselves. We often forget we once worshiped Zeus and those other “primitive” gods with the same blind passion and fear...
To Run and Leap with Peasants: Idealism and Stereotype Formation in The Book of the Courtier
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In the sixteenth century, the ideal was inseparable from the ruling class: it was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, the aristocracy establishing itself as the ideal while simultaneously defining the ideal. The members of the nobility lived in tightly-monitored roles. Idealism was not about the...
The Serpent Underneath: A Lesbian's Defense of Lady Macbeth
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
“Dyke,” hiss the schoolboys, to the girls with grass-stained knees and dirt-streaked cheeks. To the girls who run faster, throw further, tackle harder than the prides of fatherhood manifest. A word, but so much more a performance. A stereotype, but so much more an expectation....
The Purpose of Purpose: Aesthetics and the Unity of Context and Form in Third-World Literature
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
All literary texts are both political and aesthetic. Words in and of themselves are innately sensual, inseparable from the emotions they evoke in a reader. They are also political, pieces of language steeped in history and theory. However, writers often plan toward one extreme, selecting their...
"The Oppressive Christian Faith as Detrimental to Africans and Native Americans"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Christianity. It sounds innocent enough. But, with that religion comes a dogma with a dark side; an aspect of oppression for minorities. The Christian faith was never the choice for Africans and Native Americans. The word of God was on the lips of white Europeans who wanted to spread their...
"The Faustian-Bargain Theme Found in The Monkey's Paw, The Playground, and The Black Lake"
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Temptation preys upon what we wish for and what we dream for. Want a flashy car: a cherry red, nitrous infused Lamborghini with leather seats, a thumping sound system and a set of wicked hydraulics? Sure it sounds good, but how possible is that on such a measly salary? Maybe, but only after...
"Jud Crandall: Neighbor, Mentor, Father"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
With experience comes knowledge. Sometimes, the experience might not make sense, and it helps to have a guiding hand. No, this is not the introduction to Chicken Soup for the Soul, but more like an intro for Chicken Soup for the Soulless. The spiritual world is difficult for the hardened realist...
"Homer Loves Odysseus; Virgil Loves Aeneas - but Aeneas Doesn't Love Dido"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Influence comes in many forms - religion, music, books, and authors. By experiencing different people's views, we gain a sense of understanding the world through their eyes. We take cues from others, how they think, act and do in the world, and internalize their beliefs. The religious zealot...
Kant, Mill and Protagoras
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
When following the determining factors of morality for either Kant or Mill one would generally arrive to the same conclusion on whether an action is moral or not. Although Kant believes that his method of deriving morality is best, Mill believes that Kant's process is lacking. “But when he...
Three Vehicles and Their Resulting Enlightenments in Buddhism
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Buddhist path leading toward nirvana is one properly undertaken with the understanding that enlightenment is something coming in degrees, and perhaps without a finite ‘ending point.' It is not unlike the mathematical concept of a limit. “The limit of ‘the function of x' as x...
Ariel's Levels of Consciousness
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
William Shakespeare's extensive investigation into social life in his earlier plays allowed him to instead focus on the more complex topic of human consciousness, which he pursues through magical inhuman characters, in his final play The Tempest. In his book The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio...
Summary and Review of "The Iraqw of Tanzania" and "Hunger and Shame"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The Iraqw of Tanzania, by Katherine Snyder, is a detailed ethnographic account of the affects of Maendeleo (progress and development) on the Iraqw people of northern Tanzania, shaped partially by the struggle between the young and the old to capture the true essence of Iraqw culture. However,...
