To hell and back: A human's tale by Dante Alighieri
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
When asked to name the most influential authors in the history of literature, a person would most likely refer to authors whose acclaim is so great, one only has to say a single part of his or her name. Poets and playwrights, these authors composed works that transcend time and place and carry...
Shall we proceed: Fatalist fetishes in "Lift not the painted veil"
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Life is the most beautiful disaster. It is a dichotomous wrenching of mind and body, destiny and fate, knowledge and understanding, which by the very end—in those precious last moments, one is left only with the question… ‘Will there come a light, or just darkness'? If one wishes...
The Irish literature
Thesis - 9 pages - Literature
Who is Irish, who are the Irish, what makes an Irish writer Irish? Why does he/she have to be Irish, follow and become part of some tradition, this question of who/what is Irish runs parallel to whom and what is ‘I'? I can stand for identity in that it is I the writer (a writer, not this...
Comparative analysis of poetry
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Language is the most important aspect in poetry or rather the author's essential key to achieving their main objective - grabbing the reader's attention and keeping throughout the poem's entirety. Many poets are unsuccessful in doing so simply because they believe that poetry should be difficult...
Comparing narrative in fiction and nonfiction
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Fiction in definition is the works of literature whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact such as poems, novels and short stories (American Heritage Dictionary; 2006). Nonfiction is defined as works of literature comprising of narrative prose dealing with...
We are what we repeat: Repetition and identity construction in Derrida and Butler
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Philosophical and ideological traditions permeate everywhere from popular thought, culture, and subjective experience to science, literature, and politics. In past decades, critical thinkers have engaged in re-determinations and restructurings of philosophical traditions that presuppose or...
Analysis of - There eyes were watching god by Zora Neale Hurston
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The novel starts by saying that men and women are different. Men wish for what they can't have in vain, while women on the other hand are more realistic in that their goals are actually attainable. And like other women of her time the lead character Janie Mae Crawford aims for a real...
The Black Pages book review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In the poem “I hope You Believe Me”, Heru strives to teach about the oppression faced by people of African descent through metaphors. Heru's poem has three strengths. It is provoking, articulate and subtlety reflects on various black thoughts on oppression. The poem is provoking due to...
Observing the life and times of a 'Kaffir Boy'
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Emotion and sensitivity engulf the reader into the world of this powerful memoir that rightfully and adequately portrays the story of a youth coming of age in apartheid South Africa. On all levels the main character in Kaffir Boy, Johannes was demeaned by whites for being African with a tribal...
The hope of the poet
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Not until the end of his career as a poet, albeit a mere couple years, does Keats write perhaps his most illuminating lines, clearly communicating the end to which he aspires as a writer: ‘The poet and the dreamer are distinct / Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes / And that the height of...
Ben Edwards - The return
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
He was the best, once, now reduced to this. The decaying rooms of this dilapidated construction are not fit for humans to reside, just birds and perhaps the odd rodent. Walking through the huge floor to ceiling windows he heard the crunch of broken glass under his feet, vandals and time really...
This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona: A break with cultural assumptions of identity amongst contemporary Native Americans
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The following dissertation will focus on the short story, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” by Sherman Alexie. This document will outline continual themes on cultural assumptions regarding identity, and based on the perspective of the short story and its interplay, will...
The personal universal: Pronouns and identity in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Ralph Emerson's individualist essay, “Self-Reliance”, is an open forum of what is necessary to be independent and skeptical of the ideas of others. Emerson seems obsessed with what truly defines the character of a man, but this obsession seems to stem in part from his own example....
Murdering the past: Influence and immortality in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
On first reading, the majority of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories are concerned with death in a variety of different forms. Whether Poe is describing murder, the fear of being killed, characters previously deceased who return to life, or those who still live being buried prematurely, the subject...
Critical review of the series: Twilight
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Janice Radway's article, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” Radway analyzes a group of suburban housewives who tend to read romance novels as an escape from their everyday lives as wives and mothers. Similarly, the popularity of the teenage vampire book...
Artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind
Thesis - 15 pages - Literature
Vladimir Nabokov boasts an impressive resume. As a writer, critic and scholar, he perfected both his own craft, and his ability to analyze the work of others. Similarly, within his texts, he focused a great deal of energy on the manipulation of his readers own reactions, earning him a reputation...
Life as a weed
Thesis - 14 pages - Literature
On a bright sunny day in Brooklyn is where our story starts, where heat dazzles its inhabitants, where street thugs and hustlers hide in their street shops and apartments to avoid the blazing sun. Schools are closed; it is mid-July, the heat of New York City streets boiling even the most...
Analysis: Catherine Hall on Victorian domestic ideology
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
This chapter by Catherine Hall examines one particular factor she identifies as being crucial to the creation of the Victorian middle-class ideal of womanhood. Since the “angel in the house” was already established as a precept by the 1830s and '40s, the author seeks farther back in...
Tragic consequences: Themes of alienation in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
A contemporary Boston physician responded starkly to The Yellow Wallpaper. “Such a story ought not to be written,” he said. “It was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” What is it about the descent into madness that is so disturbing to read? Accounts of people behaving...
Critical review: Terrorist
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
This story explores the roots (or some of the roots) of Muslim discontent in America, showing how people who are chafing at what is essentially a culture clash can internalize this into hatreds and resentments justified with polemic and intellectual rationales. The contrast between Islamic...
Charlotte Gilman and Victoria Woodhull
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Bookish Charlotte Gilman, with the deft turn of phrase, and flamboyant Victoria Woodhull, shunning social convention: on the surface these are two very different women. But in fact, they were near-contemporaries who influenced important issues of their day and helped fuel dialog and debate about...
Postmodern and psychoanalytical approaches to Lolita
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Considering how multifaceted Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is, it is possible to apply to it a variety of literary theories, all more or less fruitfully. In this paper, I will consider the postmodern and the psychoanalytic approach. We will find that Lolita is very much a postmodern text, despite...
A review of the book "Techniques of the Observer" By Jonathan Crary
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer grants a theatrical still modern point of view on the ocular culture of nineteenth century. In this book he has re-approached the complications and plights of visual modernism and social modernity both. Extroverting conventional ideas the author has...
A Proppian analysis on the narrative of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
In the 1920`s Vladimar Jakovlevic Propp, the chairperson of the Department of Folklore at Leningrad University, examined a whole series of Russian folk tales and came to the conclusion that every story contains similar themes and each theme follows a distinct pattern. From this analysis, Propp...
The poems of Gary Soto
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Throughout the three texts, A Fire in My Hands, Neighborhood Odes, and Where Sparrows Work Hard, Gary Soto uses small and normally insignificant items as the focus of many poems in these texts, celebrating them with odes and sharing the stories behind them in narrative poems. He does this in...
Better than others: Eighteenth century reactionism, elitism, and paradise lost
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
The eighteenth-century adoption of Paradise Lost—and its continuing permanent position—into the canon of English “classics” is a testament to Milton's genius for subtlety and intertextuality. The combination of classical sources, contemporaneous politics, symbolism, sexuality...
The interplay of tragedy, comedy and the grotesque in the storm in King Lear
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Comedy and Tragedy, the two modes of Drama, are usually seen as separate and distinct. Philosophically, they are. Comedy unites; it brings characters into a greater sense of harmony with one another and the universe, rewards the virtuous, punishes the wicked, and upholds the cosmic order. Tragedy...
Time passes: Experience and expression in 'The Years' and 'To the Lighthouse'
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The present unfolds as I trace my way along the thin black lines laid across the page. Woolf writes; I read. We then assemble these fractured signs, these fleeting moments in our conversations to compose a unified “whole.” A scene passes. My eyes discern a pattern and then resume their...
East London love story
Thesis - 112 pages - Literature
They were both children of poverty, born into the dark slums of East London. Yet their worlds could hardly have been more different. Eric De Milo blessed with a loving Italian family and an artistic gift that gave him a chance for a better life. On the other hand, Helena Whitman who knew little...
The Siren and the domestic ideal
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Written during the Victorian age and in a strict society, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray was a book all its own. It is mostly categorized as a satire; however, it speaks volumes about the realities of the time. Women were considered as a property, and the men laid down the law....
