"Ligeia," "The Raven," and "The Cask:" Poe's Untrustworthy Narrators
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “Marginalia,” published in 1844, Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “To be thoroughly conversant with a Man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.” His outlook on humanity was somber at best, and is a theme that we see flowing through a large...
The Person of Gaius Caligula: A Study of the Man, and An Attempt to Discern Fact from Fiction
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The historical figure of Gaius Caligula is one that has been mythologized, vilified, and misconstrued over the course of time. At this point in time, thousands of years after his historical reign over Rome, it is hard to tell what is fact and what is fiction regarding his life and his actions....
Fallen Leaves
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Environmentalism is a concept that has been long argued on many fronts. There is a large rift between those who scream for the need to protect our planet and those who could not care less. Now, with the planet moving closer and closer to possible biological peril, we find ourselves stopping to...
Aristotle's "The Rhetoric"
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
When digging deeply into Aristotle's “The Rhetoric” it only begs the question of the origins of the author. Many of us learn about Aristotle's legacy in grade school and learn about his works. However, many of us also fail to learn the basic elements that made Aristotle who he was then...
Isolation in the Scarlet Letter
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is not uncommon for authors to manifest their personal experiences in their works. Nathaniel Hawthorne himself spent numerous years in seclusion. The diverse characters in Hawthorne's timeless tale of adultery and sin, do so as well. The various forms of estrangement are experienced to...
The Prominence of "ANIMAL for HUMAN" Metaphor
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The role metaphor plays in language is viewed differently by scholars in different fields. The extremes are the classical view based on Aristotle's writings about metaphor and the Romantic view. Those that follow the classical view see metaphor as a purely literary device used to decorate...
Freudian Psychology and Euripides's The Bacchae
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Freudian psychology follows the notion that it can dissect the human mind into various parts and pieces that can be interpreted even if the individual doesn't realize what any of the messages mean. In literature, Freudian psychology can be utilized to understand themes, characters, or actions....
Mothering Desires in LeFanu's "Carmilla"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
William Veeder's essay “Carmilla: The Arts of Repression”, claims that LeFanu's “Carmilla” attempts to explain the two-sided nature of human life through what he describes as “dualisms.” He says that humans attempt to find the side of these dualisms they wish to...
Okonkwo's Telling Duality
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the definitive post-colonial, African novel, focuses on a character who is in constant struggle with his tribe and with himself. Okonkwo, a purveyor of masculinity in his society, has many reasons for his actions in the novel. The continuing cultural violence...
The Morpho-Semantics of English Compound Words: Formation, Meaning and Productivity
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The ability to compound words in the English language has always been a very productive method of adding new words to the lexicon. Compound words are generally formed in one of two ways, as root compounds or synthetically. Whichever way they are formed, the rightmost constituent is always the...
Existence and Absence of Individualism
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
There are many ways you can define a human being; through the volume of their voice to their everyday habits. Another is handwriting and when looked at in detail it can be a definition of one's self. I will discuss how handwriting and the means you go through to create it can show who you are....
From Tall Tale to Political Expression
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
If you read Washington Irving's tale of time, Rip Van Winkle, and Mark Twain's story of deceit, The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, you will find a ball of fantasy and tall tales with truth and logic buried in the middle. In comparing these two tales, one must look at what exactly a...
A hero's journey through life
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Joseph Campbell's Hero Cycle is an idea that anyone can relate to and be able to recognize. There are many stories throughout time that use this in their composition. Stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz format their structure around it. George...
Conrad vs. Achebe: The question of racism in Heart of Darkness
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Joseph Conrad said, “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” Only too well does this portray the harsh reality depicted in Heart of Darkness, one that Chinua Achebe defines as profoundly racist. Achebe's points...
The different views of life in a good man is hard to find by Flannery O'Connor
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Flannery O'Connor was born in Georgia, the same state that she wrote about some twenty years later in A Good Man is Hard to Find, as she describes with thoughtful imagery the grandmother's fierce objections to her family traveling to Florida. Having lived through the fifties, O'Connor was...
Memory Panel Contribution
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
There are several different scientific classifications of memory. The type that memoirists most often use is delineated thus: Long-term -> Declarative -> Episodic. Declarative or explicit memory requires conscious recall, which is what memoirists attempt when writing a scene from memory....
Race Criticism Analysis
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Sandra Milloy's race criticism of The Sound and the Fury focuses almost exclusively on Dilsey and draws conclusions from her flawed interactions with two families: the white Compson household and her own African-American one. Milloy sees Dilsey as one of the most celebrated black mammies in...
Response to "When You Are Old"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Upon reading “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats, one may think that it is just the lament of an old woman; this may be true on the surface, but a more in-depth reading will show that it is actually a heart-felt love letter from a former lover. When the poem is dissected and...
Football, Mead-Halls, and Bards: Perpetuated Gender Roles from Anglo-Saxon Literature
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In modern times, men and women in America are divided by their stereotypical gender roles. Women are inferior to men; they are interested in domestic issues and should make the men in their lives happy. Men are chauvinists; they enjoy “nights with the guys” and feel a stronger...
The "Supreme Court of Justice": Religion and the Suppression of the Lower Classes in Freud's "The Future of an Illusion"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Though humans have “raised [themselves] above [their] animal status” (5), the fact remains that a fear of nature, a far superior force, is inherent in mankind. Left to his own devices, man is unrestricted, susceptible to outside destructive forces and his own animalistic instincts,...
Lovers and Epistles: Progressivism and Feminism in the Poetry of Lady Mary Wortley Montague
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of London were a time of formality and conservatism, especially among British women. But even in her early teens, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went against the flow of society and taught herself Latin, according to the editors of the Seventh Edition of the...
On Birds and Planes
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “The End of Admiration: The Media and the Loss of Heroes” Peter H. Gibbon details his reasons as to why there is no longer a great American hero. Over the past few decades, the public has gone from hailing political leaders and champions of peace to idolizing pop icons instead....
Plan B Sounds Good to Me
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Lester Brown's book, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, touches base with most of, if not all of, the issues that are threatening our planets modern living style. The book aptly named, giving a second plan, one that differs from how civilization is...
William Butler Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins as Innovators
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In literature there can be two major types of innovation, innovation in style and innovation in content. At the turn of the 18th Century innovations were huge as writers were creating what we now refer to as modernist poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats are two of the central...
Addicted and in Withdrawal
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Wuthering Heights is the story of two families that live on the moors in England and how the two families entwine themselves and is about the love and relationships that occur between them and their two estates. There is one relationship in particular, that is the derivative of most of the action...
The Ultimate Usefulness of Freedom
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Kant's views on social and moral progress have always been described as being “ahead of his time,” probably because of the emphasis on freedom in many of his works. According to Kant, freedom is absolutely necessary for any kind of progress. Freedom is almost always tied to reason, and...
"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....
Owning Perfection: The Struggle between Science and Nature in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark."
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In many love poems written to praise the beauty or virtue of a woman, the woman or the woman's love is often seen as a material possession or a thing to be owned. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Birthmark,” the woman is seen as something to be improved upon and perfected. Love is not only...
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...
