Gilgamesh and Ramayana: The value of the epic
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
What is an epic? The epic is traditionally defined as a long narrative poem which relates the adventures, journeys and deeds of a central hero. These narrative poems are the oldest known works of literature and some, like Gilgamesh, even date back to pre-history - the time period prior to the...
Annotated Bibliography - A Farewell to Arms
Book review - 27 pages - Literature
Killinger's argumentation is very convincing. He presents the connection between Hemingway's work and the existentialist movement in a tremendously clear and effective way. Every aspect of existentialism is covered, and backed with concrete examples and quotations from the text. The...
Catch-22 : black comedy or satire ?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Catch-22, often considered as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century, is also often analyzed as being either satirical, or characteristic of the theater of the absurd, or even both. At first sight, this appears to be totally irrelevant, given the subtle but still significant...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies - On rascals (Chap. 7)
Text commentary - 1 pages - Literature
What we have here is an extract from the novel the Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Earlier in the novel, we discovered the main character, Nathan Glass, a 60 year old man in remission from cancer. He was looking for a quiet place to die, but after a moment, he...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies An unexpected encounter "I lost contact" "happy and rich"
Text commentary - 1 pages - Literature
This text is an extract from the novel Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Earlier in the novel, we discovered the main character, Nathan Glass, a 60 years old man in remission from cancer. He was looking for a quiet place to die. In fact, someone recommended him...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies - Dream days at the hotel existence (Chap. 19) - "A steep dirt road" and "except having children"
Text commentary - 1 pages - Literature
What we have here is an extract from the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Earlier in the novel, we discovered the main character, Nathan Glass, a sixty year old man in remission from cancer. He was looking for a quiet place to die. However, after a moment...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies A night of eating and drinking - "I'm not talking" - "inside your dreams"
Text commentary - 1 pages - Literature
What we have here is an extract form the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Here, we are in the 1st half of the novel and 3 characters are present: Tom, Nathan and Harry. Nathan, the main character of the book, is Tom's uncle, and Harry is Tom's...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies Farewell to the court (Chap. 3)
Text commentary - 1 pages - Literature
What we are about to study is an extract from the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Here, we are at the beginning of the novel, where Nathan and Tom are having lunch and talking about Tom's activities. We may wonder in what ways the passage is...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies - Overture (Chap. 1) "It was early" - "were lost forever"
Text commentary - 1 pages - Literature
This text is an extract from the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Earlier in the novel, we discovered the main character, Nathan Glass, a 60 year old man in remission from cancer. He was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn to...
Review of 'The dry salvages' by T.S. Eliot
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
“The river is within us, the sea is all about us” (line 15.) In his poem The Dry Salvages, T.S. Eliot uses the river, the smooth imagery of thin water, seeping through the countryside as an allegory of the quiet, which dwells underneath the surface of us all. The Dry Salvages is the...
Subjectivity in Wollstonecraft's 'A vindication of the rights of a woman'
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The romantic period in English literature littered the written landscape with fresh, progressive works. By the later part of the eighteenth century, the artistic backbone of artists and intellectuals pushed against traditional art, representing, instead, a stronger emphasis on the emotional...
Theatre presentation: Italian futurism and the theatre Itself
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
The futurist movement in theatre began around 1909 with Flippo Marrinetti's publication of the first Futurist Manifesto. Francesco Cangiullo, born in Naples in 1888. He was a poet playwright, theorist, and visual artist wrote several Futurist sintesi (which is a very short play). In 1914 he wrote...
Theatre of the absurd
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
The Theatre of the Absurd (French: Théâtre de l'Absurde) was a movement that happened in the late 1940's through the 1960's. The term was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of a book on the subject which was first published in 1961. Later there were 2 revised versions,...
To hell and back: A human's tale by Dante Alighieri
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
When asked to name the most influential authors in the history of literature, a person would most likely refer to authors whose acclaim is so great, one only has to say a single part of his or her name. Poets and playwrights, these authors composed works that transcend time and place and carry...
Shall we proceed: Fatalist fetishes in "Lift not the painted veil"
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Life is the most beautiful disaster. It is a dichotomous wrenching of mind and body, destiny and fate, knowledge and understanding, which by the very end—in those precious last moments, one is left only with the question… ‘Will there come a light, or just darkness'? If one wishes...
The Irish literature
Thesis - 9 pages - Literature
Who is Irish, who are the Irish, what makes an Irish writer Irish? Why does he/she have to be Irish, follow and become part of some tradition, this question of who/what is Irish runs parallel to whom and what is ‘I'? I can stand for identity in that it is I the writer (a writer, not this...
Comparative analysis of poetry
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Language is the most important aspect in poetry or rather the author's essential key to achieving their main objective - grabbing the reader's attention and keeping throughout the poem's entirety. Many poets are unsuccessful in doing so simply because they believe that poetry should be difficult...
Comparing narrative in fiction and nonfiction
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Fiction in definition is the works of literature whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact such as poems, novels and short stories (American Heritage Dictionary; 2006). Nonfiction is defined as works of literature comprising of narrative prose dealing with...
We are what we repeat: Repetition and identity construction in Derrida and Butler
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Philosophical and ideological traditions permeate everywhere from popular thought, culture, and subjective experience to science, literature, and politics. In past decades, critical thinkers have engaged in re-determinations and restructurings of philosophical traditions that presuppose or...
Analysis of - There eyes were watching god by Zora Neale Hurston
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The novel starts by saying that men and women are different. Men wish for what they can't have in vain, while women on the other hand are more realistic in that their goals are actually attainable. And like other women of her time the lead character Janie Mae Crawford aims for a real...
The Black Pages book review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In the poem “I hope You Believe Me”, Heru strives to teach about the oppression faced by people of African descent through metaphors. Heru's poem has three strengths. It is provoking, articulate and subtlety reflects on various black thoughts on oppression. The poem is provoking due to...
Observing the life and times of a 'Kaffir Boy'
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Emotion and sensitivity engulf the reader into the world of this powerful memoir that rightfully and adequately portrays the story of a youth coming of age in apartheid South Africa. On all levels the main character in Kaffir Boy, Johannes was demeaned by whites for being African with a tribal...
The hope of the poet
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Not until the end of his career as a poet, albeit a mere couple years, does Keats write perhaps his most illuminating lines, clearly communicating the end to which he aspires as a writer: ‘The poet and the dreamer are distinct / Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes / And that the height of...
Ben Edwards - The return
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
He was the best, once, now reduced to this. The decaying rooms of this dilapidated construction are not fit for humans to reside, just birds and perhaps the odd rodent. Walking through the huge floor to ceiling windows he heard the crunch of broken glass under his feet, vandals and time really...
This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona: A break with cultural assumptions of identity amongst contemporary Native Americans
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The following dissertation will focus on the short story, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” by Sherman Alexie. This document will outline continual themes on cultural assumptions regarding identity, and based on the perspective of the short story and its interplay, will...
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
Text commentary - 3 pages - Literature
The History of love is a novel written by Nicole Krauss and was published in 2006. First of all, this excerpt is astonishing as far as the figure of the narrator is concerned. As we do not know the novel and its plot, we will consider that the narrator is a masculine child feeling his first love...
The Sea, John Banville (p. 112-114)
Text commentary - 3 pages - Literature
The Sea is a novel written by John Banville. Even if it was published in 2006, its story takes place at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century in France. This extract begins with the meeting and the marriage of Pierre Bonnard and Marthe de Méligny. Then, it offers a long...
The personal universal: Pronouns and identity in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Ralph Emerson's individualist essay, “Self-Reliance”, is an open forum of what is necessary to be independent and skeptical of the ideas of others. Emerson seems obsessed with what truly defines the character of a man, but this obsession seems to stem in part from his own example....
Murdering the past: Influence and immortality in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
On first reading, the majority of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories are concerned with death in a variety of different forms. Whether Poe is describing murder, the fear of being killed, characters previously deceased who return to life, or those who still live being buried prematurely, the subject...
Critical review of the series: Twilight
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Janice Radway's article, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” Radway analyzes a group of suburban housewives who tend to read romance novels as an escape from their everyday lives as wives and mothers. Similarly, the popularity of the teenage vampire book...
