Romeo and Juliet - as characters, as symbols of love, and as symbols of innocence torn apart by a hardheaded society - are cultural icons so ingrained in society that they are often synonymous with the very concepts they represent. After centuries...

In the 1997 film, Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann has attempted to take the original play by William Shakespeare, and create an appropriation of it for today. He takes what we value about the text: the themes, evocative language and poetry, the...

"You're television incarnate, Diana: indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt...

Many film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy of “star-crossed lovers” have been made, both in the original setting and more modern ones (Shakespeare Prologue. 6). Two movies that exemplify this are Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and...

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the 1996 cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, is imbued with religious imagery. The feuding families display such images on everything from their cars, to their clothes, to their guns. In addition, a statue of...

Ludicrous car chases, intense hot pink hair and a world where Prince songs are sung as hymns; is this what Shakespeare wanted when he wrote Romeo and Juliet over 400 years ago? Baz Luhrmann’s film adaption of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, is a...

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the whirlwind lives of the 1920s New York upper class. In the novel, Fitzgerald criticizes the unattainability of the American Dream as well as the shallow nature of the upper class. From this...

For characters in The Great Gatsby, rendering delusive illusions of one’s self may be fundamental to climbing social hierarchy, but compromising the tension between their painted picture and concealed canvas may be internally agonizing. From the...

World war one is a defining part of history worldwide, lasting from 1914 to 1918. Although America only joined the war in 1917, its effects were inescapable, and consequently the war is alluded to in many works of literature from the time. The war...