Old stories of love and tragedy
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet largely pulls from a traditional tale, written and copied for decades before Shakespeare took his pen with an effort to adapt. Shakespeare's version, unquestionably the most famous, tells the story of love but, more, it tells of the tragedies to which that love...
A special education, learning to teach a disabled student
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
A Special Education: One Family's Journey Through the Maze of Learning Disabilities is the author, Dana Buchman's explanation about how her family coped with having a child who suffered from severe learning and developmental disorders. It is a tremendously interesting look at the topic because...
Culture and order: all sweetness and light - published: 25/03/2010
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
“Culture and Anarchy,” Matthew Arnold's series of essays comment on the status of culture throughout the late nineteenth century. Arnold saw culture as the “pursuit of total perfection. ” It was then, he believed, the practice of all to accept that perfection and further...
He just wanted to play bass: The story of Jaco
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
“I can see its not going to be easy being me, ” in a forewarning tone of eventual doom, John Francis Pastorius III described the weight pressing down on him, through expectation. In the 1995 biography Jaco: The Extraordinary And Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, ‘The World's Greatest...
Familial construction in Christopher Carrington's 'There's no place like home'
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
In Christopher Carrington's No Place Like Home, the author tackles the very difficult question of what comprises a family. The question posed, liking a thread throughout the book as it attempts to be answered, is what are the issues facing gay and lesbian parents as they choose to construct a...
The relationship between Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Through the course of the novel, Jane strives to define the concept of propriety for herself that is at odds with her natural “virulent passion.” Her impassioned outbursts are both a central struggle through her youth and an engaging facet of her more mature personality. Jane is taught...
Like the rich and poor together: Gender relations revealed through class differences in Italian American literature
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Since the early Italian American experience is largely polarized between the worlds of labor and the family, consequently, the role of class and gender are not easily avoided in Italian American literature. In the memoir Rosa, the Life of an Italian Immigrant, and Pietro DiDonato's Christ in...
Justice in the Eumenides
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout his trilogy, the Orestia, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, explores the theme of retribution, as one family member kills another, raising question of whether or not their actions are a form of justice, or revenge. Aeschylus seems to present a clear dichotomy between the two...
Artie, Fritz and Will
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
With the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) (Oliver 6), the counter-Enlightenment came into its own after hiding for centuries under the drab rationalism of Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. Although this attack on the supremacy of reason...
Motivations for characters in the Iliad
Thesis - 2 pages - Philosophy
This is analysis of four characters in the Iliad and their relationships with the thing which motivates them, a will to power. Each of these four characters, Zeus, Agamemnon, Hektor and Achilles strives for domination, but in their own way, but despite these differences, we see how each of them...
Fate vs circumstance
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Fate, a doom or fortune that depends on one's destiny gives man the idea of a future that is certain and firm. Fate has been the blame of man's circumstances hence giving man the discouragement of taking full responsibility for his actions. In Faust and The Sorrows of Werther, Goethe creates two...
Shylock and Lear: society's outcasts
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's use of the outsider, one excluded from society especially through the removal of his identity, serves to portray the cruel and selfish aspects of humanity. In The Merchant of Venice and in King Lear, the substandard treatment and lack of sympathy Shylock and Lear encounter,...
Horatio: A man of virtue
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's Hamlet, known for its examination of deception and betrayal, presents a set of characters trapped in a web of lies and murder. The ghost of Hamlet's father, who puzzles and eventually drives Hamlet to madness by placing the burden of revenge on his shoulders, defines the problematic...
The victimized villain: Shylock
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare portrays Shylock as a ruthless, greedy Jewish villain and thus establishes a barrier between him and the other predominantly Christian characters. Throughout the play, this alienation, as a result of Shylock's resentful character and bitter actions, and the...
The Count of Monte Cristo
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
A classic tale, The Count of Monte Cristo has been adapted to many forms of media. One of the more recent retellings is the 2002 film version starring Jim Caveziel as Edmund Dantes. A main reason The Count of Monte Cristo has proved to be so popular and enduring as a story is that it is a...
Jihad and Western perspectives of Muslim identity
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
Jihad is one of the most misunderstood topics in the world today. Much of the West believes that the word means Holy war and that it is fundamental to Islam and its ultimate goal of world domination. The Muslim world, of course, knows better what Jihad means, but even among Muslims there exists a...
Liberation theology and the life of Archishop Oscar Romero
Thesis - 8 pages - Philosophy
As Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero was chosen in order to avoid interference from the church in the coming political unrest. Because Romero saw the plight of the poor and down-trodden and the brutality and disregard for human dignity and life by the government; he realized that the church...
Mormon persecution in Missouri
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
In modern America there exists a delicate balance between church and state. We have a constitution that protects us from interference from churches in government affairs, and vice versa. However the constitution is very brief and somewhat vague on the subject. This creates many problems, with...
Abraham: Father of monotheism
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
The story of Abraham is one of the most important and prominent stories in Islam, Christianity and Judaism. This can be clearly seen by the fact that these three religions are often referred to as the Abrahamic religions. Abraham is often considered the father of the great monotheistic traditions...
A means to an end: Reconsidering the use of stereotypes in the graphic narrative
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
After reading the first fifty-two pages of Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, one may wonder if the reviews that appear on the back are even referring to the book on which they are printed. While Derek Kirk Kim proclaims, “As an Asian American, American Born Chinese is the book I've...
America: No place for free blacks? Navigating "freedom" in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Since my first experience with Uncle Tom's Cabin in high school and in further studies, I've struggled with the question of abolitionism and the societal value of the African-American characters in the novel. More broadly, one of the reasons I enrolled in this course was my interest in...
The politics of race and female empowerment in wide Sargasso Sea
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Miscegenation, an act that was illegal in America until the 1967 ruling of Loving vs. Virginia, is not uncommon in literature and not limited to the human species. We know of Moses marriage to an Ethiopian woman (King James Bible, Numbers12:1); in the Arabian Nights we know of King Shahryar's...
Split personalities and an odd love triangle in Ford's The Broken Heart
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
John Ford's The Broken Hear t has been said to be written as homage to Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and to his love affair with Penelope Rich. While this could be true, Ford offers a similar love triangle between Orgilus, Penthea, and Bassanes. Orgilus and Bassanes have clear parallel roles to...
Classical cannibalistic myths: Revenge as an appetite in Titus Andronicus
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Vengeful acts, especially in Renaissance drama, are often countered by a more heinous act of violence. Titus Andronicus plays by this common rule with its climatic scene involving a mother forced into cannibalizing her children. The mode of this final vengeance is inevitable due to the fact that...
David Hume and the compatibility of necessity and liberty
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
The mind, according to David Hume, is not a truth-tracking device, and according to him, we misuse it if we think it can bring us to metaphysical conclusions. To Hume, the science of the mind can describe how the mind works and why it reaches the conclusions it does, but it cannot take us beyond...
A double paradox story
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
Philosophy has three major realms: the study of the physical world, the study of morals, the study of logic and reasoning. Immanuel Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals focuses on the study of morality and tries to give a clearer understanding of moral principles so that people can...
Never put Descartes before de horse
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
Rene Descartes used doubt to prove his beliefs to be true. In his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes enters into his most radical phase of methodological doubt when he introduces his evil genius hypothesis, also known as the evil demon argument. Descartes' demon...
The plot against people: Critical analysis
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In “The Plot Against People,” Russell Baker writes about inanimate objects and the three major categories they can be classified in; those that don't work (A), those that break down (B), and those that get lost (C). The way this essay works is that Baker describes various objects with...
How the ex-colored man's identity is constructed
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
From the beginning of his tale, the ex-colored man admits to a vague feeling of “unsatisfaction, of regret, of almost remorse.” As the story is told, it becomes clear that these confused emotions are the result of a confused identity. The narrator struggles not so much under the...
Reginald Rose biography
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Understanding Reginald Rose's life goes a long way toward understanding the recurring themes within his work. Indeed, most biographies on Rose focus almost exclusively on his work. Considering how prolific of a writer he was, it is safe to say that in many respects his life and his work were...
