Newest Literature Essays

Like much of the poetry of Keats, these three poems explore life’s contrasts of pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow, permanence and impermanence. The mortal pleasures of Beauty and Love are longed for, but proven to be all too often tempered...

Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro is essentially a Bildungsroman, in that it follows Paul on his journey from child to adult, and from childishness to maturity. As with all stories of growth and development, Maestro’s focus is often upon Paul’s...

Sean O’Casey’s drama Juno and the Paycock details the slow, painful degradation of the Boyle family in war-torn Ireland in the early 1920s. Juno remains strong and calm throughout the course of the play, even though she suffers from a drunkard,...

Walter Benjamin’s work as a philosopher and theorist speaks at length of mechanical reproduction and the impact it has on society. Benjamin’s work can therefore be applied to the society depicted in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, illuminating it...

An apple pressed precariously to her blushed lips, Lula from Leroi Jones’ existential drama Dutchman is the epitome of temptation. She snakes around the train car, spying Clay and eventually driving him to his outburst late in the second scene....

Carpenters are traditionally regarded as hard-working, rugged men with calluses on their hands and dirt beneath their fingernails. They are strong and silent; they take pride in their work and are generally self-assured. One of the main characters...

In “The Grammar of Narrative,” a chapter in his longer work, The Poetics of Prose, Tzvetan Todorov describes the simplest, “minimal complete plot” as consisting “in the passage from one equilibrium to another. An ‘ideal’ narrative begins with a...

In the “Narrative Desire” chapter of his larger work, Reading for Plot, author Peter Brooks discusses the different modes of desire that exist within a reader. He argues that these desires are the forces of momentum brought to a text that in fact...

The thirteenth of fifteen stories in James Joyce's Dubliners collection, "A Mother," can be seen as something of a break between the heavy, serious vignettes in its vicinity. It can be seen as a story to chuckle at; after all, the title character...

In The Rover, Aphra Behn illustrates a world in which sex and economic exchange unite under the mandates of the patriarchy. In such a society, sexuality is commodified, and a woman is either sold into the marriage market (by her family, in an...

The doctrine of creation is not an ambiguous aspect of the Bible. The first four chapters of Genesis contain the primary biblical information on creation; therefore, they provide the basis of the biblical doctrine. This seemingly straightforward...

The last two paragraphs of The Plague emphasize Camus’ belief that even during a crisis, humans must always fight against death even if that battle will be a constant struggle without victory.

Rieux deems the stubborn and communal fight of man...

In Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe constructs an image of a woman who is resourceful, self-sufficient, shrewd and independent. His Moll came from nothing, born to a mother imprisoned in Newgate, born to this underworld of contained vice and...

The Victorian concept of masculinity is one caught up a series of interrelated metaphors relating to the empire and national identity. Throughout the Victorian corpus there are a number of texts that create a metaphorical relationship between...

In ‘The Motives of Eloquence’, Lantham describes Shakespearean drama as the art of “superposition”. One arc of action is performed over others so that “[d]ramatic motive is stronger than ‘real’, serious motive”. The justification of a characters...

Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film ‘Children of Men’ is a text that explores the interplay of past, present and future on both personal and societal levels. Many characters in the film are obsessed with reiterating the past in an endless cycle of...

In the work of the Romantic poets, there is a clear disparity in the representation of male and female homoerotics. While male homosexual poetry is generally characterised by a careful synthesis of personal feeling and an imagined homosocial...

In Maus, Art Spiegelman produces what can be seen as a reaction to the Holocaust and its complicated aftermath. It is a graphic representation of the various horrors of the Holocaust and he chooses to make his characters anthropomorphic. One may...

In his analysis of Taxi Driver as a revisionist western, Robert Ray places Taxi Driver's protagonist Travis Bickle squarely in the mould of the solitary heroes of the western genre. He notes the unspecified origins of Travis as well as the...

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."

Akira Kurosawa

"What this picture is about -- and it keeps getting more clear to me all the time -- is the insanity."

Robert Altman

MASH was not Richard Nixon's favorite war film of 1970. Of the four highest...

In her 1987 staging of "Othello" at the Market Theatre in South Africa, Janet Suzman aimed to make a pertinent artistic and cultural statement about both the political system of Apartheid and its deep racial underpinnings. Recorded on video for...

In the realm of assassination drama, The Parallax View is in some ways an inversion of the similarly speculative plot of The Manchurian Candidate. In the latter film, Korean War soldiers are brainwashed by an external force (Communists) into...

In Akira Kurosawa's transformation of King Lear into Ran, the flat character of the Lear's Fool has evolved into Hidetora's Kyoami, a character who exhibits a number of personal complexities absent from Shakespeare's Fool. Both characters have a...

Through intense visuality and the complex connections among various characters, Woody Allen in Annie Hall suggests an inextricable connection between geographical location and identity in terms of class, religion, politics, and interpersonal...