Newest Literature Essays

German playwright Bertolt Brecht developed his theory of epic theatre as a response to the renaissance of Aristotelian tragic theatre in the latter part of the 1920s (Hecht, 40). Where Aristotle allowed the audience of his theatre the purgation of...

Plagued with poverty in the rural Texas area, homophobic cowboy Ron Woodroof spends the majority of his time on his electrician practices and cheap sex. Through one of his sexual partners, Ron is infected with the AIDS virus, which at the time had...

All humans face the struggle of aging. With the passage of time, one must grow old and eventually perish. Aging is something we fear, as it brings on a variety of physical, psychological, and socially constructed ailments. Often there is the idea...

In the stereotypical high school hierarchy, jocks always reign over the band kids, theater geeks, and math geniuses. These athletic students separate themselves from the others, and as this occurs, the geeks, nerds and other social pariahs must...

When we examine two different films made more than fifty years apart from each other, we may surprisingly be able to find a lot ideas shared between them. The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise, tells of an alien in human form...

Narration style plays a significant role in the way an audience receives and interprets a story. An intrusive narrator can manipulate a reader’s understanding of a specific character or event based on the narrator’s personal biases and imposed...

Walt Whitman begins his poem, “Song of Myself,” with: “I celebrate myself /And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (lines 1-3). In these lines, Whitman shows that everyone is equal. Equality is a...

In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, there are many interesting characters who often perform heroic or important actions. Instead of focusing on one of these characters as the protagonist, the play revolves around multiple...

In Hal Ashby’s cult classic Harold and Maude, we follow Harold (played by newcomer Bud Cort), a morose and eccentric teenager who enjoys pretending to kill himself to annoy his mother. His mother is Mrs. Chasen (played brilliantly by Vivian...

Both “It Had to Be Murder”, written by Cornell Woolrich, and Rear Window, the film directed by Alfred Hitchcock based on the book, tell a strange tale of a nosy protagonist in a story about the occasionally blurred line between fantasy and...

Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” and Eliza Haywood’s “Fantomina” both imply a strong relationship between sex and power. Yet, the ways in which their characters understand this relationship is dependent on their gender. The male protagonists,...

Migration is not a contemporary phenomena; it has defined human nature since (or even before) crossing The Bering Strait. Humans migrate for two reasons: they are looking for better lives or they simply cannot stay—the latter being the most...

Literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes once said, “Literature is the question minus the answer.” In Jon Krakauer's novel Into Thin Air, the author questions if he is loyal enough to his teammates to take the chance of forfeiting his summit...

Timothy Treadwell, best known as the subject for Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, shunned society and left it behind, subsequently falling victim to his own convictions out in the wilderness. Treadwell, an American bear enthusiast, was mauled after 13...

In "Sonnet," Lewin uses the traditionally romantic sonnet form in aptly named poem Sonnet to explore a speaker’s conflicted feelings for his beloved. The poem might be read as a devoted deceleration of the speaker’s love for the addressee, and yet...

Within Children of Men, the implementation of various stylistic elements from a cinematography standpoint allows Alfonso Cuarón to iterate subtle messages throughout the film. More specifically, the usage of combined camera angles and extended...

Class and Society in The Defense of Poesy Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy, written in 1579 and published in 1575 (Norton Anthology Volume B) is a literary composition that preserved the eloquence and sophistication of poetry, allowing...

It is through harshness that you start questioning yourself, your beliefs, and purpose in life, but is during these times that we do not perceive the light, that--from a Christian perspective--we must persist and trust that God will guide us....

While no scholars definitively know what Shakespeare believed, in terms of his religious views, his works (and particularly his sonnets) are replete with religious language and references. However, many times, this seemingly biblical and divine...

Gene Tierney once said “when you have spent an important part of your life playing Let’s Pretend, it’s often easy to see symbolism where none exists”. The statement highlights how symbolism can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is a...

Early 20th century Eugenicist Madison Grant, according to Robert Sussman’s The Myth of Race, believed that the union of black and white would “be the end of civilization” (183). However, W.E.B Du Bois’ short story, “The Comet”, sees the same union...

When all that is reported of a political conflict is in dealings of terror -- of violence on each side -- it often becomes difficult to decipher who was right and who was wrong; all we see is red. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 critically-acclaimed film...

Ernest Hemingway’s work has been largely criticized for its sexist undertones, and in The Sun Also Rises the character of Brett Ashley is the perfect example of misogyny. Helene Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa” writes about how feminism is...

The play Equus was written in 1973 by Peter Schaffer. In the play, Alan, a 17-year-old boy with a horse fetish, blinds six horses in a stable, and it is down to Dysart, a psychologist, to understand why he did it. A major theme of the play is “...