Newest Literature Essays

As we race toward more sophisticated forms of virtual reality, its worth considering the work of Stanley Kubrick. He spent his career probing and solving the questions of immersive storytelling in ways that still remain unique. More than any other...

The film Bonnie and Clyde (1967, dir. Arthur Penn) is more than an escapist fantasy that lets the audience root for the bad guys. It is a groundbreaking example of American cinema, one that can also be used to construct a historiography of...

Shakespeare is perhaps the best-known name in the world. Naturally so, since his plays have been a part of the canon for a long time, with Julius Caesar among them. There have been thousands of adaptations of Julius Caesar let alone Shakespeare’s...

War films tend to adhere to the common trope of heroism or courage by combatants in the face of impossible adversity while displaying unshaken patriotism. Rarely do these films display the overwhelming dread that comes with facing one’s own...

The summer of 1816 in Geneva was a rather sublime and therefore inspirational season. The weather was so harsh and unpredictable that it ushered a group of remarkably talented people around the hearth instead of roaming the dangerous Alps. Being...

In the era of postmodernity that we live in today, the ideas of distinguished philosophers still have a lasting legacy that is apparent in many of the established foundations that are the cornerstones of our world. Thomas More and Francesco...

Generic plurality is a matter of political statement for Rushdie. Intertextuality is an integral part of his historiographical metafiction. A variety of generic modes, with their points of origins both Asian and Euro-American, interpenetrate and...

It is an incredibly common proverb that money cannot buy happiness. Most individuals agree that while money may be able to fulfill physical needs, it cannot fulfill psychological needs. Edward Arlington Robinson indicates this precept in his poem...

"To express yourself needs reason, but expressing yourself is the reason." These words of Ai Weiwei perfectly describe how the character Equality feels in the novel Anthem by Ayn Rand. Equality searches for a reason, an excuse, a chance, to...

To some extent, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two figures who are manipulated unfairly by both Claudius in the scheming, and Hamlet in his tricks, and one can therefore see them sympathetically as victims to more powerful people; nonetheless,...

It is a cynical statement, but it is frighteningly valid: contemporary liberal societies are little more than disciplinary dystopias. Many different phenomena reveal this, especially when understood through the framework of Michel Foucault’s...

An individual’s context exerts a significant influence over the journeys they take and the ways they make discoveries. In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, John's personal context led to his journey of combating loneliness, through which he...

The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer was written in the late Middle Ages, a time in which women possessed little agency and were perceived as inferior individuals. However, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath presents a female character that is vibrant and...

Women holding onto their youth plays a significant role in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire which opened on Broadway in 1947 and in Notes on a Scandal published in 2003 by Zoe Heller. In both texts this theme is caused by many...

Gambling, envy, pride--each represents a specific anti-thesis to one’s general concept of virtue. However, each of these vices dwell within the pages of the Mahabharata. If the Mahabharata serves as a teaching mechanism for its readers, then the...

The Ancient Greek society that birthed the Odyssey, written around the eighth century BC by Homer, differed greatly from individualistic modern culture. Whereas today civilization can be defined in terms of technology, wealth, or healthcare,...

The concept of transformation appears in a variety of ways within A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Transformation within plays written by William Shakespeare often takes place as the changing of either a characters outward appearance or a denoted...

The tradition of elaborate mourning was already a burgeoning custom in the 19th century but it was Queen Victoria's public mourning of her beloved Prince Albert's death that popularized the customary funereal rituals practiced throughout the...

Rossetti famously defied Victorian ideals by ending her engagement to James Collinson in 1850 on religious grounds, as she was a devout Tractarian and he had become a Roman Catholic. Her faith coloured every day of her life, even supposedly...

Rossetti, labelled the “queen of the pre-Raphaelite school”, and Ibsen, a great perpetrator of the Realism movement, were separated by artistic styles in writing, but shared a time period and similar social climates. Therefore, the ways in which...

Dracula’s abrupt opening declaration that Jonathan Harker “left Munich at 8:35 p.m. on 1st May” does very little in terms of setting the initial scene, though readers find the brief nature of Harker’s diary peeling away to reveal the superstitious...

Tragedy and romance are two genres that often go hand-in-hand to effectively enhance the qualities of each throughout the text in which they are present. Two texts that we have read this semester, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Voltaire’s Candide, are...

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was written and performed in London at the very end of the sixteenth century. During this time, as during much of history, the Jewish population was not the most popular, especially in London where...

The Sympathizer, the name of the novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, successfully depicted the main character in the book-- the “narrator” himself. The storytelling was in a quite vulgar yet concise style, which best describes the life of “a spy, a...