Newest Literature Essays

We can’t know how another person feels. Perhaps, in an age of “empathy workshops,” this is a disappointment, but on a deeper level of human behavior it is probably both simultaneously a relief and a tragedy. "Thank heavens," some may say, "that we...

The idea of rebirth and newness are a critically important theme of the novel 'Room' and a principal factor of the story itself. The novel is all about newness, since for Jack, having lived his whole five years of life inside Room, the act of...

“Racism is not about how you look, it’s about how people assign meaning to how you look.” (Robin Kelley, an American History Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles)

People tend to judge each other based on social constructions...

History, as humankind knows it, encompasses a body of words, and accompanied with these textual artifacts are the ideals, thoughts, and morals of a particular society. Culture, shaped by the thoughts of our predecessors and expanders, can be...

Educational practices have evolved in a multitude of ways throughout human history. In Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, each land that Gulliver visits has its own idea of what education should be like for the citizens there. The first land...

“These are the myths I tell about my family and, like all myths, they are both truths and lies, simultaneous buffers of love and betrayals of trust.” (Hsu-Ming Teo 1)

Love and Vertigo is a contemporary autobiographical novel that maps the lineage...

In David Guterson’s award-winning 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars, the story centers around the murder trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, using the testimony as a vehicle to tell a multigenerational story about the island’s fraught history from the...

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.” - Albert Einstein

Distinguishing...

Once, in a physical science class, my professor showed the students a picture diagram of the three-pronged iceberg that sank the Titanic. A peer of mine immediately said, “How did that small iceberg sink a huge ship?” My professor let the class...

Imagine if all those fortune tellers and palm readers are right and their “predictions” hold meaning. Think of how much that would change our world today. Everyone would be given an opportunity to change the negative aspects of their futures....

There’s a plethora of adjectives one could apply to the survivors of Hitler’s nightmarish concentration camps during the later years of the second world war; lucky, miraculous, strong-willed, and many more. However, what one must begin to...

Humankind has been unravelling the secrets of the universe for millennia, discovering more about the world in the process; but will we ever reach a point where we know too much? That is indeed the premise of Shelley’s “The Modern Prometheus”; a...

In social psychology, there is a well-known theory that explains why individuals show hatred for those of different races, religions, sexualities, sports teams, political parties, and other groupings. This is called the “social identity theory”....

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, is regarded as one of the first and most important modern feminist writers. In Orlando: A Biography, she tackles and bends the concepts of gender roles and gender identity and, on the other hand, deals with the...

American literature was founded upon strong ideals rooted in individualism, and as a result, many stories are written with the idea of “what does it mean to be an American?” Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and James Thurber’...

Ever since the species of man has existed, men have looked for improved states of society. Searching for food, shelter, and safety have been major problems, even in today’s world: naturally, authors would write books about utopias that provide for...

In Euripides’ Medea, one could argue that Medea’s most tragic flaw is her emotions. Medea goes on a quest to seek revenge on her unfaithful husband Jason and her retaliation is her closure. Jason’s betrayal is the fuel for this revenge, and...

In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, the division in social class is the driving force of the novel. The Capitol creates this illusion of social mobility through the games, which provides a sense of hope to the lower classes. This “illusion”...

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway criticizes societal conventions as it portrays the internal thoughts of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and the various characters that surround her in post-World War I London. Woolf illustrates the mental...

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres follows the novel’s narrator, Ginny Smith, as she struggles with temptation and the mental and physical repercussions of being a victim of unnatural behavior. Larry, Ginny’s father, practices chemical-based farming...

The postmodernist writers emerged after the Second World War, and their fierce critiques of human nature showed a race that was vile and heinous at best, with Tennessee Williams’s depiction being no different. In his play A Streetcar Named Desire,...

In publishing I, Robot, Isaac Asimov inadvertently defined — and arguably, had a very large hand in creating — the science fiction subgenre of robot and/or artificial intelligence science fiction. In doing so, Asimov also gave voice to rising...

Underground Airlines traverses many social and political climates, namely, the tension that exists between privileged whites and oppressed blacks. While Ben Winters' novel is set in an imagined future where institutionalized slavery still thrives...

Water is the most abundant source of life on this planet. Not only did the first living beings emerge from its depths, but it also possesses the ability to keep every living thing alive. Powerful as it is, water takes on whole new meanings in...