Breaking Through the Trappings of Stereotyped Femininity
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Edna Pontellier is a victim of the mother/whore duality, unable to escape the conditions of her culture that prevent her from being capable of self-actualization, and so walks into the ocean and never comes out again. This is the conclusion to Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, in which she...
Post impressionism in To the Lighthouse
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
Very little endures in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; by the third book most of the characters have died tragic and largely overlooked deaths, or they have disappeared almost without mention. Only two characters, the neurotic philosopher Mr. Ramsay and the lone artist Lily Briscoe are...
The Liminal Period in the Cinderella Fairy Tale
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In “The Little Glass Slipper”, Cinderella is undergoing what anthropologist Victor Turner, in his theory regarding rites de passage, would regard as a transitional period between being a girl under the protection of her mother and a woman under the protection of a husband. During this...
Dr. Faustus and Eve's Sins and Judgments
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Milton's Eve and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus were duped into spiritual doom in pursuit of knowledge, both seeking knowledge bought power at the expense of their spirit. Doctor Faustus sells his soul to Satan, exchanging it for knowledge of magic, while Eve ignores God's command not to eat the fruit...
Alienation in the Butcher Boy
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
In the Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe paints a picture of the perfectly dysfunctional family in The Bradys, who are shown in stark contrast to the perfectly normal family, the Nugents. From the start, Francie Brady's family was the epitome of unstable. Francie's father was an alcoholic who abused...
Style vs. Substance in The Sea
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Sea is no doubt, a difficult novel to read. John Banville's language can be quite strenuous, and at some times, enigmatic. No major events or plot points seem to occur in The Sea, that is, externally. There is not much of a linear plot, if any. Almost everything that happens in the main...
Chinese Mythology, Religion and History: Look At The Journey to The West
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Often times, there is a distinct line between fact and fiction - between history and mythology, and even religion. However, in many of China's classic novels this line is blurred to the point of non-existence. A perfect example of this is Wu Cheng'en's The Journey to the West. Wu Cheng'en...
The Time Machine and the Plight of the Chinese Immigrant in 19th Century American West
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The Time Machine, written in 1895, describes the adventures the Time Traveler as he explores the 800 thousandth century and the unknown eons unto the dying of our sun. The bulk of the story occurs in the year 802,701, where the Time Traveler stops and encounters a strange species called the...
Fraud: A night-time adventure leads to more trouble than expected
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Adventures in the middle of the night were something I was always very fond of. For the most part they never seemed to get me into much trouble; I just coveted the feeling of being able to sneak out of my house without getting caught. For a fifteen-year-old, it was definitely a thrilling feeling....
Bartleby: A Christ-figure
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance,” concludes the lawyer in Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Arp and Johnson 589). This statement rings true, as any reader of the enigmatic short story will find himself or herself equally aggravated by the strange...
Freedom That is Never More Authentic Than When it is Within the Walls of a Prison Cell
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Whether it is read from an historical, psychological, literary, or any other sort of applicable perspective, the reader must admit that Toni Morrison's novel Sula allows itself be read in many different ways. Perhaps that is one of the beauties of the book: people from many different backgrounds...
The Fall of Greece, The Rise of Rome
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Greece: City-States in Conflict The Peloponnesian War was waged mostly between Sparta and Athens, although both had outside allies. After Sparta defeated Athens, the balance of power should have shifted to leave Sparta in the role of empire-builder, but the Spartans were unable to unify the...
Darkness and Light in "Heart of Darkness"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The battle between light and darkness is being waged right now, in every corner of the earth. This war has been fought since time began. In every realm of society, opposites counterbalance each other. The balance of powers in the government allows the American people to have a say in the...
The Open Boat
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In the story of “The Open Boat”, Stephen Crane has taken the time to masterfully portray a story that is so very dear to his life. Back in 1897, Crane went through the horrific experience of crashing his boat and being stranded for nearly 30 hours. This experience became so near and...
The Making of the Lady of Shalott's Soul
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott” is the story of an isolated woman who breaks free of her prison in order to enter the world around her. Through the use of vivid imagery and the strategic placement of words and phrases within the narrative structure of the poem, Tennyson builds a...
Bakhtin's Dialogism In The Big Sleep
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin is a philosopher and theorist who defies easy categorization. He has been associated with Marxist Literary critics, Russian Formalists and structuralists. While he has elements in common with all three, he also differs greatly from them in fundamental ways. His works and...
Reflections on 'A Clockwork Orange'
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
It's a 1st person narrative through Alex's eyes. The first 3-4 pages are used in describing the ‘Korova Milk Bar' and its inhabitants. It sells milk laced with drugs. It appears that he is the leader in a gang. There is a brief description of the members in his gang. He seems to be the...
The Parent-Child Dynamic: Ernest Hemingway Vs Winesburg
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Ernest Hemingway's first collection of stories, In Our Time, published in 1925, was heavily influenced by his then friend Sherwood Anderson's 1919 collection Winesburg, Ohio. The most notable difference in the times in which the stories are set is Winesburg, Ohio is set before World War I, and...
Emasculation: Are Men in Control or Women
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States, along with much of the world, saw great strides made in the feminist movement. The rights of and respect toward women were beginning to take an upward momentum, and at the same time, traditional ideas of masculine infallibility...
Kings as Philosophers and Philosophers as Kings
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Literature
In books 5 and 6 of Plato's Republic, the issue of who should rule society is addressed. Through out the dialogue, the character Socrates makes several arguments for the intelligence, virtue and worth of philosophers as people and as potential rulers. In this paper I will examine his arguments...
The Troubles With Banking: Implanting Submissiveness, Instilling Patriotism
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Paulo Freire's “problem-posing” instructional method in his essay “The ‘Banking' Concept of Education” is an essential educational technique. Freire's proposed approach to education not only calls for change in educational practices, it also holds greater sociopolitical...
History, Memory, and Relationships with the Past in James Joyce's Ulysses
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The past can be a daunting thing. From personal memory to history at large, the past has the power to bury those unable to establish a healthy relationship with it. One can easily become trapped - paralyzed - in the past through guilt, regret, or nostalgia, emotions generated based upon...
Patriarchal Sexuality of the Internalized Document in Corregidora
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The adage “history repeats itself,” like many adages, sometimes seem disingenuous; they are neatly packaged concepts that lack any definitive details that would give one a context to consider them properly. In Corregidora, there is an expansion of this idea of history and repetition....
'Otherness' and the Fact and Fancy Dichotomy in Charles Dickens' Hard Times
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
“Otherness” describes a person engaging in the reflexive act of defining their identity in reference to another person. In this way, Otherness is a definitive means of exploring the relationships between social castes and gender relationships. In Hard Times, these two types of Otherness...
'An Other of the Other' in Emile Zola's Nana and Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening'
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Emile Zola and Kate Chopin both present texts that depict the fall of a heroine. Nana and Edna Pontellier Naturalistically represent archetypal women of the late 19th century; Nana, as a courtesan, represents the rising lower class, and Edna representing the upper-middle class. Despite the...
A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The theme I select to examine in A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles, is the power of love. Love in the time of Drosilla and Charikles was an entirely different concept. Especially from what we are accustomed to today. Loving someone fifty years ago, isn't even close to how we love a...
Technology in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The technology in our world has been both a beneficial force and a destructive one. On one hand, technology has made our world a much simpler place to live in, and it is hard to imagine the world we live in today without it. Just about everything we do, from shopping for groceries to paying your...
The Question of Morality Film Noir
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Moral ambiguity is a central theme in John Huston's film The Maltese Falcon (1941) and in Billy Wilder's film Double Indemnity (1944) and James M. Cain's novel by the same title. The films and novel follow characters whose motives are questionable and morally problematic. This essay will discuss...
The Issue of Hope and Redemption in Film Noir: Living Day-to-Day in the Present, or Living for the Future?
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The films Out of the Past, Force of Evil, and Double Indemnity are narratives that contain similar noir themes. All three narratives follow troubled male characters who must sever ties with their pasts in order to move forward to a hopeful and happy future. Two of these characters succeed,...
A God with Different Faces: Conditions for the Redemption of Everyman and for the Condemnation of Doctor Faustus
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Literature
The themes of mankind's redemption from sin and his place in the afterlife are of central importance to the Middle English play Everyman and the Renaissance play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Both Everyman and Doctor Faustus concentrate on the redemption of mankind, but because of the...
