Alfred Hitchcock's 'Shadow of a Doubt'
Thesis - 1 pages - Literature
Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt is an indictment of the American middle class lifestyle. This is evident in two scenes which together act as a sort of point/counterpoint of lifestyles. One is the opening sequence of the movie, in which we as viewers are slowly introduced to Uncle Charlie,...
A review of Things fall apart
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart brilliantly relates to the reader the story of one man's life and chronicles its disintegration. This man's name is Okonkwo; it is his journey and his trials that are followed, most significantly those in which he interacts with his family. From the beginning,...
The Martian chronicles: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The plot description in the back of this book fascinated me. It is a philosophy or ideal from the mind of the author, which is really almost a palindrome. This is a science fiction book with the idea that there is life on other planets but that they are just as skeptical of our human existence as...
The Iceman cometh: Review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The Iceman Cometh is an American tragedy set amidst the desolation of a saloon crowded with the marginalized elements of society. While Eugene O'Neill, the playwright, may not have been the most talented author in his ability to pen the most realistic, eloquent, or beautiful dialogue, he was...
The house of the seven gables: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a story more akin to a moral fable than the gothic writing one might expect from a piece of nineteenth century horror. Set across two centuries, and varying between the present and past, Hawthorne captures the peculiar nature of the...
Ayn Rand's The fountainhead: A book review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
I chose to read The Fountainhead based on a couple of recommendations. Written by Ayn Rand, it is an astounding piece of literary work that follows the life of a young architect, Howard Roark. The Fountainhead takes place in New York beginning in the mid-1920's and continues into the 1930's. In...
Ruth Rendell's The crocodile bird: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
I came across this book at random when I needed something for a book check. After reading the first few pages I was hooked. The book seemed mysterious and provocative in its own slightly twisted way. This story takes place in a very small town in England in the nineteen eighties and early...
A review of The confessions
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
For this book club I spent a lot of time looking into all of the books on the list that I had never heard of. I read the summary of each of the books on the list and eventually settled on The Confessions by Saint Augustine. I chose this book because it seemed like the Catholic equivalent to...
Koren Zailckas' Smashed: Review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
I had seen a recommendation for this book along with an interview of the author more than a year ago in a magazine. It had always looked interesting to me as I am interested in a career in addiction medicine, so when I recently saw it in a store I jumped to buy it. This is the memoir of a girl...
A review: On liberty and utilitarianism
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
John Stuart Mill's treatises on the nature of civil liberty and the political philosophy of utilitarianism are some of the most groundbreaking, and perpetually relevant, discourses on the subjects. His works stand as a testament to the ability for progressive, and at a given point in time...
Of mice and men: A review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
I read this book because my peers read it. Peer pressure, right? I needed an honors book, it was short, and it was the first book my mom offered me when I told her that a classic would fill the requirement. It is a classic book, not sure what genre it falls under, but Wikipedia places it under...
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
This novel covers the time period of three generations. It is a work of fiction but comes off as an autobiography. The narrator, is of the youngest generation, and grew up in Detroit but tells the story as an adult living in Austria. The narrator's parents also grew up in Detroit. The first...
Norman Mailer: The naked and the dead
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The Naked and the Dead was Norman Mailer's debut novel detailing the lives of a group of American soldiers during World War II. Coming just three years after the conclusion of hostilities, this lengthy tome transported the country back into the horrors of war. The poetry in this first foray...
In cold blood: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood stands as what must be one of the finest works of American storytelling, made all the more gripping by the fact that it is nonfiction. The immense popularity of the tale practically require that some knowledge of the events are ingrained upon an American mind....
Everything is illuminated: Book review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
After watching the movie, Everything is Illuminated; I knew that I had to read the book to prolong the experience that Jonathan Safran Foer wrote about in his novel. There are several different stories inside this single novel. The main story is set in modern day Ukraine and is recorded as the...
Arrowsmith: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis, is a sprawling examination of 1920s America. The author employed his hero of sorts as the vehicle through which he conveyed his distaste for the commercialism that had captured and, in his eyes, corrupted the nation. In order to accomplish this feat, Lewis created...
An individual's encounter with conflict
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
At the center of human nature is a fundamental attraction towards the power of individuals over others. It is upon this subject which thousands of writers have based their learning, to attempt to understand the way people interact with the world around them. Two such writers are Jean-Jacques...
1984: George Orwell
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
1984 is a modern classic that is based on a society where a government has the ability to control citizens' minds in order to maintain their power. I selected this book after I read Animal Farm. I had greatly enjoyed reading Animal Farm and thought that I would try reading another book from...
The water babies, Victorian literature and the depiction of childhood
Thesis - 13 pages - Literature
The social hierarchy of Victorian England perpetuated the involvement of the working class in poverty driven crime and with regard to the concurrent impact on children; Duckworth comments that “Crime and poverty were inseparably associated and most of the young who suffered gaol sentences...
Loss and suffering in Anglo-Saxon literature
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
Literary historicism is relatively modern concept of literary theory developed in the 1980s through primary exponent Greenblatt . The underlying basis of literary historicism is the study of literary texts in historical context and an attempt to better understand intellectual history through...
A contrast of depictions of growing up from Alcott's Little Women and Stevenson's Treasure Island
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
The coming of age narratives in Robert Stevenson's “Treasure Island” (1883) and Louise Alcott's “Little Women” (1868) juxtaposed thrilling stories with moral issues that were contextually uncommon in children's literature. Additionally, both novels were written in what has...
The saga of Seabiscuit
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
During the 1930's, America was recovering from a period where nearly every citizen was completely down and out. The Great Depression had caused the nation to crumble and had left people hopeless and downtrodden. They were looking for a hero, someone to represent their struggle and provide them...
Women: Inferior to men, inferior to women, through The Rover and The Way of the World
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Seventeenth century British women held no personal value. Throughout Apra Behn's, “The Rover” and William Congreve's, “The Way of the World,” women are commoditized, used as pawns by men and powerful elders. Their value is not a human value, because women are seen as objects...
The Odyssey of Homer and the Aithiopika of Heliodorus
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Though the Odyssey and the Aithiopika, or Ethiopian Romance, were composed by two different men writing from different worlds and separated by a gap of many centuries, they share many of the same thematic, structural, and literary features. The Odyssey is a Homeric epic poem which is thought to...
Competing giants: The subversive counter-performance of the Soviet writer
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The early twentieth century poet Osip Mandelstam postulated that, “Poetry is respected only in [Russia] - people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for it.” Mandelstam, who himself fell victim to the Stalinist regime for his subversive prose, was...
Gilgamesh and Ramayana: The value of the epic
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
What is an epic? The epic is traditionally defined as a long narrative poem which relates the adventures, journeys and deeds of a central hero. These narrative poems are the oldest known works of literature and some, like Gilgamesh, even date back to pre-history - the time period prior to the...
Review of 'The dry salvages' by T.S. Eliot
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
“The river is within us, the sea is all about us” (line 15.) In his poem The Dry Salvages, T.S. Eliot uses the river, the smooth imagery of thin water, seeping through the countryside as an allegory of the quiet, which dwells underneath the surface of us all. The Dry Salvages is the...
Subjectivity in Wollstonecraft's 'A vindication of the rights of a woman'
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The romantic period in English literature littered the written landscape with fresh, progressive works. By the later part of the eighteenth century, the artistic backbone of artists and intellectuals pushed against traditional art, representing, instead, a stronger emphasis on the emotional...
Theatre presentation: Italian futurism and the theatre Itself
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
The futurist movement in theatre began around 1909 with Flippo Marrinetti's publication of the first Futurist Manifesto. Francesco Cangiullo, born in Naples in 1888. He was a poet playwright, theorist, and visual artist wrote several Futurist sintesi (which is a very short play). In 1914 he wrote...
Theatre of the absurd
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
The Theatre of the Absurd (French: Théâtre de l'Absurde) was a movement that happened in the late 1940's through the 1960's. The term was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of a book on the subject which was first published in 1961. Later there were 2 revised versions,...
