J.M.W. Turner: Incendiary change
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed vast transformations in Europe, as the notions of a voice for every citizen and the power of the common people became powerful stimuli for change. Although the move away from unchecked monarchical power was...
Evil: Destroying from within
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
American literature in the nineteenth century was a journey in exploration of previously hidden aspects of the human psyche and this involved surpassing the boundaries of regular fiction to mystery and fantasy. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were pioneers in the subgenre of dark...
Dialectical inquiry and the divided line
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In Republic, Plato (using Socrates as a literary mouthpiece) examines the nature of justice and describes the ideal city as being ruled by philosopher-kings. In Books VI and VII, the philosophers engage in a discussion of the qualities of true philosophers and the process through which these...
Sufficient to have stood: Temptation in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Perelandra
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
Original sin has a curious, irresolute connection to human freedom. God?s fundamental gifts to His children?reason, imagination, free will?are the very things that give men the desire to sin as well as the ability to resist. This combination makes the Fall of Man a paradoxical event, one that...
Pay a ticket, value life: Theories of drama in our town
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Thorton Wilder's Our Town remains a classic work of existential ideas and American theater because of its universality. While the play does take place specifically in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, this specific small-town life is a metaphor not even for our own towns; rather, Thorton Wilder's...
A review of Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher
Book review - 11 pages - Literature
Tom Perrotta, the reigning bard of American suburbia, can inspire compassion for the most unlikely of subjects. In Election, he humanizes heartless, bitchy Tracy; in Little Children, he measures out kindnesses to Larry the violent racist as well as Ronald the convicted sex offender. But in his...
Fitzgerald and Borges: The desire for the absolute
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald?s The Great Gatsby and Jorge Luis Borges?s ?El Aleph? can be said to share a structural framework or paradigm which takes the form of a paradox. This paradox concerns the fact that desire is at once finite, because it becomes substantialized in an object, and infinite, because...
Phallocracy in Alan Moore's "From Hell"
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Alan Moore offers a diagnosis of reality that portrays misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism, and governmental tyranny as demonic forces. Moore uses the graphic narrative medium as a means to communicate the demonic nature of these systems of power. In Moore's work on Swamp Thing, he created...
Imagination and Self-Transformation in Puig's El beso del la mujer araña
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
One of the first things to strike a reader of Mañuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña is its narrative, or rather, textual structure. The novel is composed of numerous different discourses, including film narrations, footnotes, surveillance evidence, dialogue, subjective thoughts, etc. Most of...
Victorian Gothic literature
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
All was dark and silent, the black shadows thrown by the moonlight seeming full of a silent mystery of their own. Not a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate; so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass...
Mary Magdalene in alternative Christian texts
Thesis - 9 pages - Literature
The most common portrayal of Mary Magdalene has been as a prostitute, though even the Roman Catholic Church, which invented that story, has conceded that it is not true. The second most common portrayal of her has been as the woman who was present at the crucifixion and went to the tomb....
The making of a saint: the early life of Mother Teresa
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Of all the modern people canonized as saints by the Roman Catholic Church, Mother Teresa was the most famous. She was widely admired for her dedication and her charity and almost as widely criticized for her doctrinaire approach to religion. This paper will examine her life before she began...
More than they bargained for
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The process of maturation from childhood to adulthood, or “coming-of-age,” is a unique experience that often shapes the way that an adult will conduct his or her life in the future. In literature, a Bildungsroman outlines the transformational experiences of a young person as they...
Ethnographies in context and as fictional representations
Case study - 9 pages - Literature
Empirical observation and objective analysis are some of the core tenets of sound scientific inquiry. These processes lead to the recording of data and presentation of findings which confirm or disprove hypotheses, thus renewing the drive for further studies. Particularly in the social sciences,...
The drama of discrimination in Henry James' The Ambassadors
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Ambassadors is clearly a novel: the novel is free, and has the most elastic form. We could be tempted to say that there is no drama in the work. In fact, drama has different meanings. First, it is the name of theatrical plays of a particular kind or period. Secondly, it can mean a situation...
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The theme that interests us is the quest for identity in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim. The book was written in 1901 and the plot takes place in India during the time of the British colonization. Kim presents several quests: a quest implies that the protagonist has to seek something noble, like the...
Philip Roth, Portnoy's complaint
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The text under scrutiny presents us an extract of the confession of a man to his psychiatrist: he talks to him more precisely about his childhood, and the way his mother used to act with him during that period. What is interesting about this text is the manner the narrator presents his memory:...
How Shakespeare dramatized the changes in Lady Macbeth
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
“Ambition is the step that can turn a noble-hearted man into a sinner” is the message Shakespeare wanted to convey to the audience when he wrote the play Macbeth in 1606. Lady Macbeth's is the wife of an important nobleman: Macbeth, they are both characterized by their great ambition of...
Plato as a proto-feminist: Tendencies towards the development of feminist thought
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
The idea of Plato's Republic being one of the true first pro-feminist arguments seems to have some steam in modern times. However, there seems to be major flaws with these theories. The fact that modern feminism is not grounded in Platonic feminism is perhaps the most striking issue. For, if...
Plato's Republic V: Women as rulers- A feminist proposal
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
In Book V of Plato's Republic, Plato argues that women should be rulers, raising questions as to whether Plato was an early advocate of feminism. However, an examination of the argument he provides in the text of the Republic does not support this claim, and Julia Anna's' scholastic work...
Lyrical ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge or the birth of a new literary movement during the Industrial Revolution
Case study - 4 pages - Literature
Industrialism, expansion, profit, production and individualism were the feelings which took place during the period of the Industrial Revolution in England. People in Great Britain were led by the streams of progress, but the modernizations in technology had some important consequences on people:...
Harry Potter - Translation and analysis
Book review - 12 pages - Literature
Everybody has heard about Harry Potter, the famous book by J.K. Rowling and the famous wizard. It is, as everybody knows, a very popular novel everywhere in the world. It is particularly popular in the country where it was written. Not only children, but also many grown-ups actually love it. We...
A streetcar named Desire, "Repetition"
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
In most of the classic plays we studied in high school, numerous events and rebounding occurred one after the other that enabled the plot to move forward. At the end of the play, the situations used to evolve and the characters' lives had often changed. However, in this work, the final situation...
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?
Thesis - 2 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...
A critique of the Dystopian novel
Thesis - 17 pages - Literature
The Dystopian novel is a strange subspecies in literature. While it shares many aspects with the traditional science fiction novel, it is rarely categorized with science fiction. Whereas it might satirize the Utopian socialist fantasy of the perfect society, the satire is usually exchanged for...
The wilderness in American fiction: Hemingway and Faulkner
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Growing up during a time in American history when much of the country was still an unspoiled wilderness, it is no wonder Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both show a particular awe for nature and a preoccupation with wilderness as a symbol. Wilderness is an important theme in Hemingway's...
The use of borders in Richard McCann's "My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame"
Thesis - 12 pages - Literature
Carroll Knolls—the setting of Richard McCann's “My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame”—is a world defined by borders; it is divided by property lines, lot spaces, fences, gates, doors, and all other manners of boundaries and barriers. The author infuses the...
"Nothing that is so, is so": The extent of role of this statement in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
“Nothing that is so, is so”, says Feste. He says so ironically, talking to Sebastian, who he is convinced is actually Cesario. This is said for a specific situation, but it might actually be relevant for the whole play: Indeed, this apparently absurd quotation raises the question of...
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, Chapter 7 reviews
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
At the beginning of this chapter, a letter from his father explains to Victor the circumstances of William's murder. He leaves for Geneva immediately to comfort and grieve with his family. But it is dark when he reaches Geneva and gets close to home, during a thunderstorm and Victor is started to...
Horace Walpole vs. Clara Reeve: The role of the Gothic
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
Gothic novels are seen as the beginning of modern horror fiction. Many devotees believed Gothic novels have inspired pleasant horror in its readers. The genre is generally accepted to have been started by Horace Walpole and his novel The Castle of Otranto. Although Walpole was an aristocrat and...
