Jihad vs. McWorld: The new world disorder
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Jihad vs. McWorld was written by Rutgers University Political Science professor Benjamin R. Barber. The author is widely regarded one of the nation's foremost scholars on democracy. He has written Strong Democracy, in which he explains that economic liberalism is the basis for and cause of...
Out of the garden: Examining the true origins of Genesis
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7 (Holy Bible, King James Version). Ever since that first breathe, man has been questioning the ways of the Lord. Laws, teachings, and...
Racial stereotypes and their role in the concept of Manifest Destiny by Justin Herndon
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The modern connotations of the concept of “Manifest Destiny” are generally of two diverging camps; One is a romanticized image of devout pilgrims, such as the Mormons, who left the crowded and sinful cities of the East for the freedom of the West, hoping to find a new promised land, or...
Just vengeance or righteous follies; which Hamlet did you see?
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
William Richardson describes Hamlet's character as one “moved by finer principles, by an exquisite sense of virtue, of moral beauty and turpitude.” (Hoy 147) Richardson goes on to say that a man like Hamlet “will find [his sense of moral excellence] a source of pleasure and of pain...
William Blake's "Wall of words" on circular reasoning
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
“And the salt ocean rolled englob'd.” (Blake Pl. 28.23) The previous line comes from one of Blake's prophetic works, “The First Book of Urizen,” and is very typical of a Blake ending. More than a century before Stanley Kunitz was born, Blake had mastered the technique...
How Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' contributed to the evolution of feminism
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Kate Chopin was an integral part of the evolution of feminism, providing early 20th century readers with feminist literature that is still highly respected and studied today. Although it is easy to approach her work, and all such work, work with textual evidence supporting a claim of the author's...
Heaven and hell: Aldous Huxley opens the doors of perception
Book review - 9 pages - Literature
Unlike any other mammal on earth, man possesses the unique ability to traverse various levels of the mind in order to alter and create his own perceptions of reality. Unlike any author in modern literature, Aldous Huxley charts man's explorations into the realms of the mind in his books The...
The logic of justifying utilitarianism actions in Koestler's "Darkness at Last"
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
Arthur Koestler in Darkness At Noon, explores the utility of totalitarianism through the fictional life of Nicholas Rubashov, a lifelong, loyal member of The Party who has recently been hauled into jail under dubious charges. Rubashov has spent his entire life promoting the Utilitarian and...
American Jews and politics in the selected works of Philip Roth and Joseph Heller
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The works of Joseph Heller and Philip Roth are frequently inhabited by American-born Jews. In The Counterlife Roth discusses the association between the American born “Diaspora Jew” to the State of Israel. In Plot Against America it is the reaction of a Jewish family to governmental...
Books that shaped our history of the Vietnam War
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As long as there is war, and as long as the printing press continues to exist, there will be books about war. Yet as media proliferates, the content of these books changes dramatically. With the dearth of eyewitness accounts of earlier wars, save the journals and varying forms of correspondence...
Perfecting the Human race: Creator, thy name is Man
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Since many believe the notion that a higher power than man, “God,” created mankind, it is assumed that this undertaking can only be performed by God, and therefore anyone else attempting such a task would be blaspheming his efforts. The Promethean myth challenges that the creation of...
The Bell Jar
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In the Bell Jar, Plath explores the marginalization of women. Her fiction, grounded in her own experience, permeates with that experience, revealing not only her commentary, but positions devolved into their most rudimentary parts, as to give the reader a backdrop to view them in greater relief....
Radical poetry: William Blake and the fight against oppression
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The industrial revolution. The term conjures up images of unstoppable progress, the advancement of mankind, economic expansion, and technological achievement. At the same time, it also drags up such sights as the oppression of the common man, dehumanizing working conditions, and dreary and...
Asserting women's intellectual legitimacy through coercive subtlety: An analysis of the narrative voices of Anne Bradstreet and Susanna Rowson
Case study - 6 pages - Literature
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women in America were dominantly expected to be ethical, simple-minded, and largely uneducated members of their community. As a result, female writers would often face strong social scrutiny based on this governing gender subordination because of...
Alice in Plato land: The allegory of wonder
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
For millennia, philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Wittgenstein have argued over the nature of reality, its objectivity and apprehendability. Alice in Wonderland explores the nature of reality using logic, philosophy, and mathematics. The device of the rabbit hole, which establishes the...
Privilege does not pacify: Phillis Wheatley's writing protests slavery despite status
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Phillis Wheatley was brought to New England in 1761 to be a slave. While not every detail of Phillis' life is known, she is considered to have had a good life for someone who was legally property. The Wheatleys encouraged her education and later her career as a poet. After learning to read,...
Peyton Place: The Author, the bestseller and the legacy
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Artistic masterpieces can evolve from any genre. Pablo Picasso's abstract paintings are revered by some as just Leonardo Da Vinci's telling portraits are. The same principle can be applied to works of literature. Frontier adventure stories and political solutions written in the form of science...
Self reliance as a means to discovering identity
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
According to Ralph Ellison, identity is the American theme. This sentiment explains why his highly acclaimed novel, Invisible Man, features a nameless protagonist trying to discover who he is. Ellison also insists that “the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who...
The repression of memory in witchcraft study
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The readings for this week focused around the different approaches to the historical study of witchcraft and witchcraft trials: rationalism versus romanticism. Rationalism focuses more on historical and archeological studies in its attempt to discover a cohesive historical narrative, while...
Finding the man in the golem: Perfection through the word in Gustav Meyrink's "The Golem"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The Golem, according to legend, is a man-made creature, constructed out of wax, inanimate until a written Cabalistic scripture is placed in its mouth. Without the written word, the physical form of the Golem remains a mix of primal elements; without the clay to inspire, the written prayer remains...
Sight and reality in Chestnutt's "The Conjure Woman"
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
There has always been a fundamental distinction between reality and how our mind represents reality. What we see and observe (external sight) comes into conflict with what we interpret and feel (internal sight). Charles W. Chestnutt's The Conjure Woman explores the gulf between the eye and the...
Elsie Venner: A destiny of obscurity
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In it's own words, the novel Elsie Venner, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, has been called “A Romance of Destiny” (Title), “a medicated novel” (Preface 1), and a “test [of] the doctrine of ‘original sin' and human responsibility” (Preface 1). I see very little...
'The oval portrait' and 'The birthmark': An insight to an era
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Documents, records locked away in vaults, and history books are all excellent way to learn about the past. These are all ways that facts can be found, but that is only part of what can be discovered about past. Literature gives an insight into the culture of the times that facts and figures...
Analysis of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
In the popular short story The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe reveals the horrid theme that each person has a vicious wicked side or a dark side that can provoke the person into committing unthinkable sins for no apparent reason. Poe was an expert in writing thrillers which the psyche of the...
Edgar Allan Poe: The man inside his work
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The life of Edgar Allan Poe can easily be found throughout all of his stories and poems. It would be unfair to say that Poe only wrote autobiographical fiction, but his work does parallel his life. His life was a perfect match for great fiction. While it is true that his life was horribly...
Hemingway's art of anxiety: The visual-to-verbal relationship in "The Sun Also Rises"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Hemingway's style depends upon vividness and exactness of visual detail to create the atmosphere of modernism which permeates his works both large and small. Though this richness is due to influence from other writers of the modernist period (as well as the application of his own theory of...
The parallel tragedies of Lily Bart and Tess Durbeyfield: An examination of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles are powerful examples of the American and British realist novel. Both depict the harsh Victorian society in which women were held to unattainable standards of perfection, and both are social commentaries about the...
The traveling musician as the other in two of Eudora Welty's short stories
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Eudora Welty was a writer who sought to identify her native Mississippi in terms of her concept of place. By focusing so often on place, Welty often used the concept of outsiders to emphasize the nature of the place in which the outsiders have come to interact. The outsider characters in...
The eccentrics of Margery Kempe, an aspired Saint
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Margery Kempe, the daughter of John Burnham, a popular mayor of Bishop's Lynn, England, was born in 1373. Although she could not read or write, Kempe dictated a biography of herself to be written, that begins with her marriage at the age of “twenty year of age or some deal more”...
The Peanut-Crunching Crowd and the Rubber crotch: How Sylvia Plath's legacy has suffered by the hands of sexism, over-eager feminists, schadenfreude, and gender politics?
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
O'Rourke goes on to say that although poems like “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus” seem “crudely self-involved,” the majority of Plath's poetry is abstract, symbolic, and in general quite distant from the confessional poets with whom she is grouped. Despite this, Plath's...
