Freedom That is Never More Authentic Than When it is Within the Walls of a Prison Cell
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Whether it is read from an historical, psychological, literary, or any other sort of applicable perspective, the reader must admit that Toni Morrison's novel Sula allows itself be read in many different ways. Perhaps that is one of the beauties of the book: people from many different backgrounds...
The Fall of Greece, The Rise of Rome
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Greece: City-States in Conflict The Peloponnesian War was waged mostly between Sparta and Athens, although both had outside allies. After Sparta defeated Athens, the balance of power should have shifted to leave Sparta in the role of empire-builder, but the Spartans were unable to unify the...
Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Frederick Douglass autobiography has a points of departure of numerous critical studies of Afro-American literature, and origin of black fictional and non-fictional prose. There are scenes where the character learns to read, if often echoed in later black narratives. Tension between his desire to...
Mysteries in New York - The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
One night in New York, Quinn, a writer, is telephoned by someone asking to speak to Paul Auster, a private detective. At first, he hangs up but at the second call, interested, he decides to play the role of this detective and accepts a meeting. He is asked by Peter Stillman to follow his father...
Darkness and Light in "Heart of Darkness"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The battle between light and darkness is being waged right now, in every corner of the earth. This war has been fought since time began. In every realm of society, opposites counterbalance each other. The balance of powers in the government allows the American people to have a say in the...
The Open Boat
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In the story of “The Open Boat”, Stephen Crane has taken the time to masterfully portray a story that is so very dear to his life. Back in 1897, Crane went through the horrific experience of crashing his boat and being stranded for nearly 30 hours. This experience became so near and...
The Making of the Lady of Shalott's Soul
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott” is the story of an isolated woman who breaks free of her prison in order to enter the world around her. Through the use of vivid imagery and the strategic placement of words and phrases within the narrative structure of the poem, Tennyson builds a...
Bakhtin's Dialogism In The Big Sleep
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin is a philosopher and theorist who defies easy categorization. He has been associated with Marxist Literary critics, Russian Formalists and structuralists. While he has elements in common with all three, he also differs greatly from them in fundamental ways. His works and...
Reflections on 'A Clockwork Orange'
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
It's a 1st person narrative through Alex's eyes. The first 3-4 pages are used in describing the ‘Korova Milk Bar' and its inhabitants. It sells milk laced with drugs. It appears that he is the leader in a gang. There is a brief description of the members in his gang. He seems to be the...
Truth in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In his 'Gulliver's Travels: A Critical Study', A. W. Eddy defines Swift's work as a response to the 'popular craze for discovery' that prevailed during the 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries. Indeed, the forerunners of Gulliver's Travels (1735) are numerous....
Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning by Mark Twain : A Commentary
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The story apparently takes place in a carriage of a train and it is told by a certain Mr. McWilliams to the listener, who is in fact re-telling and transmitting Mr. McWilliams words. We have only a part of his so called 'talk', which actually resembles more a tall-tale than anything else...
An Analysis of Two Scenes from Anne Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The most important characters of the story, La Motte and his wife, are well known. We already know a lot about them for, as the story opens, they are leaving Paris because La Motte is being persecuted for the debts he has accumulated by gambling. In the preceding scene, the La Motte family have...
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (A Summary)
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The story of Gatsby can be regarded as the story of universal ideas, which came to be defined in the 1920s. On the surface, it tells the story of thwarted love between some of the characters. On the background, however, it encompasses a larger set of problems. For example, it is partly focused...
Analysis of Ode on Melancholy by John Keats - publié le 16/04/2008
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Ode on Melancholy is an example of a Pindaric ode, i.e., it is composed in iambic pentameter (we have some occasional spondees too), while the rhyme scheme is a b a b c d e c d e for the first two stanzas and a b a b c d e d c e for the third and last one. We have three stanzas, the first one...
The Parent-Child Dynamic: Ernest Hemingway Vs Winesburg
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Ernest Hemingway's first collection of stories, In Our Time, published in 1925, was heavily influenced by his then friend Sherwood Anderson's 1919 collection Winesburg, Ohio. The most notable difference in the times in which the stories are set is Winesburg, Ohio is set before World War I, and...
Emasculation: Are Men in Control or Women
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States, along with much of the world, saw great strides made in the feminist movement. The rights of and respect toward women were beginning to take an upward momentum, and at the same time, traditional ideas of masculine infallibility...
Kings as Philosophers and Philosophers as Kings
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Literature
In books 5 and 6 of Plato's Republic, the issue of who should rule society is addressed. Through out the dialogue, the character Socrates makes several arguments for the intelligence, virtue and worth of philosophers as people and as potential rulers. In this paper I will examine his arguments...
The Troubles With Banking: Implanting Submissiveness, Instilling Patriotism
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Paulo Freire's “problem-posing” instructional method in his essay “The ‘Banking' Concept of Education” is an essential educational technique. Freire's proposed approach to education not only calls for change in educational practices, it also holds greater sociopolitical...
History, Memory, and Relationships with the Past in James Joyce's Ulysses
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The past can be a daunting thing. From personal memory to history at large, the past has the power to bury those unable to establish a healthy relationship with it. One can easily become trapped - paralyzed - in the past through guilt, regret, or nostalgia, emotions generated based upon...
Patriarchal Sexuality of the Internalized Document in Corregidora
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The adage “history repeats itself,” like many adages, sometimes seem disingenuous; they are neatly packaged concepts that lack any definitive details that would give one a context to consider them properly. In Corregidora, there is an expansion of this idea of history and repetition....
'Otherness' and the Fact and Fancy Dichotomy in Charles Dickens' Hard Times
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
“Otherness” describes a person engaging in the reflexive act of defining their identity in reference to another person. In this way, Otherness is a definitive means of exploring the relationships between social castes and gender relationships. In Hard Times, these two types of Otherness...
'An Other of the Other' in Emile Zola's Nana and Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening'
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Emile Zola and Kate Chopin both present texts that depict the fall of a heroine. Nana and Edna Pontellier Naturalistically represent archetypal women of the late 19th century; Nana, as a courtesan, represents the rising lower class, and Edna representing the upper-middle class. Despite the...
A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The theme I select to examine in A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles, is the power of love. Love in the time of Drosilla and Charikles was an entirely different concept. Especially from what we are accustomed to today. Loving someone fifty years ago, isn't even close to how we love a...
Technology in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The technology in our world has been both a beneficial force and a destructive one. On one hand, technology has made our world a much simpler place to live in, and it is hard to imagine the world we live in today without it. Just about everything we do, from shopping for groceries to paying your...
The Question of Morality Film Noir
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Moral ambiguity is a central theme in John Huston's film The Maltese Falcon (1941) and in Billy Wilder's film Double Indemnity (1944) and James M. Cain's novel by the same title. The films and novel follow characters whose motives are questionable and morally problematic. This essay will discuss...
The Issue of Hope and Redemption in Film Noir: Living Day-to-Day in the Present, or Living for the Future?
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The films Out of the Past, Force of Evil, and Double Indemnity are narratives that contain similar noir themes. All three narratives follow troubled male characters who must sever ties with their pasts in order to move forward to a hopeful and happy future. Two of these characters succeed,...
A God with Different Faces: Conditions for the Redemption of Everyman and for the Condemnation of Doctor Faustus
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Literature
The themes of mankind's redemption from sin and his place in the afterlife are of central importance to the Middle English play Everyman and the Renaissance play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Both Everyman and Doctor Faustus concentrate on the redemption of mankind, but because of the...
The Disparate Faces of God in the Visions of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Literature
In “A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich” by Julian of Norwich and “The Book of Margery Kempe” by Margery Kempe, each author gives literary descriptions of her own holy visions. In each description of a vision or a revelation in the two works, each author...
Iago, an Immoral Monster
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Literature
Othello, Shakespeare's tragedy, a story of jealousy, envy, betrayal and death displays the evil masterminding of a single individual. The ambitious Iago, a character filled with jealousy uses his manipulative traits to penetrate the minds of the play's characters to set them on a course of...
The Rebellious Woman: Gender and Sexuality in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market
Tutorials/exercises - 8 pages - Literature
One cannot help but notice the numerous interpretations of Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” that pertain to either gender, sex, or religion. The poem itself has been scrutinized more often than one can count, critics often referring to its erotic subtext and similarities to various...
