Fear: The deconstruction of normality
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In all honesty and truthfulness, post-war, American authors have produced quite a frightening element in this country's literary discourse. Frightening, because they amass self-critical observations that have ultimately led to paranoia regarding the reliability of life's constructs and realities....
Chapter VIII's analysis of 'Human Bondage' by Somerset Maugham
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The excerpt to analyse retraces what may be considered as a part of the main body of the plot of the apprenticeship novel Of Human Bondage by the English writer Somerset Maugham. The passage I'm about to try to analyse is extracted from the 58th chapter which means that the reader is already half...
Liberalism: What are the main concepts of liberalism?
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Liberalism is a philosophy, or political movement that has, for an aim, the development of individual freedom. Since the concept of freedom evolved over time, liberalism evolved as well. However, some core assumptions never changed. First, let us consider how all the core concepts of liberalism...
Comparison between 'Nighthawks' by Hopper and Mystery and 'Melancholy of a Street' by de Chirico
Case study - 4 pages - Literature
The success of the Melancholy show demonstrated that existential issues are a productive source of inspiration for artists. Universal melancholy affects both painters and spectators. Hopper's Nighthawks and De Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street represent human metaphysical concern,...
What were the origins, the aspect, and the outcomes of the War of the Roses?
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
“And here I prophesy: this brawl today, Grown to this faction in the Temple garden, Shall send, between the Red Rose and the White, A thousand souls to death and deadly night.”: this is how the Earl of Warwick announces the War of the Roses in Shakespeare's Henry VI. Indeed, from 1455...
"Clay" excerpt from Dubliners by James Joyce, 1914
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The passage studied here is an excerpt from "Clay", one of the short stories of the book Dubliners, which was written by James Joyce in 1914. In this story, the main character Maria is invited to spend the Hallow Eve evening at Joe's, a man of whom she once was the nurse but who is now...
A review of Mead's God and Gold
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Walter Russell Mead's text God and Gold : Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World is a difficult work, especially in terms of contemporary criticism, because it is revered by both right-wing conservatives and some socialists. The book explains (and to some degree may even argue...
The theme of "incomprehension" in The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
According to one review, The Secret River “invites us to examine flawed human lives and to reflect on a tragedy of mutual incomprehension.” Discuss how this theme of “incomprehension” is explored in the novel. One of the main themes of The Secret River, a historical novel...
What was 'Tito's way', and how successful was it?
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Looking back at the time after the end of communism (Cuba and today's China being particular and Chavez not a communist), we basically find only three different ways of communism; the original one, the Lenino-Stalinism in the USSR, the latter one, China's Maoism, and finally the...
Spanish literature: The Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes, books written at the outset of Spain's golden age, are extremely important works. The Celestina is a love story, while Lazarillo de Tormes is one of the first picaresque novels. Despite this major difference, they are similar in that they are both critiques...
The Russian novel: the narrator's role in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
“Death”(Part 5, chapter 20) is the only chapter of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with a title. It is not the only death in the book; Anna's suicide at the end of the novel is arguably the story's most important death. Although the death of Nikolai Levin by no means drastically alters the...
Shakespeare's plays illustrated by Blake and Fuseli: The artists as critics
Essay - 11 pages - Literature
It has judiciously been pointed out that “pictures from Shakespeare account[ed] for about one fifth -some 2 300!- of the total number of literary paintings recorded between 1760 and 1900” (R. Altick). As a matter of fact, the renewed interest in nineteenth century British art in the...
Order and disorder in Robinson Crusoe
Book review - 14 pages - Literature
“Necessity is the mother of inventions” could undoubtedly be regarded as one of Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731)'s favourite proverb, and indeed, he employed the maxim in his History of Trade, writing: “Necessity which is the Mother, and Convenience which is the Handmaid of Invention,...
What is the relation (if any) between virtue and human flourishing?
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
When you shout at a passer-by in the street, and ask him what would be the most important goal in his life, he is likely to answer, like a majority of people that he wants to live happily. Then, we should raise the question: how could we achieve this happiness? More than two thousand years ago,...
The difference between sentences that are evaluated by linguistic significance alone and sentences that are evaluated by linguistic significance and other circumstances
Essay - 16 pages - Linguistics & languages
Significant differences among sentences of natural language certainly occur. It is not a matter of theoretical philosophy or theoretical linguistics but simply common sense. The difference I would like to focus on is the one between sentences that are evaluated using linguistic significance alone...
Fascism, communism and totalitarianism
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
“Fascism was the first mass-mobilizing development dictatorship that provided a frank, complete, and relatively coherent rationale for totalitarianism." Actually, Mussolini's doctrine of delayed industrialization was the first to openly affirm “the reality of production and the...
Ernest Gellner: Nations and nationalism
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism , which was published in 1983, is a core reading for the study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European history for it cleverly conceptualizes notions -namely nationalism and nation-state- that are essential components of that period. The course...
Is "To Kill a Mockingbird" (by Harper Lee) a novel about racism?
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Writing To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has chosen to make a description of the Deep South during the Great Depression of the 30's through the eyes of a young girl, leaving us uncertain about the qualification of this novel. Indeed, reading the biography of the author, the reader realizes that...
France and the United States: Two different approaches to feminism
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Feminism is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “the belief that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men” . However, there is not a single definition for feminism. This notion is rather complex and controversial, and it cannot be fully comprehended in...
Dr. Seward's blind rationalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Seward, young British physician and unreliable narrator, embodies late-Victorian scientism and rationalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Irony in Seward's portrayal reveals much of the author's criticism of the late-Victorian scientific establishment. Although Seward sees himself as...
Literature review on virtual tour technology
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
Numerous developments in virtual technologies show up in modern world creating for people more and more comforts and possibilities. Different kinds of visions that we may see with the help of virtual tour technology, have elevated the status of virtual environment to the level of pop...
The universal human rights concept and its roots in Western political thought
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Commitment to the idea of cultural relativism is usually seen as precluding the acceptance of the idea of universal human rights. But is relativism against universalism a false dichotomy? Can we construct a “differentiated universalism” or a “non-ethnocentric universalism”?...
The Australian Strine
Essay - 17 pages - Philosophy
Having spent my eight-month-stay between Sydney and Brisbane, respectively State capitals of New South Wales and Queensland, sharing Australians' life, and having also travelled a bit to other cities and States of the East Coast, I feel I must share my affection for this vast, exciting...
Incidents in the life of a slave girl, by Harriet Jacobs
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The novel Incidents in the life of a slave girl is an autobiography written by Harriet Jacobs in 1861. In this book, she relates various events of the life she had when she was a slave in South Carolina. She confides in the reader and gives details of the difficulties she had to face in her...
The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
The original idea of the Ku Klux Klan was born in the late 1865, in the minds of six young men -John Lester, James Crowe, John Kennedy, Richard Reed, Frank Mc Cord and Calvin Jones- in the quiet town of Pulaski, Tennessee. They were Confederate soldiers during the Civil War and were bored with...
King Lear, by William Shakespeare: My experience of reading Shakespeare
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Reading in Original version a Shakespeare play was in my mind a kind of challenge. I read quite a few of Shakespeare's plays in the past, but they were translated in French. I had heard so much about Shakespeare's wonderful style, the beautiful English language he used that I wanted to...
The role of NGO's during wartime: humanitarian vs pacifist ideals
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Since the beginning of modern humanitarian action during wartime (with the birth of the ICRC), the question of the NGOs' role on the battlefields has been the subject of an important controversy, opposing humanitarian to pacifist ideals. Indeed, pacifists' main point was to denounce the...
Essay on Hemingway's book: "The Sun Also Rises"
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Published in 1926, The sun also rises is considered as one of Hemingway's best novels. It depicts the circle of American expatriate writers living in Paris in the 20's. Through drinks, rides in Montparnasse, fiestas in Spain, the relationship between Brett and Jake and the remaining...
The emotional and psychological reader's response in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Blue Hotel"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
"The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane are two short stories which, beyond the colour references in the title, try to develop certain psychological responses within the reader. I will attempt to show how through two different points of view for...
John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": Chapter 3
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The chapter under study is an extract from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Situated at the beginning of the novel, chapter 3 offers a very detailed description of a land turtle trying to reach the other side of the highway. Its journey is described as a very slow and painful one, full...
