Newest Literature Essays

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” Strother Martin stated in the 1967 film, Cool Hand Luke. This line could have easily been used in Thomas Pynchon’s novella published a year earlier, The Crying of Lot 49. The often convoluted...

Throughout Shakespeare’s Othello, the notion of monsters, monstrosities and the unnatural is a prominent theme. Often brought to light within the context of the villain Iago, the words “monster” and “monstrous” are used a combined 12 times...

Following its publication in 1899, Kate Chopin’s novel ‘The Awakening’ endured strong criticism due to its controversial portrayal of a female protagonist who openly expels the norms of maternity and monogamy. Diedre Stuffer notes how the...

As an audience, we crave comfort and reassurance that characters in the play, who we pity (ie. Lear) will not be harmed or the harming of them will be able to be prevented. Moreover as the tragedy in the play is unrelenting, Shakespeare uses...

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment explores the inner turmoil of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, through his murder of an old pawn broker. Raskolnikov’s internal divide is displayed throughout the novel through his bipolar behavior and his...

For Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, obsession is a central theme for their short stories. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator expresses a negative obsession for the pale-blue eye “with film over it” of an elderly man, but also...

In his book Denying History, author and scientist Michael Shermer provides readers a look into the dastardly and nonsensical world of Holocaust denial and why some believe the Holocaust never happened. To that end, a look into and refutation of...

Women in WartimeIn his novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explores the physical, emotional, and mental burdens of war. Set during the Vietnam War, O’Brien guides the reader through the common feelings of guilt, loss, and terror felt by...

Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” portrays many male characters as, arguably, predatory patriarchs, where they can be seen to be preying on the vulnerable, generically referring to young girls we see without major parental figures - men are presented...

The carriage is elegant, decadent, and a true symbol of luxury and privilege. The carriage blocks out its surroundings as it is the main focus, and things around it seem minute. It is elevated, allowing the passengers to peer through the windows,...

In the filmmaking process, the director undergoes a series of creative choices that work to advance the narrative, deepen characterizations, and illuminate the theme of the film. While there is a longstanding debate between film critics and film...

If there is one thing that almost every single person in world has in common, it is an existential fear of death. The subconscious thought that eventually reaches a sudden, overwhelming, hyper-realistic tipping point that we have been internally...

Most people have a person, a set of rules, or a greater idea that suppresses them, leaving them with a feeling of entrapment. In Isamil Kadare’s Broken April this was the blood code, that left inhabitants of the High Plateau’s in Albania trapped...

The concept and action of dreaming is a natural process, innate to almost all human beings despite gender, race, and culture. People dream both subconsciously in their sleep and consciously dream towards a goal or a better future. This natural...

It is a universal desire to crave knowledge about where you come from. To not only want to know what preceded you, but how you, well, became you. It is no coincidence that people who are adopted seek to find their biological parents, or why...

D.T. Niane’s revised edition of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali follows the journey from birth to adulthood of Sundiata, a developing prince and founder of the Mali empire. From a childhood of ridicule filled with gossip, disappointment, and the...

A guilty conscious can be a crippling ordeal to the mind especially if the basis of the guilt cannot be undone or corrected. When the mind is in emotional distress it will grasp on any construct that makes it feel better. In Martin Scorsese’s...

The sex industry is a significant market within the globalized capitalist system. Critic Jean L Pyle argues that ‘structural adjustment policies mandated by the International Money Fund’ are required of less economically developed countries as ‘a...

One of the main ideas explored in both The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini, and Atonement, a film directed by Joe Wright, is the everlasting presence of the past in the lives of the protagonists, both of whom make a mistake in their...

‘Age has rusted what the poet writ/ Worn out his language and obscur’d his wit.’ (JOESEPH ADDISON)

Within the quote under consideration, Addison asserts that within the Restoration period the skill and rhetoric of the English poet had diminished...

Australian poet, Bruce Dawe, is renowned for the social commentary present in his poetic work, which so often addresses culturally sensitive societal themes. Dawe’s “Enter Without So Much as Knocking” (1962) follows the consumerist experiences of...

The first volume of the Diary of Anais Nin covers four years of her life from 1931 until 1934. During these years, she is swept up in an affair with both Henry Miller and his wife, June, she finally meets her father who abandoned her and her...

As a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan always wants to walk a fine line. If there's one fundamental theme that suffuses his entire filmography is that cinema as a shared narrative can be a hugely powerful cultural force. I'm far from the first to...

The Grimm fairy tale “The Jew in the Brambles,” which is found in the “adult” section of the collection, is much more than a simple fairy tale. It is even more than a folk tale intended for a mature audience. It is a story that evokes the deepest...