Even this simple paper is beautiful: American beauty as a philosophical primer
Thesis - 7 pages - Philosophy
An American Beauty, in the most literal of senses, refers to a breed of roses. The breed of roses first seen in the movie of the same name are most likely that breed. The appropriateness of that name is without question. The American Beauty is an aesthetically pleasing rose. It is, as the name...
Books that shaped our history of the Vietnam War
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As long as there is war, and as long as the printing press continues to exist, there will be books about war. Yet as media proliferates, the content of these books changes dramatically. With the dearth of eyewitness accounts of earlier wars, save the journals and varying forms of correspondence...
Perfecting the Human race: Creator, thy name is Man
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Since many believe the notion that a higher power than man, “God,” created mankind, it is assumed that this undertaking can only be performed by God, and therefore anyone else attempting such a task would be blaspheming his efforts. The Promethean myth challenges that the creation of...
The Bell Jar
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In the Bell Jar, Plath explores the marginalization of women. Her fiction, grounded in her own experience, permeates with that experience, revealing not only her commentary, but positions devolved into their most rudimentary parts, as to give the reader a backdrop to view them in greater relief....
Radical poetry: William Blake and the fight against oppression
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The industrial revolution. The term conjures up images of unstoppable progress, the advancement of mankind, economic expansion, and technological achievement. At the same time, it also drags up such sights as the oppression of the common man, dehumanizing working conditions, and dreary and...
Asserting women's intellectual legitimacy through coercive subtlety: An analysis of the narrative voices of Anne Bradstreet and Susanna Rowson
Case study - 6 pages - Literature
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women in America were dominantly expected to be ethical, simple-minded, and largely uneducated members of their community. As a result, female writers would often face strong social scrutiny based on this governing gender subordination because of...
Alice in Plato land: The allegory of wonder
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
For millennia, philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Wittgenstein have argued over the nature of reality, its objectivity and apprehendability. Alice in Wonderland explores the nature of reality using logic, philosophy, and mathematics. The device of the rabbit hole, which establishes the...
Privilege does not pacify: Phillis Wheatley's writing protests slavery despite status
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Phillis Wheatley was brought to New England in 1761 to be a slave. While not every detail of Phillis' life is known, she is considered to have had a good life for someone who was legally property. The Wheatleys encouraged her education and later her career as a poet. After learning to read,...
Can we say that peace is a "recent invention"?
Essay - 6 pages - Politic philosophy
"Man is a wolf for man" wrote the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He meant that men, according to nature, were constantly fighting against each other. The history of International Relations fits completely in this analysis since groups, ethnicities and later nation -states have always...
Peyton Place: The Author, the bestseller and the legacy
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Artistic masterpieces can evolve from any genre. Pablo Picasso's abstract paintings are revered by some as just Leonardo Da Vinci's telling portraits are. The same principle can be applied to works of literature. Frontier adventure stories and political solutions written in the form of science...
Self reliance as a means to discovering identity
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
According to Ralph Ellison, identity is the American theme. This sentiment explains why his highly acclaimed novel, Invisible Man, features a nameless protagonist trying to discover who he is. Ellison also insists that “the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who...
The repression of memory in witchcraft study
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The readings for this week focused around the different approaches to the historical study of witchcraft and witchcraft trials: rationalism versus romanticism. Rationalism focuses more on historical and archeological studies in its attempt to discover a cohesive historical narrative, while...
Finding the man in the golem: Perfection through the word in Gustav Meyrink's "The Golem"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The Golem, according to legend, is a man-made creature, constructed out of wax, inanimate until a written Cabalistic scripture is placed in its mouth. Without the written word, the physical form of the Golem remains a mix of primal elements; without the clay to inspire, the written prayer remains...
Sight and reality in Chestnutt's "The Conjure Woman"
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
There has always been a fundamental distinction between reality and how our mind represents reality. What we see and observe (external sight) comes into conflict with what we interpret and feel (internal sight). Charles W. Chestnutt's The Conjure Woman explores the gulf between the eye and the...
Elsie Venner: A destiny of obscurity
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In it's own words, the novel Elsie Venner, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, has been called “A Romance of Destiny” (Title), “a medicated novel” (Preface 1), and a “test [of] the doctrine of ‘original sin' and human responsibility” (Preface 1). I see very little...
The Bergsonian martial artist : Bruce Lee's philosophies on the martial arts
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
Bruce Lee, international film star, martial arts master, and founder of Jeet Kune Do, received his undergraduate training in Philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle during the early 1960's. He studied Eastern and Western Philosophy, as well as the history of thought. It is unknown...
'The oval portrait' and 'The birthmark': An insight to an era
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Documents, records locked away in vaults, and history books are all excellent way to learn about the past. These are all ways that facts can be found, but that is only part of what can be discovered about past. Literature gives an insight into the culture of the times that facts and figures...
Race, culture, civilisation
Essay - 5 pages - Politic philosophy
As we can observe daily uses of concepts like race, culture, or civilization through newspapers, magazines, TV shows, etc. The need of defining them occurs repeatedly. What then are we talking about with respect to the concept of culture? Is it a political, artistic, or even ethnic pattern of...
Analysis of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
In the popular short story The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe reveals the horrid theme that each person has a vicious wicked side or a dark side that can provoke the person into committing unthinkable sins for no apparent reason. Poe was an expert in writing thrillers which the psyche of the...
Edgar Allan Poe: The man inside his work
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The life of Edgar Allan Poe can easily be found throughout all of his stories and poems. It would be unfair to say that Poe only wrote autobiographical fiction, but his work does parallel his life. His life was a perfect match for great fiction. While it is true that his life was horribly...
Hemingway's art of anxiety: The visual-to-verbal relationship in "The Sun Also Rises"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Hemingway's style depends upon vividness and exactness of visual detail to create the atmosphere of modernism which permeates his works both large and small. Though this richness is due to influence from other writers of the modernist period (as well as the application of his own theory of...
The parallel tragedies of Lily Bart and Tess Durbeyfield: An examination of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles are powerful examples of the American and British realist novel. Both depict the harsh Victorian society in which women were held to unattainable standards of perfection, and both are social commentaries about the...
The traveling musician as the other in two of Eudora Welty's short stories
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Eudora Welty was a writer who sought to identify her native Mississippi in terms of her concept of place. By focusing so often on place, Welty often used the concept of outsiders to emphasize the nature of the place in which the outsiders have come to interact. The outsider characters in...
The origins of human aggression and just war theory
Thesis - 6 pages - Philosophy
Critics of just war theory will remind people of its theoretical nature and inability to prevent a war. While this is certainly true, in that politicians in power are unlikely to attempt to use just war theory to prove that their cause is just before entering a war, the theory enables...
The eccentrics of Margery Kempe, an aspired Saint
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Margery Kempe, the daughter of John Burnham, a popular mayor of Bishop's Lynn, England, was born in 1373. Although she could not read or write, Kempe dictated a biography of herself to be written, that begins with her marriage at the age of “twenty year of age or some deal more”...
The Peanut-Crunching Crowd and the Rubber crotch: How Sylvia Plath's legacy has suffered by the hands of sexism, over-eager feminists, schadenfreude, and gender politics?
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
O'Rourke goes on to say that although poems like “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus” seem “crudely self-involved,” the majority of Plath's poetry is abstract, symbolic, and in general quite distant from the confessional poets with whom she is grouped. Despite this, Plath's...
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, 1938
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
At the end of 1936 George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair was his real name) went to Spain to fight fascism. He got involved with the POUM militia and went to the battlefront of Aragon. He wrote his book ?Homage to Catalonia' just six month after returning to England. He wanted to relate his vision...
The crisis of the European sciences and transcendental phenomenology by Edmond Husserl
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
Edmond Husserl was giving a conference in Vienna in 1935 about what he called the crisis of the sciences. His first question was if there is a real crisis of the sciences, and how he may speak of a crisis of the sciences while they are quite successful. In this context we must remember that the...
"The tortilla curtain", T. C. Boyle
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
To begin with, the author's purpose was certainly to show us the life of an immigrant in America. Thanks to their influence all over the world, the USA is very attractive to immigrants who are looking for employment. The USA represents for immigrants, prosperity and success. This conception...
The (Wo)Man of our dreams: Gender-bending in Takarazuka
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
An extraordinarily attractive actor, with large, dark eyes fringed by long lashes and chiseled features, suddenly appears on an audience walkway (“silver bridge”), much to the delight of adoring fans (Brau 88). With arms extended widely, the actor begins serenading the enraptured crowd...
