"With their tongues cocked and loaded:"The power of language and dialect in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Zora Neale Hurston was a cultural anthropologist for her own culture. She spent much of her life recording the stories and saying of the people around her, both in Harlem and abroad in the American South. She poured her energy into representing people the way she saw them, or heard them, as the...
Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant on the Improvement of Society
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
n the Preface to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes, “The last thing I should promise would be to “improve” mankind.” Although it was not Nietzsche's aim to improve life for the majority, it was the main focus of many of the writings of his predecessors and contemporaries....
North, by Seamus Heaney
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
In 1975, Seamus Heaney came out with his fourth book of poetry, North. Although the third volume, “Wintering Out” foreshadows many of the same themes, it is North, according to several critics that develops these themes, and establishes a turning point in Heaney's poetry. According to...
Setting the Atmosphere in The Cask of Amontillado, The Masque of the Red Death and Pickman's Model and The Lottery
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
“It was a dark and stormy night…” Classic, word-of-mouth horror stories begin with this line. What is it about the “dark and stormy night” that should cause us, the reader, to feel anxiety and fear about the story about to be told? Horror stories cannot begin without a...
Symbolism in 'The Scarlet Letter'
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is bursting with symbolism. And, while they do not place a high value on subtlety, these symbols are very effective vehicles for the story's most prominent themes. Perhaps the most prominent is the conflict between what Hawthorne clearly...
Feminism in Ibsen's A Doll's House
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
According to Joan Templeton, author of Ibsen's Women, Ibsen's inspiration for Nora in A Doll's House came from a family friend, Laura Peterson Kieler, also a writer (135). Kieler, the "real-life Nora," likewise borrowed money for her husband, who was sick with tuberculosis, to...
Power and Difference: A Derrida and Foucault Encounter
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
The works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault discussed here explore relationships of power in Western language and social structures. These relationships can be difficult to detect and are thus often overlooked, even when one searches rigorously. We will find that such relationships are...
Some Narratological Moves and Their Effect in End of Alice
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Let it be known that in End of Alice there is no ANP, only an ENP, and the ENP is the time during which Chappy is imprisoned. The “prison” time moves forward steadily and occasionally will jump backward in an analepsis to, roughly, two points in the narrator's past. The first analeptic...
Transcendentalist Theory in Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Walt Whitman, a well-known Transcendentalist, believed that humans and nature share an intimate relationship. His poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" illustrates this communion with the natural world. It contrasts this view with the scientific view of nature that...
The Two Theban Tragedies: Antigone and Oedipus the King
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Greek tragedies all possess a common trait: the protagonist displays a tragic flaw, which ultimately leads to his or her downfall. In the two Theban tragedies, Antigone and Oedipus the King, Creon's tragic flaw is immoderation, while Oedipus' unwillingness to accept his fate causes his...
Butterfly or Bumblebee?: The Sting of Satire in The Importance of Being Earnest
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Oscar Wilde said that his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, subtitled “A Serious Comedy for Trivial People” was “written by a butterfly for butterflies” (qtd. in Stokes 115). Although this statement may be true, the subject of the play itself, while treated in a...
The Enlightenment of Sir Gawain
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain is a model knight in all things material; he excels in his physical prowess as well as the arts of conversation and courtly love. Although he also exhibits outward signs of devotion and piety, his spirituality is called into question through...
Treatment of time in Virginia Woolf's Work
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In her novel "Orlando: a Biography" published in 1927, Virginia Woolf evokes 'the extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind' (Orlando p.91) and the opposition she expresses between this two conceptions of time is to be found, more or less obviously, in most...
With close reference to any two poems on this course, critically discuss different conceptions of American-ness
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
One can find a great variety of themes in American poetry, whatever the period one is interested in: poems about love or about war, about the self or about nature, about reality or about dreams. But the common point of all these is that they convey a sense of American-ness - that is, they can all...
