Newest Literature Essays

In Shakespeare's play, Othello, the men hunt the women, as a human hunts animals in the wild. The man exerts dominance and expects the woman to accept her submissive role in relation to his dominance. The central couples involved in showing this...

Choose one non-dramatic text offered on the module, (an extract from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Literary Remains,) and show how it might help us understand Othello.

The extract presents a sustained attack by Coleridge on Shakespeare for his lack of...

Compared with other literature of the Heian Period, the Torikaebaya Monogatari stands out as an unusual story. The reversal of gender roles that is central to the plot is a narrative device not found among the other surviving monogatari from this...

Less than a decade after Karl Marx completed his philosophical work, The German Ideology: Part I, Charles Darwin was finally persuaded to publish his biological masterpiece, The Origin of Species. Could these two works be bound intrinsically...

The Mirrors of Macondo

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude the fictional town of Macondo provides a stage, on which the speaker uses the regression of a society to show the disastrous consequences of capitalism on an...

True to its title, One Hundred Years of Solitude masterfully analyzes that human superego which brings each individual to a torturous state of perpetual solitary confusion. Although taking no stance on the validity of societal morale, Gabriel...

Power is the predominant theme of Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest': who holds power, who doesn't, who wants it, who loses it, how it is used to intimidate and manipulate and for what purposes, and, most especially, how it is disrupted...

"One should never direct people toward happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for...

"What is absurd is the confrontation between the sense of the irrational and the overwhelming desire for clarity which resounds in the depths of man."

-Albert Camus

The human existence is controlled, monitored, and viewed to assume a predictable...

Form as Strategy: Keats's "On the Sonnet" and "Bright Star"

"On the Sonnet" is a poem that deplores convention, flouts convention, is governed by convention, and recuperates convention. It is neither a proper Petrarchan poem nor a Shakespearean...

The pattern of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals revolves around the deconstruction and consequent rebuilding of common thought relationships; within these differentiations we find both the thematic basis for and the huge diversity of...

Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Genealogy of Morals" and Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents," have similar goals. Both men want to expose what they see as the impediments of society on the freedom of the individual. Both attack and...

In his Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche censures the members of the Judeo-Christian tradition for their "impotence." As a result of their impotence the descendents of this tradition (slaves, as I will call them to maintain some modicum of political...

In his book On Liberty John Stuart Mill argues the importance of individual freedoms for the betterment of all of society and for the individual himself. This individuality creates a dynamic for society to adapt itself towards truth and is only...

In his essays "Considerations on Representative Government" and "On Liberty", John Stuart Mill makes a convincing argument in favor of representative democracy. The system he proposes strikes the necessary balance between the "philosopher kings"...

Although Mill's On Liberty and Plato's The Republic both advocate the abolishment of gender roles, their respective justifications and resulting ideologies differ saliently. The inception of these differences arises from the basic moral premises...

The freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the guiding moral principles of the U.S., as is the view that every man or woman is created equal. We may buttress these claims with John Stuart Mill's "harm principle" from On...

In John Steinbeck's powerful American masterpiece Of Mice and Men, first published in 1937 during the height of the Great Depression, the main characters of George Milton and Lennie Small experience many hard and difficult situations which on...

Considered by many as the greatest of classic Greek tragedies, Oedipus the King ("Oedipus Tyrannus") by Sophocles (495?--406 B.C.E) is set in the remoteness of ancient Greece and has come down to us in the form of a tragic myth allegedly inspired...

Sophocles makes frequent use of seafaring imagery in his Oedipus the King, creating new perspectives from which to view its characters and cities. Oedipus tells the story of a king undone by a lack of faith in prophesy, the king of a people in...

Sophocles' epic poem, Oedipus the King, is a classic elegy that explores how irony can affect ones life and how "fate works more closely" then one would expect. It is due to this that many argue over how to react to the character of "King Oedipus,...

Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is a play about one man's actions, both intentional and unintentional, and the necessary punishment for those actions. Regardless of whether he was manipulated by the gods or self-motivated, Oedipus must take...

Frank Kermode writes in his book The Genesis of Secrecy "We are most unwilling to accept mystery, what cannot be reduced to other and more intelligible forms. Yet that is what we find here: something irreducible, therefore perpetually to be...

In his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe writes that in an ideal poem, "two things are invariably required first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness some...