Newest Literature Essays

Anne Sextons confessional lyric poem, “With Mercy for the Greedy” (1962) displays many ways of how she interprets life around her. Sexton tries to believe in religion to have a sense of believing in something, mostly because of her friend “Ruth”,...

Through ‘Le Père Goriot’ Honoré de Balzac explores the antithetical nature of several ideals: love and wealth, social status and happiness, rebellion and obedience, and – what a reader may find to be the most intriguing – morality and success....

The Significance of Institutions: Nadja, The Stranger, and Waiting for Godot Our human society is ruled by institutions. We cannot even fathom a life without them. We might think we have freedom, but there is only a certain amount of freedom we...

In the suffocating times of the Victorian era, authors adhered to strict and stifling methods of writing due to the restrictive and stigmatic conformity engulfed by Victorian society. Postmodernism conjured a form of radicalism in literature,...

In the story “Unaccustomed Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main character Ruma and her son Akash, are visited in Seattle by her father. Her husband, Adam, “would be away that week, on another business trip” (5). Ruma and her father’s relationship is...

The female characters in Isabel Allende’s novel, House of the Spirits, are generally depicted as the stronger of the sexes. It becomes apparent to the reader very early on that the author has a lot of respect for women; this is manifested in the...

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez creates a set of characters who each represent a certain aspect of close-minded human nature as a whole. It is this style of character development that allows the reader to understand that,...

The greatest fear of all is the unknown. When a person is about to die, fear creeps in because he/she has no idea what will happen next. Doing anything that does not have a definitive outcome is very scary. This is mostly because people are afraid...

The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. (Gramsci 276)

This is the epigraph of the novel July’s People based on which Nadine Gordimer prophesies the chaotic situation that...

Young Adult literature covers a wide variety of genres and subjects, covering topics that a vast majority of young adults are struggling with day to day. These novels are not limited to race or gender; however, minority characters are hard to come...

Auteur director Alfred Hitchcock first introduced audiences to Rear Window, a film that would go on to reach both critical and commercial success, in the mid-1950s. With this, he left them pondering a question still being debated by viewers today:...

Both Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi deal with the weighty themes of dehumanization, oppression, and the darkest sides of humanity. Similarities between the apparatus of oppression depicted...

True literature has two purposes, the first is to show a reflection of society, and the second is to encourage social change by showing an unflattering reflection. In 1959, Shirley Jackson published her acclaimed novel The Haunting of Hill House,...

How can we define humanity? The word “inhuman” is used to describe cruel and brutal actions. Thusly, a human’s perspective would dictate that humanity should be interpreted as the opposite, and entail dignity and goodness - but it is important to...

Nothing grows and changes throughout life like a person’s identity as people face new challenges and experiences every day. The protagonist of Black Swan film by director Darren Aronofsky, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is faced with a fatal...

Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander challenges 16th century Christian teaching. Christian teaching on desire stems from Thomas Aquinas’ Natural Law which is a set of moral laws intended to identify God’s purpose for human life. One of the five...

American Indian Stories written by Zitkala-Sa in 1921 is a collection of biographical and autobiographical stories from Native Americans living in the Sioux reservation. In this work, the author describes her (and also other people's) personal...

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” is a query made by the protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), in the film Arrival which provokes complex contemplations on determinism, free will, and fate. Does...

As detective fiction became more popular, people began speculating what the role of the detective was. In one perspective, many believed that the detective served as an explanation for the chaotic, modern world. The detective also gave society a...

In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Mary Wroth becomes one of the first women in history to write a sonnet sequence, which was first published in her romance story The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Pamphilia, meaning "all-loving," is the main...

In « Tears, Idle tears », the victorian poet, Lord Alfred Tennyson gives through his poem a retrospective glance back at what he has lost in the past, but also the way people might feel when faced with loss. Lord Tennyson wrote this poem after...

To figure out the nature of knowledge, one must ask what it means to know, or fail to know something. This involves understanding what knowledge is, and determining cases in which one knows something, and cases in which one does not know...

‘As one judge said to the other, “Be just, and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.”’ - William Burroughs

Agamben’s Homo Sacer begins thus: ‘The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the...

Humor makes life bearable. It brings joy to the vagrancies of humanity. Without humor, life would be hard to cope with. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a perfect example of how humor can make life a joy to live and remind us that in this life,...