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...
The (Wo)Man of our dreams: Gender-bending in Takarazuka
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
An extraordinarily attractive actor, with large, dark eyes fringed by long lashes and chiseled features, suddenly appears on an audience walkway (“silver bridge”), much to the delight of adoring fans (Brau 88). With arms extended widely, the actor begins serenading the enraptured crowd...
Is she fact or fiction? : Blurring boundaries in Angela Carter's 'Nights at the Circus'
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
In Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter succeeds in creating a heroine so untraditional, so much larger than life in both physique and personality, that the topic of who Fevvers is and what she represents is discussed even more by critics than it is by the book's other characters. The winged woman...
Archetypal criticism - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare is one the most acclaimed and widely read pieces of literature in the history of Western civilization. It is the story of a young prince named Hamlet who must battle his adversaries and his own demons in order to avenge the fratricide committed...
Early existentialism in Julius Caesar
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
There is a saying among political scientists that the citizens of a nation deserve their leader. In other words a dictator or tyrant will never appear out of a vacuum, but as the result of countless historical events, and as an expression of the society's current values and priorities. As such,...
Major themes in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The effects of the Vietnam War left men with terrible everlasting images and countless troubles, according to Tim O'Brien's novel that portrays a war that was meaningless and strung out. O'Brien's book, “The Things They Carried” describes the everyday issues that war soldiers...
Research on techniques for online promotion
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Literature
Being able to choose a research topic presented a special opportunity and also a harrowing realization that being interested in a wide array of topics, narrowing in on one would be a difficult task. I knew that I would have to spend many hours reading about and searching for the information I...
