Old stories of love and tragedy - published: 22/07/2009
Thesis - 4 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...
Scaling, airbrush, cropping and other ways to transform a portrait
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. The times change, and we change in them. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus certainly transforms over time. At the core of this modernist novel lie issues of religion, art, aesthetic, and conversion. James Joyce brilliantly...
A subjective analysis of what one might term as a lighthouse
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Woolf could choose many ways to describe the Ramsay's to her audience. She could start with a description of their summer home, the price of their rent, or their family lineage in an attempt to engage the reader and establish some common ground on which to build from. But, as Woolf points...
Gremio and Echoes, Gremio and Echoes
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
What determines a character's worth? Are heroes more important than villains? Importance seems to vary subjectively, as does one's curiosity. In The Taming of the Shrew one may become identified with, intrigued by, or appalled by a number of characters, and as in much of Shakespeare's work, most...
Sugar and vice and everything nice: Examining the dual qualities of - The Fable of the Bees
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In what way should we approach this startling claim? Is Bernard Mandeville simply a cynical philosopher degrading humanity and encouraging depravity? If private vices do in fact lead to public benefits what effects will this have on religion, economy, and morality? These questions, among many...
The religion of the social contract defining and denying civil religion
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
Throughout his work On the Social Contract, Rousseau attempts to describe a societal system in which sovereign rule is found within the collective will of the people. Within this system, he argues, freedom is linked to morality and essentially humanity. This freedom exists as a civil freedom in...
Berlusconi's Italy: A critical review
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
E. Shin and John A. Agnew is in many ways about the notorious Silvio Berlusconi but it is actually more focused on Italy and its politics as a whole. It is about what the authors call the “followership” of Berlusconi more so than his actual leadership. This book review will discuss the...
Artists & mental illnesses - The mad genius
Thesis - 6 pages - Philosophy
Plato (427 - 347 B.C.), one of the earliest of the great philosophers claimed in his writing “The Ion” that artists, when creating, went temporarily out of their minds, that the artist was merely the medium used by the Gods to communicate with the audience. Plato used the term...
Socrates and the importance of philosophy and the examined life
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
Those who have studied Socrates know that his thesis is: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” (Plato: 443). This is a statement that he says in his defense after he has been found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens, making the stronger appear to be the weaker, and for...
Nietzsche's genealogy's contribution to ethics
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche is arguably one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century as he challenged the roots of Christianity and the morality that came from it. He was a believer of life, and the realities of the world, not in the life that was rooted in religion. In other words, he...
Ayn Rand's theory of rights as a serious theory
Thesis - 15 pages - Philosophy
Ayn Rand is a thinker who has attained notoriety for having a significant amount of influence on contemporary libertarians, especially when it comes to her theory of rights. She is unlike many other prominent theorists, in that she published much of her ideas in works of fiction, and this led her...
The languages of modernity in "Paper Pills" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Jean Francois Lyotard describes modernity as an era of irrevocable progress forward, a subtle movement onwards that is characterized by the centralization of authority and imposition of a teleological mentality, whereby every development is considered valuable from an evolutionary perspective....
Racism and Canada's marginalized members: A literature comparison
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Canadians are proud of the fact that they live in a tolerant and multicultural society, but this pride is often ignorant to the fact that racism has played a large part in this country's history, and in many cases it has been systematic and caused much hardship and suffering. Systematic racism...
Human rights and Islam: A critical review of research on Sudan
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
Many non-Muslim onlookers in places like the West have heard of the apparent human rights violations that occur in the some parts of the Islamic world, and they have come to conclude that women are naturally supposed to take a subordinate position to men. While there might be some good reasons...
Representations of social class in popular literature
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Many of the texts studied in literature portray Canada as a country that is divided by social class. Three of these novels in particular are Who Do You Think You Are?, The Wars and In the Skin of a Lion. The first of these novels is a set of small stories that chronicles the main character's...
Experience reflection mill valley Islamic center
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
Understanding the Muslim faith today for outsiders is more important now than any point in recent history. An increasing number of the world's headlines today come from countries with predominately Muslim influence. In an age of such political correctness in use of terminology, it is important...
Reaching for a Larger History: A comparative book review
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Hugh Kearney's The British Isles: A History of Four Nations and Gary Nash's The Unknown American Revolution both attempt to introduce an often missed dimension into their respective subjects. Although each book has a unique style and approach (because of differences in scope, audience,...
Mere Christianity: Discussion
Thesis - 2 pages - Philosophy
Mere Christianity was compiled, and expanded, from a series of radio lectures by C.S. Lewis. They have a conversational style, but they present some very deep and difficult ideas. In his introduction to the volume, Lewis describes how he took these lectures upon himself as a means of joining the...
Abraham Kuyper and John Calvin: Calvinism and Neo-Calvinism compared
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
On November 9, 1891, the Dutch pastor and statesman Abraham Kuyper spoke to the first Christian Social Congress in the Netherlands on a profound and continually relevant subject—poverty. The address was peculiarly relevant to that time, even past-due, as Kuyper himself announced in his...
Lord over logic
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
The seeming necessity of logical principles, such as the fundamental “law of non-contradiction”, has led many thinkers to consider these principles primordial, basic, and uncreated. I can sympathize with the attitude that gives rise to this belief. In my own personal history of studying...
Dejection and the eighth deadly sin: A Christian-critical engagement with Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode"
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
For the ordinary reader encountering Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode,” the poet's dejection may seem irrelevant. The most explicit reason proffered for his dejection is that visitations of affliction have suspended “what nature gave me at my birth,/ The shaping spirit of...
Framing Jane Eyre: The mystery of St. John's letter
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In the final pages of Jane Eyre, one encounters a mystery more impenetrable than the madness of Jane Poole. As many have noted, Charlotte Bronte has given us a novel of character, rejecting plot as the driving force in her story. One reads Jane Eyre to watch the slow unfolding of the person she...
Faery lands forlorn: A window onto one region of the imagination of John Keats
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Dooyeerdians tend to admit that indefinability characterizes an irreducible mode of being. At first, of course, this admission appears ludicrous. The modalities exist as a language for describing how the logical part of one encounters non-logical (not illogical) reality. But if they are pressed...
Confessions of self-displacement in Great Expectations
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
One sometimes suspects, while reading Great Expectations, that Dickens could have been good friends with Bishop Tutu. One of the particular satisfactions of the novel is the often tender justice meeted out for character's sins. Very few characters who actually appear for any length of time remain...
The face of nature in Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
A cruel realization overtakes the sensitive convert to Naturalism. Seldom has there been a more sensitive convert than Thomas Hardy, who, although he flirted with Anglicanism because of his family and with the Baptists because of a friend, ended his days with a troubled faith in the indifferent,...
Bavinck and Vollenhoven on faith
Thesis - 8 pages - Philosophy
In 1918, Herman Bavinck published an articled entitled “Philosophy of Faith” in the Annuarium of the Societas Studiosorum Reformatorum; thirty one years later, Dirk Vollenhoven presented a paper entitled “Faith: Its Nature, Structure, and Significance for Science” at a Roman...
Autism and Apophaticism
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
A postmodern philosophy of religion, of the relationship between God and men, is based on a unique set of beliefs about God, language, what it means to be as human, and the way the world is given us to inhabit (including ourselves). Perhaps the profoundest movement within this philosophy occurs...
Transformations of literature: augustine's 'confessions' and virgil's 'aeneid' - published: 07/07/2009
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Both St. Augustine's Confessions and Virgil's epic The Aeneid marked a new direction in literature for the West. Each one was inspired by the works of previous authors, but was willing to forge a new literature for their times. In the Aeneid, Virgil established Rome as indebted to the Greek...
The empowered woman in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
Speaking of his king's command to “stay [his wife's] tongue,” (The Winter's Tale, 2.3.110) Antigonus very succinctly states the theme of female empowerment in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Throughout the play, Shakespeare employs various strategies to communicate this idea. One...
A review of T.H. White's book The Once and Future King
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
An epic historical fantasy with a point that transcends the genre, T.H. White's classic four-part novel is a time telescope with a mirror at the end in place of a lens. As with most classical literature, White's tale contains a higher intention hidden beneath the folds of his satirical prose,...
