History, Memory, and Relationships with the Past in James Joyce's Ulysses
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The past can be a daunting thing. From personal memory to history at large, the past has the power to bury those unable to establish a healthy relationship with it. One can easily become trapped - paralyzed - in the past through guilt, regret, or nostalgia, emotions generated based upon...
Patriarchal Sexuality of the Internalized Document in Corregidora
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The adage “history repeats itself,” like many adages, sometimes seem disingenuous; they are neatly packaged concepts that lack any definitive details that would give one a context to consider them properly. In Corregidora, there is an expansion of this idea of history and repetition....
'Otherness' and the Fact and Fancy Dichotomy in Charles Dickens' Hard Times
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
“Otherness” describes a person engaging in the reflexive act of defining their identity in reference to another person. In this way, Otherness is a definitive means of exploring the relationships between social castes and gender relationships. In Hard Times, these two types of Otherness...
'An Other of the Other' in Emile Zola's Nana and Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening'
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Emile Zola and Kate Chopin both present texts that depict the fall of a heroine. Nana and Edna Pontellier Naturalistically represent archetypal women of the late 19th century; Nana, as a courtesan, represents the rising lower class, and Edna representing the upper-middle class. Despite the...
A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The theme I select to examine in A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles, is the power of love. Love in the time of Drosilla and Charikles was an entirely different concept. Especially from what we are accustomed to today. Loving someone fifty years ago, isn't even close to how we love a...
Technology in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The technology in our world has been both a beneficial force and a destructive one. On one hand, technology has made our world a much simpler place to live in, and it is hard to imagine the world we live in today without it. Just about everything we do, from shopping for groceries to paying your...
The Question of Morality Film Noir
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Moral ambiguity is a central theme in John Huston's film The Maltese Falcon (1941) and in Billy Wilder's film Double Indemnity (1944) and James M. Cain's novel by the same title. The films and novel follow characters whose motives are questionable and morally problematic. This essay will discuss...
The Issue of Hope and Redemption in Film Noir: Living Day-to-Day in the Present, or Living for the Future?
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The films Out of the Past, Force of Evil, and Double Indemnity are narratives that contain similar noir themes. All three narratives follow troubled male characters who must sever ties with their pasts in order to move forward to a hopeful and happy future. Two of these characters succeed,...
A God with Different Faces: Conditions for the Redemption of Everyman and for the Condemnation of Doctor Faustus
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Literature
The themes of mankind's redemption from sin and his place in the afterlife are of central importance to the Middle English play Everyman and the Renaissance play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Both Everyman and Doctor Faustus concentrate on the redemption of mankind, but because of the...
The Disparate Faces of God in the Visions of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Literature
In “A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich” by Julian of Norwich and “The Book of Margery Kempe” by Margery Kempe, each author gives literary descriptions of her own holy visions. In each description of a vision or a revelation in the two works, each author...
Iago, an Immoral Monster
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Literature
Othello, Shakespeare's tragedy, a story of jealousy, envy, betrayal and death displays the evil masterminding of a single individual. The ambitious Iago, a character filled with jealousy uses his manipulative traits to penetrate the minds of the play's characters to set them on a course of...
The Rebellious Woman: Gender and Sexuality in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market
Tutorials/exercises - 8 pages - Literature
One cannot help but notice the numerous interpretations of Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” that pertain to either gender, sex, or religion. The poem itself has been scrutinized more often than one can count, critics often referring to its erotic subtext and similarities to various...
William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound
Tutorials/exercises - 2 pages - Literature
In the second week of November 1913, William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound arrived in Sussex for what would be a three-year stay at Stone Cottage. Yeats thought of the excursion as an “experiment,” while Pound felt that it would “not be in the least profitable” (Longenbach 37)....
Book Review: The Women of Renaissance Florence by Richard Trexler
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Women of Renaissance Florence, Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence is a collection of three essays by Richard Trexler that give the reader insight into the experience of women in Florentine society by examining three major groups of women; nuns, prostitutes, and widows. Trexler is a...
Book review: An analysis of the narrative voice in Richard Ford's "Wildlife"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In Wildlife, Richard Ford employs Joe, a sixteen year old boy unsocialized and unfamiliar with the world around him, to tell the story of his parent's marriage. Having moved to Great Falls, Montana after living in four other towns, Joe is forced to navigate through a new town, as well as through...
Paralytic People: Paralysis in James Joyce's "A Little Cloud"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Tourists visiting New York City have one major complaint: the rudeness of everyone in the city. The tourists are not entirely to blame, though. The skyscrapers, steam rising from the streets, and the immense amount of concrete would make any non-New Yorker uncomfortable. Observers of New Yorkers...
Book review: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
All throughout time, since man was first given the ability to write, countless novels have been written on almost every subject conceivable. When it comes to literature on history, an infinite number of subtopics become available. Some examples include, war, peace, types of governments,...
Book review: He She It, by Marge Piercy
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In her novel, He She It, Marge Piercy questions ideas of gender and gender roles in a futuristic society. Piercy sets the stage of her story in a temporarily safe haven called Tikva, a Jewish slum where matriarchy holds a subtle but evident power. The story's central character is Shira...
Technical Aspects and the Drive of the Protagonist in Run Lola Run
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In Tom Twyker's film Run Lola Run, Lola is a character kinetically driven by her love for her boyfriend, Manni, and her desire to save him. This drive takes her on three separate but similar journeys, with fate and timing to decide the outcome. Lola's drive to find a hundred thousand marks...
Adelina's character in The Queen by Pacheco
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
We live in a society where many people are seen as outcasts. The majority of our society sees themselves as superior and try to suppress those not like them. In Jose Emilio Pacheco's “The Queen,” Adelina is seen as an outcast and is tormented by those around her. Her family and...
A Study of Shakespeare's Ophelia
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout theatre and drama history, we read about and study the great men that have dominated stages and plots. We analyze all of their speeches, actions, and intentions, but can the same be said of women? While women are studied in dramatic context, it is certainly not with the same...
Poems on Pleasure
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Modern literature has often attempted to put poets into categories, based on the type of literature that they have written for the world. Shelley and Coleridge were regarded as a few of the most prominent Romantic poets, due to the vivid imagery and immense emotions that their works convey. Their...
Short Story Review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Readers love the story of the predator and the prey, regardless of where or with whom the sympathy falls. A tale of survival or near-survival keeps us craving more, and if the creator or messenger of that story can secretly divulge wisdom along the way, then both reader and author benefit....
The Deceit of Ghosts
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The concept of family t presently, as the world has grown smaller, children no longer have and loyalty to family has been a virtue in nearly all times and cultures of this world. Albeithe need to embrace their parents as they once did. Yet in Ibesn's play Ghosts, the parent-child relationship is...
Behind the Murders
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Patricia Highsmith's short stories exemplify her interpretation of the human condition. However, her stories tend to involve characters with very extreme emotional conditions which ultimately cause them take surprising actions, those being the typical climaxes of Highsmith short stories. In...
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Bartolome De Las Casas was a Dominican Monk of Spanish descent, best known for his moving work A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, which details the barbaric actions of the Spanish conquistadors in their relations with the natives of the New World. Even though it was written in the...
Book Review: Women in the Viking Age
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Women in the Viking Age by Judith Jesch is a detailed and informative publication that discusses women during the Viking Age through the close examination of a vast amount of resources. Judith Jesch is currently teaching at the University of Nottingham, and has extensive experience in a variety...
Lily and Becky: A Flower and a Weed
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair was published in book form for the first time in 1848, and was available in serialized editions one year prior. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth was published in 1905 making it highly likely that Wharton was aware of Vanity Fair and the main character...
The Sound and the Fury Review
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
William Faulkner was one of the most influential writers of his time. He was a pioneer author and some even consider him to be the only true modernist fiction writer who composed in the 1930's. In that period he wrote many works that became famous, including novels such as: As I Lay Dying,...
"Ligeia," "The Raven," and "The Cask:" Poe's Untrustworthy Narrators
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “Marginalia,” published in 1844, Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “To be thoroughly conversant with a Man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.” His outlook on humanity was somber at best, and is a theme that we see flowing through a large...
