The Ultimate Usefulness of Freedom
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Kant's views on social and moral progress have always been described as being “ahead of his time,” probably because of the emphasis on freedom in many of his works. According to Kant, freedom is absolutely necessary for any kind of progress. Freedom is almost always tied to reason, and...
"With their tongues cocked and loaded:"The power of language and dialect in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Zora Neale Hurston was a cultural anthropologist for her own culture. She spent much of her life recording the stories and saying of the people around her, both in Harlem and abroad in the American South. She poured her energy into representing people the way she saw them, or heard them, as the...
Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant on the Improvement of Society
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
n the Preface to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes, “The last thing I should promise would be to “improve” mankind.” Although it was not Nietzsche's aim to improve life for the majority, it was the main focus of many of the writings of his predecessors and contemporaries....
Owning Perfection: The Struggle between Science and Nature in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark."
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In many love poems written to praise the beauty or virtue of a woman, the woman or the woman's love is often seen as a material possession or a thing to be owned. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Birthmark,” the woman is seen as something to be improved upon and perfected. Love is not only...
North, by Seamus Heaney
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
In 1975, Seamus Heaney came out with his fourth book of poetry, North. Although the third volume, “Wintering Out” foreshadows many of the same themes, it is North, according to several critics that develops these themes, and establishes a turning point in Heaney's poetry. According to...
The Trojan Women
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Euripides' Trojan Women exemplifies the cruelty and painful consequences of war, and how they affect women by leaving them powerless and without choices. Several episodes in the play illustrate this loss of choice and power, the death of Astyanax, the sexual slavery of Cassandra and Andromache,...
Poet, Humanist, Revolutionary: The Good Morning Revolution poems of Langston Hughes.
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
At the time, Hughes was in the Soviet Union, touring its various countries and struggling to put together the film “Black and White” with some fellow writers and actors. The manuscript Hughes sent Van Vechten that spring was some of Hughes' most radical work. It praised Soviet...
The Transience of Identity and the Unpredictability of Surveillance in City of Glass
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Through the use of the character Daniel Quinn, author Paul Auster is arguing against the idea that identity is static and also against the idea that surveillance is perfect. This paper explores the complex life of Quinn by taking a good look at every character that he tries to become. It starts...
Alisoun, Dorigen, and the Conventions of Women
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Domestic and social propriety are the most important concerns of wives of the era exemplified in The Canterbury Tales. Volumes of texts -- also known as deportment books -- are used to expound on domestic and social propriety and to teach young women the expectations of women in general, and in...
When China Ruled the Seas
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When China Ruled the Seas is a discourse on the histories of China's naval prowess. The book begins with early Chinese history, detailing China's first ships, and the somewhat disputable evidence of China's colonization and exploration of places such as Japan, North America, Australia, and the...
Universal Science Fiction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to Jane Donawerth in Frankenstein's Daughters, the only way for women to write science fiction, is for them to change the rules. This is certainly the case with Octavia Butler's “Bloodchild”. In Butler's Nebula award winning short story, Butler tells the tale of Gan, a young...
Japanese Culture
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Although the books, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima, are completely different works, both have uncannily similar characters. Each main character from these two books has at least one character in the other book who shares some of their...
Medea
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When first comparing the play Medea and Aristotle's Poetics, many people feel that the lead character, Medea, breaks every requirement for being a tragic character. But when we take a step back and view Medea at a different angle, we see that she does actually fit every aspect of Aristotle's...
The Effects of Christ
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
One of the central themes of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is love. Stowe felt that love could bring an end to the evils of slavery, and be a redemptive force. There is one character in this novel that embodies complete, unfaltering, and unconditional love: this character is Eva...
What's Your Perspective?
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Most experienced readers do not have a hard time discerning authorial intent within an individual work or analyzing themes within that piece. Herman Melville's Benito Cereno however, provides a challenge. Melville intricately weaves this story so that no single interpretation fits, and it forces...
Six feet of the country, by Nadine Gordimer - publié le 06/12/2007
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
How does Nadine Gordimer denounce Apartheid in this short story? Judging from this text, do you think she uses literature as a political weapon? In “Six Feet of the Country”, a short story written in 1956, the South-African white author Nadine Gordimer tells the story of a white man and...
Sexual Taboo: Vampire Myths and Stories
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The belief in vampires has been around for most of recorded history, dating back before the bible and Ancient Egypt to Babylonian demonology and very early Sumerian mythology . Although, it was never the mythology that we think of today; in those times it was a belief rooted just as strongly as...
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...
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...
