Comparison of Two Essays on Goddess Identity
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The book Seeking Mah?dev?: Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great Goddess, edited by Tracy Pintchman, contains ten essays dealing with the different ways Hindus construe the distinct image of Mah?dev?. I will compare two of those essays here and determine their approach and what they add...
Transcendentalist Theory in Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Walt Whitman, a well-known Transcendentalist, believed that humans and nature share an intimate relationship. His poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" illustrates this communion with the natural world. It contrasts this view with the scientific view of nature that distances humans...
American writers in Paris: Anaïs Nin - Houseboat - ; James Baldwin - Equal in Paris -
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
“Houseboat” is the initial short story in a collection entitled Under a Glass Bell, published in 1944 by Anaïs Nin. It presents us with the complex relationship the artist carries on with Paris - a relationship made of both attraction and repulsion. It also gives us an insight into the...
Twelfth night, William Shakespeare, Acte II, scene V
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Written in 1599 and first performed in 1602, "Twelfth Night?, like other Shakespearean comedies, presents us with a blend of realism and a fanciful atmosphere. The main plot deals with the love triangle between the countess Olivia, her suitor the Duke Orsino, and Viola, a shipwrecked young woman...
Storytelling in Beckett's collected shorter plays
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
"The exposition of the story and its communication by suitable means of estrangement, constitute the main business of the theatre; everything hangs on the story; it is the heart of the theatrical performance" (Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre). Thus it is observed that, in...
What is an American ?, from Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
A Frenchman by birth, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735?-1813) soon transformed himself into Hector St. John as part of his quest to become an epitome of the American farmer. Leaving his mother land around 1754 as a pioneer to French Canada, he finally settled in America in the...
The Power of Words in Swift's Gulliver's Travels
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
What is the common point between Gulliver's conversation with the various people he encounters during his travels, Swift's irony, and the book itself being considered both as a fairy tale for children and a bitter satire of the government of England and of humankind as a whole at the same...
Shakespeare's plays illustrated by Blake and Fuseli: The artists as critics
Essay - 17 pages - Literature
It has judiciously been pointed out that "pictures from Shakespeare account[ed] for about one fifth -some 2 300- of the total number of literary paintings recorded between 1760 and 1900" (R. Altick). As a matter of fact, the renewed interest in nineteenth century British art in the last few...
The shining
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
By choosing to produce ?The Shining' Stephen King's masterpiece, in 1980, Stanley Kubrick tackled one of the most bounded and codified cinematographic genres: the fantastic mode. Kubrick produced the film just after the relative failure of Barry Lyndon, and this time, it was a huge...
Repetition, Re(-)presentation and Interpretation in Beckett's Shorter Plays
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
When one reads Beckett's works for the first time, one cannot but be stricken by the overabundant repetitions the text is replete with. There seems to be a real compulsion of repetition in various forms- in Beckett' plays. This is most evident in his shorter works. During this seminar, we...
Le renouveau médiéval : la quête préraphaélite du Saint Graal et les légendes arthuriennes
Essay - 11 pages - Literature
Le Saint Graal est généralement considéré comme une coupe dans laquelle le Christ a bu durant la dernière Cène et avec laquelle Joseph d'Arimathea a récolté le sang du Christ lors de sa crucifixion. Cette signification était introduite dans les légendes arthuriennes, mais elle peut être toute...
Function of the Requiem in "Death of a Salesman"
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005) once revealed as regards his writing of Death of a Salesman that he “wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman's way of mind”, and in this respect, the setting of the whole play actually stands for a...
Explore the ways in which Solibo Magnifique can be described as a Creole novel
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Patrick Chamoiseau's ?Solibo Magnifique' can often be described as a Creole novel due to many factors. The most obvious reason may be the fact that Chamoiseau is Creole and it may therefore be more natural for him to write a Creole novel rather than any other type of novel. Besides,...
Critical Commentary on Paul Verlaine's Une Grande Dame
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Paul Verlaine was born in 1844 and died in Paris in 1896. His work ?Une Grande Dame' is, therefore, an orthodox Petrarchan sonnet, as was typical of the poetry composed from the sixteenth century onward. In this document, I shall be studying form, imagery and vocabulary in particular, but...
Je hasarde une explication: écrire, c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi.' (Jean Genet - epigraph to La Place) Is this the case for Annie Ernaux's narrator?
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In Annie Ernaux's La Place, the theme of betrayal is so prevalent that one could say it is the basis of the book. I think it would be fair to say that “écrire, c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi” when looking at Annie Ernaux's narrator. The narrator feels that she has betrayed...
Literary Commentary on a passage from L'Illusion Comique
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The extract has been taken from Act IV Scene I of Corneille's "L'Illusion Comique? and is a soliloquy, delivered by Isabelle. It takes place just over half way through the play, after Clindor, the man whom she loves, is sentenced to death. The passage is divided into two main sections....
Merimee aims above all to control and gratify his reader. At all times he has in mind the effects of his composition' Discuss with reference to Mateo Falcone and Tamango
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Most authors have a clear idea of how they want the reader to respond the works of literature produced by them, and how this response may be elicited most effectively. Mérimée uses various literary devices, such as language, narrative technique and characterization in order to control and gratify...
Action is character, FS Fitzgerald
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In real life, what we do is supposed to reflect our personality. What we are - to the others - is first and foremost what we do and what we look like : we are judged by the others through the prism of our physical appearance and of our own behavior. Doing something "reprehensible" according to...
Essay on Hemingway's book: "The Sun Also Rises"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Published in 1926, The sun also rises is considered as one of Hemingway's best novels. It depicts the circle of American expatriate writers living in Paris in the 20's. Through drinks, rides in Montparnasse, fiestas in Spain, the relationship between Brett and Jake and the remaining...
Social and cultural structures in English litterature: "Mikhael Bakhtin and Jude the Obscure"
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The Bakhtinian analysis of texts allows the reader to realize what an important part language plays in the understanding and interpretation of a novel. He explains how the different forces (centripetal and centrifugal) which drive the writer during his work may be recognized and how heteroglossia...
The emotional and psychological reader's response in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Blue Hotel"
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
"The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane are two short stories which, beyond the colour references in the title, try to develop certain psychological responses within the reader. I will attempt to show how through two different points of view for...
The Fantasy in 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson, was an immediate success and had been revisited a number of times since its first publication in 1886. It can be considered as the Gothic tale par excellence. The Gothic genre started in the middle of the Eighteenth...
Coriolanus (act two, scene one)
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's play Coriolanus is a political tragedy, which exposes the events that took place in Rome in the early days of the Republic. This play is set up around 490 BC, at a time when the city was divided by a conflict between the Patricians and the Plebeians because of shortage of grain....
Darwin and darwinian infuence on Thomas Hardy (Jude The Obscure) and Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass)
Dissertation - 58 pages - Literature
Charles Darwin's theories upon “Evolution” had a great impact on the scientific world in the nineteenth century, and contributed to change with respect to mentalities in a well-established Victorian society. He is mostly remembered for his conception of Evolutionism based on his theory...
Essays on Works by American Expaitriate Writers
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The first essay is a short analysis of Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises". The second essay is a critical essay treating "Action is character”— F. S. Fitzgerald. The work is discussed in relation to "The Sun Also Rises" and "Tender Is The Night", and gives specific examples and...
Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot': Between Modernism and Postmodernism - publié le 30/05/2007
Book review - 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...
Eros in fantasy
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Our study of Eros in fantasy will be based on seven short stories (A. Bierce's The Death of Halpin Frayser, Ch. Dickens's The Signalman, Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil, P. Highsmith's The Snail-Watcher, H. P. Lovecraft's The Festival, R. Matheson's Born of Man...
Study, from a discussion around a quote from Catherine Belsey, the figure of the narrator in "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco and "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Catherine Belsey presents her model of realist fiction as one of "inter-subjective communication, of shared understanding of a text which re-presents the world [and which] is the guarantee not only of the truth of the text but of the reader's existence as an autonomous and knowing subject in...
Women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In The Canterbury Tales, women appear either as storytellers or as part of the tales themselves. We must therefore make a clear distinction between the women of the pilgrimage and the characters mentioned in the tales. The former are supposed to belong to the real life, if we agree to play the...
Commentary upon Mary Shelley's statement: "What terrified me will terrify others"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Creature in itself is not what is the most terrifying. Indeed, in her dream and in the novel afterwards, if Doctor Frankenstein is afraid at the sight of his creature, it is also its coming to life which creates fear: how can an amount of bones, skin,...
