Newest Literature Essays

At the beginning of Boccaccio’s Decameron, both the male and female narrators hesitate to discuss the seemingly lewd topic of sexual relations. On Day I, the Florentines discuss various topics, yet only one narrator is brave enough to introduce...

Two orphaned boys grow up to be politically-concerned authors, one a poet and one a novelist, who use their maritime literature to speak out against the prevailing ills of European society, specifically the wrongful treatment of African people....

Emily Dickinson uses the power of metaphor and symbolism in her poem "My Life had stood-" to express the way she felt about herself as a poet in a time when women were allowed far less independent thought and freedom of expression; she gives her...

Cormac McCarthy uses a variety of literary techniques in “The Road” to establish his views on a wide range of themes.

First, the manner in which McCarthy describes the scenes throughout the novel distinctly conveys the bleak world he has created....

Bret Harte’s fiction contributed largely to the development of the Western as a literary genre. One of the earliest authors to fictionalize the American West, he spun humorous yarns depicting the offbeat gamblers, prostitutes, miners, and outright...

Jhumpa Lahiri herself is the ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ in her poignant short-story collection, laying bare universal features of loneliness and isolation. Enlightening experiences in Calcutta empowered the Indian-American author to write from the...

Jhumpa Lahiri’s labyrinthine anthology, ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ is an exposé of the plight of Indians and Indian-Americans and their interactions with each other, society and their milieu. The complexity of her tales is attributed to Lahiri’s...

‘A Christmas Carol’ was immediately popular in Victorian England and soon, the rest of the world. It became a cultural icon, sparking a tradition to be read every Christmas Eve in many households. The relevance of the novella, even in the 21st...

Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is not merely “the story of a journey up a river,” but rather an insightful psychological study into the human condition and the hidden nature of mankind conveyed in the form of a narrative. Conrad explores his...

The postmodernist novel In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaatje, is a convincing exploration of the complex nature of power and the impact of ethnocentric domination on different cultural groups. Though lending itself to a wide variety of...

They say that we are harder on those we love—in this case, whom Tess loves: Angel Clare. Indeed, the reader holds Angel to higher standards, expects more of him, and indignantly reminds others of his greater obligations and ties to Tess. Thus, we...

There is a famous lyric Paul Simon croons out with Art Garfunkel, bemoaning the stealthily infectious nature of suppression in society. “Silence like a cancer grows,” they warn, “…no one dared disturb the sound of silence.” It is this silence that...

“The normal is the good smile in a child's eyes. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.”

– Peter Schaffer

As the deeply conflicted psychiatrist Dysart, Richard Griffiths delivers this line with wonderful restraint to an audience in the new...

A simple girl raises the instrument to her lips. Her eyes are filled with wonder, her face with laughable, caricature delight. In an instant, the trumpet is snatched away, and a strongman harshly reproaches her for the presumptuous act—“Do only...

The greatest scenes in Fellini films are often the most surreal. In 8 , Fellini depicts the creative process (and correspondingly, the creative block), a famously surreal subject in and of itself. Perhaps one of the most iconic scenes in cinematic...

Actress Louise Brooks and her best-known creation, Lulu, are together one of the most memorable expressions of modern cinema’s “bad girl,” an unabashed symbol of sexuality. Born November 14, 1906, Brooks was known for her idiosyncratic bob-and...

Federico Fellini may have titled the film “Nights of Cabiria”—a title that syntactically emphasizes the nights and events in relation to, and as “acted upon,” Cabiria. Yet, perhaps more interesting than the escapades is the complexity of the...

In Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the nature of theatricality, “magic,” and “realism,” all stem from the tragic character, Blanche DuBois. Blanche is both a theatricalizing and self-theatricalizing woman. She lies to herself...

"When we are on stage, we are in the here and now."

“What is important to me is not the truth outside myself, but the truth within myself.”

–Constantin Stanislavsky

The System

It began, over a century ago, with a man named Constantin Stanislavsky....

Two similarly flawed notions of love are presented in Shakespeare’s plays Titus Andronicus (TA) and The Winter’s Tale (TWT). Both are rooted in differing degrees of misogyny, yet diverge significantly in their overarching objective. The model of...

People lose their sanity through many processes. It has become an art. In her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the stealthy approach of insanity as a medium to advance arguments of feministic roots. Her (mostly...

There is a concept of “social death” which is often applied to those individuals discarded by, excluded from, or persecuted by society. Social death has been used to describe slavery, apartheid, ostracism, or, as in the case of Hannah W. Foster’s...

According to Murray Baumgarten, “the narrator of the expressionist novel no longer worries about the ‘real’ world (422).” Instead, the narrator of the expressionist novel is concerned with the creation of a new, almost illusionary, and composite...

The flowing white tennure, the rotating sikke, the twirling spin of the right foot, the turning hands - one pointing towards the heavens, one towards the earth- the revolving mass of the flesh, and the spiral gyrating of the spirit; nothing seems...