Original Imitation
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In a modern era of corporate tyranny and the disappearance of an independent creative market, the artistic longing for originality is often forgotten. Radio stations sell out to public opinion, Top-40 hits recycling the last generation of Top-40 hits, and the hand-published pages of timid...
Journeying Abandonment
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Dante's Inferno, while a fictionalized version of the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell, is in many ways an accurate portrayal of the doctrines of Christianity. However, this Hell he creates is a Hell the Bible never expected. Influenced by the growing mistrust of the Pope throughout his native...
Know Your Neurosis: An Analysis of Frank Bruno's It's OK to Be Neurotic
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
I picked It's OK to Be Neurotic: Using Your Neuroses to Your Advantage by Frank Bruno from the bottom row on the third book case in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble because the title on the spine was so obnoxiously bold and it was shelved at the wrong end of the alphabet. They say not to...
I Love Not Loving You
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Any author to have ever written, from poetry to prose to every other genre in-between has been confronted with one universal question: where do you get ideas for your characters? And really, the answer is just as universal. It is impossible to create a completely original character, for the...
Honor and the Honorable
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to newspaper headings and television reports, every man and woman who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 is a hero. Even three years later, memorials are still built, hymns are still sung, and candlelight vigils are still held in remembrance of the bravest individuals...
"Holocaust Literature: Humanity Reborn"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
If Holocaust literature strives to portray the paradoxical (the representation of the unrepresentable, the expression of the inexpressible), maybe it too is a paradox. Confessions of the unspeakable, the unthinkable in written word. And yet it exists, tangible, published. In memoir and fiction...
Fathering the Son
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
There is a lot to be said about love. It saturates literature, Hollywood, every means of creative output known to the history of this planet. There is something mysterious about it, something undiscovered. So desperate have populations been to answer the timeless questions of love that it can...
Gambling Art: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Custom-House Introduction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In the preface of the second edition of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne discusses the “unprecedented excitement” generated by the publication of his novel (5). Ironically, this public excitement, and more importantly, the ensuing public discontent, originated not in the novel...
Father, Forgive Them: A Review of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
There is a basic purpose to the literature of Holocaust survivors: to bare witness. Many believe they survived to perform such a duty, to fulfill such a debt to those who did not. As witnesses, they record living history, for they record the history of their own lives. But what happens when a...
A Discourse on Happiness for a Drug-Free Nation
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
For the most part, there are two desirable products of problem solving: personal pleasure and the happiness of others. This difference between selfishness and unselfishness has often defined moral decision making, the former being nothing less than sin and the latter being utterly commendable in...
A Modern Myth: Emily Dickinson and the Everyday Hero
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
One can wonder whether William Shakespeare's sonnets would be memorized in every classroom across the Western world if they were anything other sonnets. So inseparable are the two ideas that they barely have separate identities: Shakespeare's sonnets are accepted without question, and most...
A Better Fate: Mythology and the Creation of Meaning
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Mythology: the bookstore catalogue designation where religions go to die. When the believers cease believing in their gods, and when the gods cease believing in themselves. We often forget we once worshiped Zeus and those other “primitive” gods with the same blind passion and fear...
To Run and Leap with Peasants: Idealism and Stereotype Formation in The Book of the Courtier
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In the sixteenth century, the ideal was inseparable from the ruling class: it was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, the aristocracy establishing itself as the ideal while simultaneously defining the ideal. The members of the nobility lived in tightly-monitored roles. Idealism was not about the...
The Serpent Underneath: A Lesbian's Defense of Lady Macbeth
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
“Dyke,” hiss the schoolboys, to the girls with grass-stained knees and dirt-streaked cheeks. To the girls who run faster, throw further, tackle harder than the prides of fatherhood manifest. A word, but so much more a performance. A stereotype, but so much more an expectation....
The Purpose of Purpose: Aesthetics and the Unity of Context and Form in Third-World Literature
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
All literary texts are both political and aesthetic. Words in and of themselves are innately sensual, inseparable from the emotions they evoke in a reader. They are also political, pieces of language steeped in history and theory. However, writers often plan toward one extreme, selecting their...
"The Oppressive Christian Faith as Detrimental to Africans and Native Americans"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Christianity. It sounds innocent enough. But, with that religion comes a dogma with a dark side; an aspect of oppression for minorities. The Christian faith was never the choice for Africans and Native Americans. The word of God was on the lips of white Europeans who wanted to spread their...
"The Faustian-Bargain Theme Found in The Monkey's Paw, The Playground, and The Black Lake"
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Temptation preys upon what we wish for and what we dream for. Want a flashy car: a cherry red, nitrous infused Lamborghini with leather seats, a thumping sound system and a set of wicked hydraulics? Sure it sounds good, but how possible is that on such a measly salary? Maybe, but only after...
"Jud Crandall: Neighbor, Mentor, Father"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
With experience comes knowledge. Sometimes, the experience might not make sense, and it helps to have a guiding hand. No, this is not the introduction to Chicken Soup for the Soul, but more like an intro for Chicken Soup for the Soulless. The spiritual world is difficult for the hardened realist...
"Homer Loves Odysseus; Virgil Loves Aeneas - but Aeneas Doesn't Love Dido"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Influence comes in many forms - religion, music, books, and authors. By experiencing different people's views, we gain a sense of understanding the world through their eyes. We take cues from others, how they think, act and do in the world, and internalize their beliefs. The religious zealot...
Kant, Mill and Protagoras
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
When following the determining factors of morality for either Kant or Mill one would generally arrive to the same conclusion on whether an action is moral or not. Although Kant believes that his method of deriving morality is best, Mill believes that Kant's process is lacking. “But when he...
Three Vehicles and Their Resulting Enlightenments in Buddhism
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Buddhist path leading toward nirvana is one properly undertaken with the understanding that enlightenment is something coming in degrees, and perhaps without a finite ‘ending point.' It is not unlike the mathematical concept of a limit. “The limit of ‘the function of x' as x...
Ariel's Levels of Consciousness
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
William Shakespeare's extensive investigation into social life in his earlier plays allowed him to instead focus on the more complex topic of human consciousness, which he pursues through magical inhuman characters, in his final play The Tempest. In his book The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio...
Summary and Review of "The Iraqw of Tanzania" and "Hunger and Shame"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The Iraqw of Tanzania, by Katherine Snyder, is a detailed ethnographic account of the affects of Maendeleo (progress and development) on the Iraqw people of northern Tanzania, shaped partially by the struggle between the young and the old to capture the true essence of Iraqw culture. However,...
"The Significance of Comic Irreverence"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Irreverence in comedy has been at the forefront of recent comedic performances. In one television show, ‘The Office', depicts supervisor David Brent, performed by Ricky Gervais, as an irreverent ‘funny man'. In one episode, while orienting a new employee around the office, he listens to...
"Gender Bending Androgynous Sexuality in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Gender and sexuality are very difficult concepts to define in our post-modern age. To begin with, the term is outdated to fit the social norms of today: attraction lies anywhere and is not confined to ‘heterosexual love' between a man and a woman. Gay, lesbian and bi-sexual are terms used to...
"Richard Cory's Lost Suicide Letter"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Paul Laurence Dunbar and Edwin Arlington Robinson created “We Wear the Mask” and “Richard Cory” during the literary renaissance after World War I. Society was targeted and critiqued by authors who wanted to describe the “spiritual problems and disillusionments” (p...
"The Advantages of the Setting of the Country-House in Detective-Stories"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The author of either a novel or a short story has one main purpose: to dazzle the reader. However, dazzling the reader is a difficult process because we don't all have the same attention spans, or have the same interests, or even enjoy the same words on the pages that other reader's find...
Don Quixote: Chivalry Then and Now
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
“A manifestation of any of these qualities: bravery, courtesy, honor.” This is the definition of the world chivalry as found in the dictionary. Though it was first coined during the Medieval Age, the idea still hold true today. One of the greatest books of chivalry is Miguel de...
The True Horrors "The Prophetic Voice"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
When Steven King releases a new novel it is bound to be one of the scariest works of literature around. King's books, filled with images of deformed dolls and haunted houses, strike fear in the hearts of his readers. King's writing appeals to our senses, torturing and manipulating them to create...
On the Education of Edgar
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
“For doubting pleases me no less than knowing.” This quote by Dante which Montaigne uses in his essays strikes at the heart of his ideas about education. He believes that the ancient ways of Aristotle, where one learns through the text of learned men, are outdated because it does not...
