Discuss the portrayal of city life in a group of works - published: 15/01/2009
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In this essay, we will look at how artists portray city life, how they make the most common things in our lives becoming special and how they transform reality into art. Indeed, everyday, ordinary life often becomes special under their brushes. Some of them like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec liked...
Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare's criticism of the XVIIth century's anti-feminism - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
like in his other Roman plays like Julius Caesar, Shakespeare used in Antony and Cleopatra the description of the Roman society to describe his own society. But in this play the main point of analysis was not politics but the place of women in the society. During the XVIth and XVIIth centuries,...
Symbolism of geography in Thomas More's "Utopia" - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 6 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...
Holocaust in American life by Peter Novick 1999 - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
Peter Novick is a professor of History in the University of Chicago. After "The Noble Dream : The "objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession" in 1988, in which he criticizes the idea of an ideal objective and neutral historical work, he published "The Holocaust in the American...
How is the traditional notion of subject challenged in "Boating for Beginners?" (Jeanette Winterson)? - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 6 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...
"The Madonna of Excelsior" by Zakes Mda: The Garden Party - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 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...
Saqiyuk - Stories from the lives of three Inuit Women by Nancy Wachowich - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Saqiyuq is a collection of stories from the lives of three Inuit women: Apphia, Rhoda and Sandra. It consists of biographies and accounts from these three generations. This book enables the reader to see the great evolution of the Inuit lifestyle during the twentieth century. The author, Nancy...
"Wonderland as a poetic world" - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Published in 1865, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland offers us a story characterized by humour, fantasy and nonsense. Originally entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground, it tells how the young Alice dreams she follows a White Rabbit down to a rabbit hole, and how she strolls in a...
The Clash Of Civilization Samuel Phillips Huntington - publié le 13/01/2009
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Sixteen years ago Gorbatchev announced on television that he resigned as the President of the USSR, the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin and on December 26th 1991, the Supreme Soviet Court recognized the extinction of the Soviet Union: the USSR was no more. After more than fifty years of...
"No artist tolerates reality" - Nietzsche. To what extend is this true in the work of Yeats and Eliot? - publié le 13/01/2009
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
"No artist tolerates reality", as far as this quotation of Nietzsche is concerned, it is true that artists - and therefore writers - cannot tolerate reality, and that is the reason why they often aim at changing this reality through their art, and in the case of writers, through their written...
Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot': Between Modernism and Postmodernism
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Samuel Beckett's most famous play Waiting for Godot was first written in French in 1948 and translated in English in 1952, that is to say shortly after the end of World War II. At that time, the threat of the Cold War, the recent horror of the concentration camps and the invention of the...
Works of literature often contain a secret which is eventually revealed with great dramatic effect - publié le 13/01/2009
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Henrik Ibsen in his drama A Doll's House vividly shocked his contemporary audiences of 1879, unaccustomed to the radical and novel insights on the relationship between husband and wife he displayed through his heroines' emancipation, from her role of a self content wife in a superficial marriage...
Terror and Horror in the Fantastic Novels: Walpole's The Castle Of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula - publié le 12/01/2009
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The concepts of terror and horror are key factors in the Fantastic and Gothic novel. This literary genre appeared with Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1765 and then flourished until 1830; it mainly developed during the historical period of the Enlightenment and can be seen as an alternative to...
Cleopatra: Shakespeare's analysis of women's alienation - publié le 12/01/2009
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to Yves Bonnefoy Shakespeare wanted to do with Antony and Cleopatra more than a political analysis of Rome. Indeed, Shakespeare analysed in this play the place of women in the Roman society, in order to make a comparison with their role in his own society. At the beginning of the XVIIth...
Excess in Blake's poetry
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The usage of excess is a seducing and appealing concept, and therefore has to be studied cautiously. Essentially, the term ?excess' is used to describe amounts that are greater than needed, allowed or usual. It can also be associated with a behavior that is unacceptable because it is...
Blanche as the centre of A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams)
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The works of Tennessee Williams is very complex because it aims at reaching the inmost depths of humanity. To that end, Williams usually works on topics like evolution or maybe degeneration of a character in a specific atmosphere and environment, among people and institutions that is hostile most...
Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1917 - publié le 09/01/2009
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The text to be commented upon is a poem written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 entitled Anthem for doomed youth. It is a petrarchan sonnet, a sort of diptych with two different parts which hinges upon lines 9 and 10. The title is a key for the interpretation of the sonnet which is an ideological poem, a...
Structure and texture in the "Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford - published: 09/01/2009
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
The Good Soldier is a novel written in 1914 by Ford Madox Ford and published in March 1915. This novel is considered as the best book of pre-war period. It is also considered as a modernist work, and in fact, many modernist innovations, as well as impressionist ones, are present throughout the...
Transformations of literature: Augustine's 'Confessions' and Virgil's 'Aeneid'
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Both St. Augustine's Confessions and Virgil's epic The Aeneid marked a new direction in literature for the West. Each one was inspired by the works of previous authors, but was willing to forge a new literature for their times. In the Aeneid, Virgil established Rome as indebted to the...
Frankenstein and King Lear: A look into religion, politics and literature
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Religion has foundation in our lives whether we choose to identify it or not. By recognizing the literary works of Mary Shelley and Shakespeare, we can intellectually inherit the limitations of our power as human beings and the important role the Judeo-Christian God plays in our political, social...
Just vengeance or righteous follies; which Hamlet did you see?
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
William Richardson describes Hamlet's character as one “moved by finer principles, by an exquisite sense of virtue, of moral beauty and turpitude.” (Hoy 147) Richardson goes on to say that a man like Hamlet “will find [his sense of moral excellence] a source of pleasure and of pain...
William Blake's "Wall of words" on circular reasoning
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
“And the salt ocean rolled englob'd.” (Blake Pl. 28.23) The previous line comes from one of Blake's prophetic works, “The First Book of Urizen,” and is very typical of a Blake ending. More than a century before Stanley Kunitz was born, Blake had mastered the technique...
Orwell & controversy
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
I am going to talk about one of the best-known authors of the 20th century, George Orwell. '1984' and 'Animal Farm' are considered as major pieces of anti-totalitarianism literacy, and above all as masterpieces in the British literature. It's quite interesting to look into...
Class and gender in the context of race in Toomer's Cane and Larsen's Quicksand
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
A poem by Langston Hughes precedes the body of Larsen's text, 'Quicksand', which asks: 'My old man died in a fine big house/ My ma died in a shack/ I wonder where I'm going to die/ Being neither white nor black?'. This poem suggests the reading frame of the rest of the...
Transnationalism in Darkwater : using the global perspective to help redefine issues in the homeland
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Du Bois', 'Darkwater' compiles varied genres of writing, discussing the standing of the African Americans in the early 20th century in the US society. Initially published in 1920, the issues of World War I backdrop a discussion of the American government in relation to the...
American Jews and politics in the selected works of Philip Roth and Joseph Heller
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The works of Joseph Heller and Philip Roth are frequently inhabited by American-born Jews. In The Counterlife Roth discusses the association between the American born “Diaspora Jew” to the State of Israel. In Plot Against America it is the reaction of a Jewish family to governmental...
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...
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...
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...
