Successful Admission Essay to a Graduate Creative Writing Program
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
I earned my Bachelor of Arts in May 2004 and since then I've wanted only to return to the classroom. I miss the stimulating discussions with peers who share my interests in literature, writing and critical thought. Temple's MA is exciting because it offers the rare program in which literature and...
Marking the body as a form of appropriation and power in Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee and "In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee as well as “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka, the marking of or writing on the body as a form of power or appropriation takes place on many levels. In both works, we have the inhumanly cruel military officials of the colonialist power -...
Wife of Solidarity, Wife of Destruction
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Every reader of the Odyssey shares something with the members of the first audience to hear the great tale. Every one has a mother. Also, most people in both groups will either have a wife, or be someone's wife. It is this overwhelming majority to which Homer speaks through one of the themes of...
Vincent Malloy as Vincent Malloy: A New Critical Reading
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
For this reading, it is assumed that there is substantial merit in the ideals described by Cleanth Brooks in his essay, “The Formalist Critics.” The so-called “articles of faith” outlined therein demand that efforts in literary criticism be targeted precisely at the literary...
Ego Trips and Empathy Falls
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Although both drastically different in philosophy, Surrealism and Russian Futurism failed to endure, but in similar ways. Surrealism, as defined by Andre Breton, is grounded in past philosophies while Mayakovsky's Russian futurism floats somewhere in an intangible future. Breton often channels...
Indigo Light
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues examines the ways in which people strive to escape from stifling conditions and find a more peaceful home within themselves. Set in the Harlem ghetto, the story depicts the strained relationship between Sonny, a heroin addict and his brother, a teacher. The narrator...
What I Talk About When I Talk About Carver
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Some might insist that Raymond Carver's short stories prove hopelessly post-modern—and that may be. However, his work remains the first that ever pulled me out of the writing into a deep pondering of the reality he creates in junction with the kind of people that compose the society in...
My Apologies
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
At first it seems daunting, attempting to fill four to six pages with insight pertaining to just one topic: apologies. However, as I reflect, I realize the true difficult task proves summing up the entire universe a single apology unlocks into a paper. Thomas Scheff begins his section about...
A Fine Balance of Potential and Kinetic Energy Establishes Relationship
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In Dream Work, Mary Oliver's poetry delivers a balance of potential and kinetic energy. One poem in particular, “Starfish,” demonstrates that establishing clear relationships within a poem lies in regulating both passive and active language. However, before establishing a relationship,...
Choosing Language that Avoids Sentimentality Elicits Emotional Resonance
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Avoiding sentimentality means writing to fight cliché and elicit emotion through originality of language. In Dig Safe, Stuart Dischell presents poetry that resonates emotionally without breeching melodrama. One poem in particular, “Children of the City,” demonstrates that a careful...
God: Creator or Created?
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
Ever since the Renaissance movement, when the question was finally free of its taboo status, there has been widespread and public debate among philosophers, theologians, and scientists as to the existence of God. With the exception of theologians, the debate has been internal as well as external,...
Symbolism in 'The Scarlet Letter'
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is bursting with symbolism. And, while they do not place a high value on subtlety, these symbols are very effective vehicles for the story's most prominent themes. Perhaps the most prominent is the conflict between what Hawthorne clearly believes is a...
A Narratological Analysis of Marabou Stork Nightmares
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Marabou Stork Nightmares gains its narratological interest from its use of a strange ANP and a variety of ENPs. On the basic level, the narrator is intradiegetic and homodiegetic, writing with internal focalization throughout the novel. However, there is plenty of innovation in the use of this...
Reactions to a Life and Death
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The account of Jack Turner's life, as shown in William Warren Rogers Sr. and Robert David Ward's August Reckoning, demonstrates the drama that occurred in Choctaw County, Alabama in the late 1800s. Jack Turner, a well-known Republican leader and freed slave, was lynched after being accused of...
More Than a Title
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Webster defines “mother” as “a female parent.” While in some cases that may be all there is to a mother, more commonly, a mother has many more qualities than simply being “a female parent.” One mother in particular who has an array of qualities is Amanda Wingfield....
The Search
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Through the evolution of the vampire novel, the search for knowledge and information remains a unifying theme that characterizes the genre. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Stephen King's Salem's Lot, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, this quest for understanding about vampires and their...
The Uncovering of Granny's Disappointments
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Katherine Anne Porter makes Granny sound like she has not done poorly for herself. In reading the first couple of paragraphs of the short story, Porter makes it known that Granny doesn't have it easy. Life is hard on her. On the surface,...
Book Report: Wise Blood
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The Flannery O'Connor novel, Wise Blood, is a tragic story set in the declining south. The characters of the novel, the main character, Hazel Motes, in particular, struggle with their religious identity and suffering throughout the course of the plot. What follows here is a report on the book's...
Sample College Entrance Essay That Was Successful
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
I've always had an odd love for language and literature. I am intrigued by words: the way they look on paper, the sounds they make when spoken, their countless meanings and connotations, the feelings they evoke. I'm fascinated by unusual syntax, which I like to experiment with in my poetry. It...
The Evolution of The Joy of Cooking
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In 1931, while most housewives were raising children and trying to maintain order and a strict budget in the Great Depression era United States, Irma von Starkloff Rombauer (1877-1962) was facing a dilemma. Following her husband's 1930 suicide, the St. Louis widow was forced to find a way to...
Marx's Concept of Class Struggle in Zola's Germinal.
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
To discuss this topic fully, one must first examine the ideas behind Marx's “class struggle.” For Marx, class struggle is the social and economic conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeois classes. This conflict is constant and inevitable in a society in which one class—the...
Failure of Religion in Moby Dick
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Herman Melville crafts Moby Dick as a microcosm of American society in the pre-Civil War era. Melville's microcosm of society is often an allegorical and ironical society in that, while his characters speak to the state of the microcosm, their words have an implication on the state of the real...
The Politics of Reticence and Paralysis
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Why are we sometimes unable to speak to others? In our societies, why are we sometimes unable to communicate - or, communicate truthfully or effectively? We are thrown into cities, let's say, teeming with unimportant people, blank faces, uncaring, hurrying, where sounds of movement and presence...
An Examination of the Pre-Revolutionary War Pamphlet The Alarm. Number V
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
1. The Alarm. Number V is the last of a series of five topical essays published by Hampden, Pseudonym, in 1773. Each of the five essays was published in the month of October. Number V, like the prior Hampden essays, was published in New York, only once, and in only one edition. This is one of...
Masculine Physicians and Prescribers: Assignations for Women in Daisy Miller and "The Yellow Wall-paper"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Both Henry James' Daisy Miller and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-paper” depict male characters that are unable to understand their female counter-points. In Daisy Miller, the suitor Winterbourne fails to comprehend Daisy's true character, and in “The Yellow...
On Contemporary American Literature and Subversions of the Canon
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Toni Morrison's claim that “Canon debate . . . is the clash of cultures” rings true to me. This statement can be looked at in a few ways. One can look at it and say that Morrison is referring to a hypothetical debate between cultures on what works should be included in a canon....
A Fever and Fervor in John Donne's Elegy
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Donne's poem “A Fever” is an elaborate blend of narrative designs. Donne uses the venerable poetic device of elegiac stanza to express mourning for the (anticipated) death of a lover from a fever. There is an explicit surface meaning to this poem as well as implicit sub-textual...
Ambivalence and Photography: Resistance or Exchange in Edward Said's After the Last Sky
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In his essay Picture Theory on the relationship between photograph and text, W.J.T. Mitchell refers to concepts he coins as the “rhetoric of resistance” and the “rhetoric of exchange and cooperation” (Mitchell, 41). The terms “rhetoric of resistance” and...
Innocence Lost: The Soldier Poets of World War I
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Before the Great War, "it had been almost fifty years since any major European power had attacked any similar country" (Childs 40). England did not remember what war was really like; the people knew nothing except for the romantic notion of war. They believed that to fight for one's country...
A Comparison of Shakespeare's Villains Aaron and Iago
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare is known for creating memorable characters, and his villains are often especially intriguing. Aaron and Iago are both villains in revenge tragedies by Shakespeare. In Titus Andronicus, which is believed to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, even though most of the characters are far...
