Antigone Commentary
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Sophocles wrote three plays about Thebes and while the tragedy of Antigone is chronologically the third and last of these, it was ironically written first out of them. It opens up, giving little background, with the two sisters Antigone and Ismene discussing their two now deceased brothers in...
Carpe Diem? Try Tomorrow
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
Initially, I sat in front of a blank page contemplating how to start the introduction, how to draw the reader in. But after an hour, it became clear to me that I could not easily conjure up a stylish lead-in with the subject matter. So here I am addressing the issue flat out. Does this make me...
The North Indian Tabla Drum as Saivite Hindu Religious Path
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
The traditions of Hindustani (North Indian) tabla drumming gather the various strands of culture that exist in India into a complex social tapestry. In order to understand the cultural phenomenon of tabla music, it must be heard within the context of an Indian heritage originating from a wide...
How can MacIntyre claim that some traditions, but not others, can escape the problem of incommensurability in their moral reasoning?
Essay - 5 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...
Anthrologists in Disagreement over Cockfighting
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
In anthropological theory there has been a clear division and consistent debate between cultural materialists and non-materialist symbolic anthropologists. Theorists such as Marvin Harris and Julian Steward are exemplary of the materialist position, while others such as Sherry B. Ortner and...
Symbolism of geography in Thomas More's "Utopia"
Book review - 5 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...
John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": Chapter 3
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...
"Go tell it on the mountain" of James Baldwin
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...
How does "Boating for Beginners" (Jeanette Winterson) use intertextuality to comment the world?
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...
How is the traditional notion of subject challenged in "Boating for Beginners?" (Jeanette Winterson)?
Book review - 5 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...
Barbara Blaugdone's An Account Of The Travels Sufferings & persecutions
Book review - 7 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...
Place, race and identity in Langston Hughes' "A Toast to Harlem"
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...
"The Madonna of Excelsior" by Zakes Mda: The Garden Party
Text commentary - 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...
"Dancing with Dogma. Britain under Thatcherism" by Ian Gilmour - publié le 21/11/2007
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The document under study here is extracted from Dancing with Dogma. Britain under Thatcherism, a book by Ian Gilmour, a Scottish leading figure on the liberal, or "wet", left-wing of the Conservative party, essentially under the governments of Heath and Thatcher. The piece of writing concentrates...
Postmodernism: Moving Toward Transcendence
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The conception of a utopian society has both motivated and haunted countless civilizations since the dawn of time. Sublime and intangible, the aspiration to reach a “perfect” society is arguably the heart of one of the world's most significant movements; modernism. Proponents of...
An Animal's place in America
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In 1975, an Australian philosopher by the name of Peter Singer first published his controversial book Animal Liberation. It has since become widely known as the beginning of the current “animal liberation movement” in America. The book preached the virtues of vegetarianism and vilified...
The Good-Morrow
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
“The Good-Morrow” is a story written by John Donne that talks about two lovers finding each other, and realizing that nothing in the world ever has or will matter. I believe that the lover's Donne is speaking about are himself and a lover of the past. However, the poem is not just about...
Masculinity in The Woman in White
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The novel, The Woman in White, “seeks to revise recent accounts of the model of male identity posited by the first sensation novel”(Ablow, Par. 4). In The Woman in White, the author, Wilkie Collins, presents masculinity through the character of Marian Holcombe at a time when femininity...
The Flavor and Sound of Liberation
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
The versatile musical functionality of the tabla reflects its utility as an instrument of contemplation. As the rhythmic expression of the drone, the tabla focuses the listener's attention on the present musical moment. From a psychological perspective, “the basis of listening is the...
Devotion and Musical Practice in North India
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
The guru-shisya parampara is the system of master/disciple lineage that characterizes the traditional education system of North Indian music. The term parampara, ‘disciplic succession,' is introduced in the Bhagavad-gita (4.2), when Krsna tells Arjuna: “This Knowledge of yoga was...
Longing For HER: Ferlinghetti's Mad Quest for the Muse
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
While Lawrence Ferlinghetti makes no claim to being enlightened, his poetry is nonetheless a record of and reaction to the sacred journey. While it is illuminating to read words of the awakened prophets of world history, I think it can be as rewarding to read the work of those who, sincere in...
The Inner Soundscape of Nada-Yoga: Sonic Path of Union
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Himalayan religious traditions (Saivite Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Tibetan Bon-po) are related by a common heritage of esoteric practices intended to unify the religious aspirant with the ultimate reality (as defined by the particular tradition). This gnosis is defined variously as dzogchen...
Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is a novel that with its darkly scathing humor attempts to impart the message that the plasticity of the present tense is illusory by exposing the superficialities of California's mortuary business. The contemporaneous effect that living in a world where a perverse...
Notes From Underground: The Autonomic Remonstrance of a Persona
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Dostoevsky's classic, Notes From Underground maintains the transient ability to pass through the realm of classic literature and into the incendiary realm of the literary fiends who feed on accumulated grotesqueries. This transmutability is painfully not shared with the fabricated persona of the...
Bleeding Death: Mortality and Acceptance in Catch-22
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The death toll during World War I surmounted fifteen million. The second World War erased the lives of fifty-five million, nearly five million of which were civilian Jews exterminated throughout Hitler's tyranny. Nine million died during the Russian Revolution, and twenty million more died...
A Fictional History: Shakespeare, England and the Importance of Historical Fiction
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
It is almost amazing, the overwhelming feeling of disgust that infiltrates a high school classroom whenever the subject is history. A kind of primitive competition to find the few kids who actually enjoy the class and bribe them for photocopies of notes and exam answers suffocates like a humid...
Concise Summary of Descartes' Reasoning in "Meditations on First Philosophy"
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Descartes' Meditation One sets out his purpose of creating a new scientific paradigm to be based on a foundation built above the wreckage of his former opinions. He sought a reason to doubt the entire canon of his opinions so that he might begin “to establish anything firm and lasting in the...
Exposition of Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in Philosophy
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Taking their cue from the scientific philosophy of Francis Bacon, the thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed that the mind acted as a mirror, simply reflecting images of outward objects onto the subjective self. Immanuel Kant proposed a reorientation in which the relation between subject and...
Duality in Mahayana Buddhist Scriptures
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Buddha's teachings, although expressive of ultimate reality, have been conveyed through the relative medium of language. This discrepancy has led to the invocation of dichotomies such as “reality versus unreality”, “existence versus nonexistence” and “truth versus...
Essay about The Once And Future King by T.H White, Henry IV by Shakespeare, linked to the archetypal values in Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Adventure.
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Perhaps the very word “hero” should suffer a live vivisection for all of its purported morality and bloody, patriarchal implications. There are many universal components of the hero as explored and anatomized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero's Adventure. You've seen it many times before;...
