Is "Sicilian truth" an oxymoron?
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo is by no means the kind of text that invites the reader to take it lightly and straightforwardly. The subtle irony running through the piece constantly implores the reader to interpret and re-interpret various scenes and the characters within them—in...
Circumstance in Jane Austen's early novels
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Circumstance and money figure heavily in Jane Austen's first two novels—Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice—particularly in the way these social and financial considerations impact marriage. They can cause multiple problems, thwarting passionate romance, such as in the cases...
Teaching themes of empathy through children's literature
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As Christians we are called to treat all individuals with understanding and compassion, extending to them the same unmerited favor that God has extended to those who follow Him. But how do we extend a sense of understanding to those whose personalities and experiences are quite different from our...
Real-World relevance of fantastic creation: An examination of "High Fantasy" and the goals of literal and historical writing.
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Literature
For the most part, fantastic or otherwise impossible methods of storytelling are ignored in the world of modern and classical literature. In order to accurately appreciate the quandary of the modern “Fantasy” author, one must be aware of the commonplace practice of division and...
Troilus' unwilling free will
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” consistently and emphatically stresses the absolute nature of courtly love and its proclivity to incite moral responsibility with relation to one's sense of free will and personal obligation. Chaucer toys with the notion of Troilus' free will versus his...
Denial: Internal struggle of a homosexual
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
James Baldwin's” Giovanni's Room” explores the internal struggle of a homosexual in denial. The main character, David, faces an internal conflict that eventually destroys every relationship he encounters in his personal life. His own struggle with his sexuality began at an early age and...
The Wife of duplicity
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The Wife of Bath's Tale, from Geoffrey Chaucer's “The Canterbury Tales”, was a veiled social critique. Her tale was a treatise of social commentaries on the role of gender, the church, and nobility in society. Geoffrey Chaucer used the duplicity of his character, The Wife of Bath, and...
Sermon 8 on the plagues of Egypt and the ten commandments of the law
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Augustine was greatly appreciated by his respective community for his teachings on Christianity and the profile of the Christian identity. His resources were not limited to only the New Testament Scriptures but avail other writings to further fulfill such teachings. The Jewish Scripture, or the...
Tool or trifle: The moral question of style
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
“You know not what hurt you do to learning that care not for words, but for matter, and so make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart.” (Roger Ascham) I am thirteen. Almost every afternoon I shove a book in my pocket, a hat on my head, and I wander out into the scurry-flurry of a...
Myth, the age of irrationalism, and the cult of celebrity.
Essay - 10 pages - Philosophy
Ancient and primitive cultures demonstrate the use of myth as an epistemological basis, but historically they have been replaced by Rationalism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the insufficiency of reason for the task we give it has become more and more evident, until at last...
Augustine and the vast interior: A discussion on Christian Asceticism
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Augustine's Confessions are built upon the twin poles of a search for God and a search for self. These twin poles are also twining poles because Augustine proclaims that one can only understand self in light of God and that one can only find God through self-knowledge. In one of his sermons,...
Death of a Salesman: Tragedy or not?
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The great authors of old, such as Aristotle, Sophocles and Homer, all wrote incredible tragedies that immortalize the classical notion of a tragic hero. But what of today? Are there no tragedies that occur in the society of today? Where is Oedipus Rex in the world of the twentieth century? In...
But the sun also rises
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In Ernest Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises, both the title and epigraph create commentary on the attitude of the characters. By using both a Gertrude Stein quote and a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, Hemingway shows how his generation was viewing life and, in contrast, how his...
Why the Greeks?
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
I take the question which is the title of this paper in two ways. First, I take it to mean, “what racial, historical, cultural, geographical and political factors gave rise to what is commonly considered the first flowering of philosophical thought;” Second, to mean, “for what...
Modern tragedy-The crucible
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In the history of the theatre, tragedies have always existed as a window to human nature. They depict man at his best, ready to sacrifice everything, even his life for the cause. The different types of tragedy include Sophocles's Greek tragedy, Shakespearean romantic tragedy, and modern...
American art : An interface with the modern art
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout the history of art, different movements arise as a result of the social, political, economic, and emotional state of mind that both people and nations are experiencing at a given time. Modern art and postmodern art are no two exceptions to these circumstances and have come to be for...
Fitzgerald and modernism
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout periods of literature, Modernism has revolted against former social standards and subject matter that is both prohibited and restricted in conversation and literature alike. The early 1900s were a time when writers were determining for themselves what they deemed to be important and...
Memorize your timetables: The rational world and the power of prediction in Tabucchi's La Testa Perduta di Damasceno Monteiro
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Philosophy
In Antonio Tabucchi's La Testa Perduta di Damasceno Monteiro, the reader is pulled into a detective murder-mystery dealing with decapitation, murder suspects named il Grillo Verde, and tripe. Of particular interest, however, is the character of Don Fernando, a lawyer whose mind flies from topic...
An investigation into cause and effect in Hume
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
My roommate has asserted that every time she breathes pepper, she sneezes. Her past experience of breathing pepper and sneezing has always reflected her future experience of breathing pepper and sneezing. She claims that if she amasses a sufficient number of similar cases where the future has...
The circle of life: A comparative look at the metaphysics of Conway and Spinoza
Book review - 3 pages - Philosophy
Both Lady Anne Conway and Baruch Spinoza argue that the individual things in the world, everything from the mosquito to the chair to the supermodel, contain the substance of God. And by sharing in the substance of God, the chair, the supermodel, and the mosquito are all alike. At the same time,...
European social philosophy: A look at human need in Hegel's "Modern civil society"
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel gives an account of the modern social world as consisting of three institutions: the family, civil society, and the state. Focusing on modern civil society, I plan to discuss one of several ways in which human need is affected by this...
Human catharsis in war
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Do you ever look at something for so long it doesn't make sense anymore? Have you ever been stuck in a moment that was your entire life? Cheated death, but regretted it afterwards? Looked at the man standing next to you and thought, “Who will die first, you or me?” This is every single...
Sir Thomas Browne: The cosmography of himself
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
There is an adventurer who discovers more that is truly surprising, than the one who penetrates jungles, crosses deserts, and keeps the company of caravans; for all ‘Africa, and her prodigies' cannot have an effect on the placid, unplumbed nature, other than to store up images in his mind;...
Moral philosophy on God, rationality, and the death of both
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
Right off the get go one can see these two philosopher's thoughts on morality appose one another, but their differences goes far beyond a petty disagreement over morality. The nature of their conflict goes much deeper, past a simple debate over what is good and what is evil. Together these two...
The ethics of Merton: Non-violence and its connection with the sacred
Essay - 9 pages - Philosophy
Nonviolence is both a form of theory and the commitment to a lifestyle which adheres to this theory. Although there are different perceptions of the importance of direct action, nonviolence is mostly defined by its attitude of understanding and humility. The nonviolent tradition believes strongly...
Analyzing the Amplesso: The philosophy of lovemaking in Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is usually acclaimed on grounds of its experimentation with narrativity. More specifically, Calvino weaves the beginnings of ten different pseudo-novels into a larger plotline involving the adventures of a reader (Lettore), who the narrator...
The path to freedom
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
This book as a whole does not tell a story; that is, the trace of events and the overall course of Irish independence don't go from beginning to end and tell. Rather, each chapter depicts a significant time period in the history of Ireland that Collins, the author, witnessed. Everything is more...
Edgar Allan Poe: The relationship between symbolic imagery and the human psyche in "Metzengerstein" and "A Tale Of The Ragged Mountains"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best known authors in American literature. John Kehoe (1997) discusses Poe's life in his brief biographical article “Edgar Allan Poe.” Kehoe explains that Poe is considered to be one of the major literary figures of the Romantic Movement that existed...
Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" and Elie Wiesel's "Night": A literary analysis and comparison of Holocaust literature
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The Holocaust of the 1940s is one of the most abominable periods in world history. Approximately eleven million Jews lost their lives during World War II due to Nazi genocidal policy enforced by Adolf Hitler. Jews were beaten to death, starved, burned in human crematoriums, enslaved, and...
Mind control and nineteen eighty-four and brave new world.
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Dystopia is, “an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.” (Dictionary) In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, we are introduced to two different dystopian societies. Mind...
