King Lear, by William Shakespeare: My experience of reading Shakespeare - published: 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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" - publié le 15/01/2009
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" - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - published: 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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) - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - published: 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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) - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - published: 15/01/2009
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 - published: 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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 - publié le 15/01/2009
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...
Place, race and identity in Langston Hughes' "A Toast to Harlem" - publié le 15/01/2009
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
“A Toast to Harlem” is an extract from a volume of selections entitled The Best Of Simple which was published in 1961. The author, Langston Hughes, was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902 and died in 1967. He is known as one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem...
How does "Boating for Beginners" (Jeanette Winterson) use intertextuality to comment the world? - publié le 15/01/2009
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Boating for Beginners is a novel by Jeanette Winterson which belongs to post-modern literature and can be defined as a re-writing of the Bible. In her text, she uses a literary device called intertextuality in order to make comments on what she thinks is wrong in our modern society and for what...
Barbara Blaugdone's An Account Of The Travels Sufferings & persecutions - publié le 15/01/2009
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Barbara Blaugdone was born in England in 1609. Her journal entitled An Account OF THE TRAVELS; Sufferings & Persecutions was published in 1691. It is an autobiographical work where she relates her personal and perilous adventures, as a testimony of what she endured when she traveled both in...
"Go tell it on the mountain" of James Baldwin - publié le 15/01/2009
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in 1953; it is James Baldwin's first novel and a real success. It took him ten years to complete this work, he was a very polyvalent writer and he published novels: Another Country (1962), short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965) scripts and plays: The...
Symbolism of geography in Thomas More's "Utopia" - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Thomas More was born in 1478 at a time when England was in transition between Feudalism and the early Renaissance. More was a lawyer, a historian, a philosopher and became Henry VIII's chancellor in 1529. When Thomas More refused to convert himself to Protestantism, he was accused of being a...
Holocaust in American life by Peter Novick 1999 - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
Peter Novick is a professor of History in the University of Chicago. After "The Noble Dream : The "objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession" in 1988, in which he criticizes the idea of an ideal objective and neutral historical work, he published "The Holocaust in the American...
How can MacIntyre claim that some traditions, but not others, can escape the problem of incommensurability in their moral reasoning? - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
From the moment we abandoned Aristotle's teleology, MacIntyre believes, there has been no proper moral philosophy, but only philosophers "working ... with bits and pieces of philosophies which are detached from their original pre-Enlightenment settings in which they were comprehensible and...
How is the traditional notion of subject challenged in "Boating for Beginners?" (Jeanette Winterson)? - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Boating for Beginners is the second novel published by Jeanette Winterson in 1985. It deals with the growing up of Gloria Munde, who seeks her way in the world. The resemblance between Gloria Munde and Jeanette Winterson is striking and some elements of Gloria's life echo Jeanette's: both...
Judaism and Rechtsstaat - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
The modern political philosophy, influenced by the Enlightenment and the ideal of individual liberty developed by Locke, considers that the political sphere must be independent from the religious sphere. In Israel, this separation between the State and the religion is not so clear. The...
"The Madonna of Excelsior" by Zakes Mda: The Garden Party - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
"The Garden Party" is the second chapter of Zakes Mda's fourth novel The Madonna of Excelsior which was published in 2001. The author was born in Hershel in 1948 and grew up in Lesotho where his family emigrated for political reasons. He left South Africa in 1963 for the United States where...
Saqiyuk - Stories from the lives of three Inuit Women by Nancy Wachowich - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Saqiyuq is a collection of stories from the lives of three Inuit women: Apphia, Rhoda and Sandra. It consists of biographies and accounts from these three generations. This book enables the reader to see the great evolution of the Inuit lifestyle during the twentieth century. The author, Nancy...
