Newest Literature Essays

To read Proust carefully is like looking closely at your own pupil. Curiosity pushes you up to the mirror so close that eventually the tool of perception itself is ineffective. Indeed you can't see what's doing the seeing. Likewise, putting up a...

The "Combray" section of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way is an extended meditation on an idyllic past. The book begins, though, not with recollections of Combray, but with a description of the narrator's half-asleep state, a state of consciousness...

In <i>The Sun Also Rises</i>, Earnest Hemingway depicts the independent Lady Brett Ashley, the main female character in the novel, as a selfish, careless, and superficial woman. She was perhaps once a compassionate woman: she was a...

The destruction of WWI disillusioned an entire generation and accelerated the evolution of modernism --- a culture that was ostensibly enlightened, irredeemable and confused. The emergence of 1920's modernism allowed for a resurgence of feminist...

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.

I have outwalked the further city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat.

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to...

Beneath Hemingwayâs graphic portrait of the lost and wounded post-World War I generation presented in The Sun Also Rises, a blatant anti-Semitic intent emerges. Whether Hemingway was merely a mouthpiece for the intolerant views of his...

Hemingway's Depiction of a Man in The Sun Also Rises

Common among many of Ernest Hemingway's novels is the concept popularly known as the "Hemingway hero", an ideal character readily accepted by American readers as a "man's man". In The Sun Also...

Bright daylight, a river, cool breezes, green and rolling countryside, oxen, cattle, pigeons, valleys, hills stretching off back toward the sea, children playing in the hot sun - when Jake and his company first perceive 'Nature' in The Sun Also...

Toni Morrison novels famously give voice to a black political, social, and moral conscience. Her novels deal primarily with the issues and concerns of black heritage and future and all the triumphs and tragedies of power and identity in between....

This novel is entitled Sula, after the woman who takes the conventions of her small home town and turns them completely upside down, but the story itself would not be complete without her friend and counterpart who embodies these conventions, Nel....

Scorching flames, conflagration, burning. The imagery of fire has long been linked to power and passion. Fire can enact complete obliteration, and yet can also forge a new beginning where only scattered ashes of the past remain. The symbolic motif...

Geoffrey Chaucer once wrote, "Trouthe is the hyeste thing that a man may kepe" (The Canterbury Tales ëThe Knight's Tale'). Since before the ancient Greeks, mankind has striven to discern and define truth, a noble if somewhat arduous task. Even...

Question:

The theme of resurrection ("rebirth," saving or redeeming in one's soul, renewed interest in and zest for life, salvation from death, harm, or "nothingness," etc.) is predominant throughout this novel. Identify two characters whose lives...

"Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it in hiding."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A society constrained to specific social standards reprimands those who do not conform to such principles. In the process, a supreme...

"Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it in hiding." ---Ralph Waldo Emerson

A society constrained to specific social standards reprimands those who do not conform to such principles. In the process, a...

During the Elizabethan age, love sonnets traditionally told the story of men in love with unattainable women. However, Spenser's sonnets from his sonnet sequence "Amoretti" defy the general pessimism and give an optimistic look at love. In fact,...

For Benjy and Quentin Compson, memory in "The Sound and the Fury" is a tool for discovering and escaping reality. Both brothers have trouble seeing the past as part of a chain linked to both the present and the future. Benjy does not recognize...

A sense of 'authorial design' in William Faulkner's 'The Sound And The Fury' does not make itself apparent until the second section of the book, narrated by the suicidal Quentin, although the seeds of this design are planted in the earliest pages...

In Faulkerâs The Sound and the Fury, Caddy, the central figure, is never given a voice. Instead, her character is revealed through the narratives of her three brothers. Since the novel is largely surrounded by the concept of alternating truths,...

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner draws attention to Benjy's ability to watch through his inability to speak. His character tends toward omniscience, as he constantly stumbles upon (or takes part in) various clandestine acts but does not...

William Faulkner presents the story of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury in a unique and precise way by showing how her family views her. Caddy's life becomes the central conflict in the lives of the Compsons, and her story, paralleled with the...

In the postwar South, the relationships between men and women were beginning to shift. Gwendolyn Chabrier writes, "While the prewar South was traditionally a patriarchy, at the time of the war and particularly afterwards, that paternal system was...

I remember the first time I really heard classical music. As long as I can remember I have loved music, but growing up, no matter how many times my parents dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the symphony, or my piano teacher tried to teach me a...

In The Sound and the Fury, the fated Compson family is a portrayal of both the declining old South and the new South that rose demonically out of its ruins. Through the Compsons, Faulkner personifies at once the mournful self-pity of a fallen...