Newest Literature Essays

In order to investigate the intricacies of Descartes’ method, we must first come to an understanding of what Descartes is hoping to accomplish by use of it, and the true immediacy with which he writes. The objectives he introduces, namely to prove...

Woyzeck is a very politically charged production with a great deal of room for symbolistic interpretations, however, with the circumstances of Buchner’s political life taken into consideration, it’s clear that they follow a pattern. Buchner’s...

Postmodernism is the idea that no grand narratives, metanarratives, and ideologies truly exist. It's the rejection of everything and then claiming that the metanarrative, that there are no metanarratives, is the real metanarrative. This...

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet ends in a dramatic cataclysm as four crucial characters drop dead in a murderous scandal of “deaths put on by cunning and forced cause” (5.2.369-371). It is in this skirmish that Hamlet achieves his long-sought revenge...

Dictatorships — real and fantastical — are run with a penchant for corruption over legality in order to achieve personal gain for the members of their administration. The fictitious dictatorship of President Don Santos Banderas in Ramón del...

In Child of God, Cormac McCarthy presents readers with the story of Lester Ballard, a young man abandoned by and expelled from society. Ballard’s is a gothic tale overflowing with depravity, libidinal pressure, necrophilia, and psychopathy, yet it...

Plato’s allegory of the cave tells the story of a group of men bound together in chains from birth, locked away from the world in a deep, dark cave. They are forced to stare at the wall of the cave and are unable to look around at each other and...

One of the most sensational aspects of W.B. Yeats’ life is his unsuccessful romancing of Maud Gonne. It is widely acknowledged that she served as muse and inspiration for many of Yeats’ poems, and ‘Her Praise’ seems to be an example of such work....

The concept of home seems fairly straightforward. Known as ‘a place or space that one constructs for oneself,’ home can be perceived as a locus that one keeps returning to, be it physically or spiritually. This definition of home centers around an...

One of the 650 film deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry is The Big Lebowski, a film described whose summary is “’The Dude’ Lebowski, mistaken for a millionaire...

Although race discrimination exists as a major theme throughout the entirety of J. K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it is in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that Harry, our protagonist for all seven books, becomes acutely aware of the...

Voltaire’s Candide presents two theorists Dr. Pangloss and Martin in the novel about the travels and quest of the titular protagonist Candide. Both are described as philosophers in the text, notably, Martin is a philosopher whom Candide meets...

Many southern writers are known for obscuring the boundaries between human and nonhuman--especially in regard to African Americans. When executed properly, authors are capable of conveying to the reader how African Americans were not typically...

Despite the passage of time, core values have prevailed as timeless and defining characteristics of human beings. Among them, friendship plays a pivotal part in the development of a person, making it stand out as one of the most valued. Friendship...

In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus explores the absurdity of the human condition, and attempts to find a way for man to reconcile himself with such an inherently meaningless existence. It is not something that is particularly hard,...

Throughout the text of "Babette's Feast," Martine and Philippa are described only as beautiful and fair, unlike their father who is portrayed as a dean and prophet, acknowledging his accomplishments directly to his worth, where as the sister’s...

William Shakespeare is not well-known for presenting perfectly typical, well-functioning, Leave It to Beaver-esque families, which made his work much more appealing to audiences who were enthralled by unpredictable drama. His representations of...

As art mirrors life, so too does George Eliot’s Middlemarch attempt to replicate a realistic world, particularly in the interactions and relationships between all the characters in the novel. Whether the relationship between the characters and the...

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster answers the question: What makes a character real? According to Forster, “it [a character] is real when the novelist knows everything about it” (Forster, pg 77). Esther Waters, the title character in George...

George Orwell’s ‘Reflections on Gandhi’was published in Partisan Reviewa year after Gandhi’s assassination, in January, 1949. There is an undeniable admission of admiration with which Orwell writes about his reception of Gandhi’s writings and...

In Stephen King’s novel The Long Walk, 100 teenage boys walk the border of Canada and the United States in the ultimate game. If these boys slow down too many times, or stop walking, they are shot until only one is left, upon which he is the...

The Fate Vs. Free Will debate has long been adapted within literary texts, but Anne Carson’s Antigonick puts a spin on it by transforming it to be a debate between two texts. Antigonick is an adapted version of Sophocles’ Antigone, which tells the...

Scholar Carl Malmgren describes the common science fiction trope of alien encounters as “inevitably broach[ing] the question of the Self and the Other…The reader recuperates this type of fiction by comparing human and alien entities, trying to...

Thinking about the sun will likely produce similar thoughts in any person: heat, energy, light, life. Albert Camus though, in his novel The Stranger, utilizes the sun to serve a much more abstract purpose. Meursault, the narrator, naturally finds...