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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable was written by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. This philosophical book was published during 2007 by Random House. It sheds light on a common characteristic of life we all encounter known as a "black...

Gender Trouble, first published in 1990 by Routledge with the title Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, is an academic piece by American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. The book is one of the many in her series...

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, written in 1989, is based on Richard Rorty’s lectures that were addressed in two sets at Trinity College, Cambridge and University College, London. He affirms that social consciousness brought on by a sense of...

This book, written in the late 1970's, is Richard Rorty's attempt to discuss his philosophy about perception and reality. The main theme of this work is that humans often confuse their perceptions about reality with reality itself, but because our...

These essays are the thoughts of a well-established German Jewish philosopher who lived from the late 19th century until September 1940. As a philosopher, he devised theories about the development of technology in relation to human progress, as...

In 1983, Frederic Jameson published an essay titled “Postmodernism and the Consumer Society.” Following extensive revision, the essay appeared a year later in the New Left Review under the title “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Capitalism....

On Photography - a collection of essays by Susan Sontag - explores what the title suggests: a take on the importance, history and nature of the medium of photography. Each essay - of which there are five - was originally circulated periodically in...

In 1964, Renaissance scholar and English Professor Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and created a revolution in the very foundation of critical theory that has since made it irrefutably one of the most...

Sigmund Freud published The Future of an Illusion in 1927 for the purpose of enlightening readers on with his analysis of the psychological operation of religious belief on society. The underlying, overarching thrust of this analysis is one of...

The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in 1900; by the time of a new edition was being prepared in thirty years later, Sigmund Freud was ready to declare in a newly composed foreword that within the covers of The Interpretation of Dreams...

Terrance Hayes is a contemporary African-American poet. Born in 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina, he was later educated at Coker College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts Degree. He continued his studies and received a Master of Fine Arts...

Anselm of Canterbury, known also as St. Anselm or Anselme de Buc, was an 11th century abbot whose writings have been traditionally heralded for their logical and philosophical basis. During a time when many theologians were writing from a more...

Virginia Woolf stands out as one of the most significant and iconic female voices in the history of English literature. A key exponent of Modernism along with writers such as E.M. Forster and James Joyce, Woolf was a champion of female...

In 1611, Aemilia Lanyer broke new ground female writers when she became the first woman to publish an English-language poetry collection under her own name. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum would prove to be the only volume of poetry that Lanyer would...

In addition to having a name at least as unusual as any offspring of late 20th century celebrities and playing a key role in the hysteria leading to the Salem Witch Trials, Cotton Mather still maintains his standing as one of the most prodigious...

The first type of writing that comes to mind you hear the name Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably not poetry. After all, Emerson’s towering stature in American letters is primarily derived from his essays. Therefore it should not be at all surprising...

American novelist Louisa May Alcott produced her 1866 novella Behind a Mask under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. Living in a discriminatory era, and writing for a partial society which favored Men authors over their female counterparts, adopting a...

A New York-born comic artist, James Sturm's 'America: God, Gold and Golems' is a series of three graphic stories first published in 2007. Each story explores less well-known aspects of American history: 'The Revival' is set during the religious...

The Moor's Last Sigh is a historical fiction novel by Salman Rushdie. This novel is his fifth novel and was published in 1995. Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian author and a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature. In France, he got the...

Many do not know of Kurt Wimmer's 2002 cult classic film Equilbrium. It tells the story of a futuristic world in all conflict, especially war, has been eliminated through the use of an insidious drug known as Prozium that inhibits emotion of all...

The Tripitaka, also known as Pipitaka, is the earliest collection of Buddhist writings. Initially these writings were composed orally and passed down by traditional teaching and re-telling. By the Third Century B.C., they were written in the...

The Breaks is the fourth novel by American author and screenwriter Richard Price. The story was published on 1983. Price wrote several novels and has been writing scripts for tv shows until now.

The novel narrates the story of a graduate student,...

Oscar Wilde published a volume of verse with the simplest and most direct of all possible titles: Poems. The opening poem of that collection features a title that is anything but simple and direct. In fact, were it not for the exclamation point...

Oscar Wilde was a Victorian iconoclast who stood at the vanguard of the aesthetic movement. His works, from his Comedy of Manners plays to his verse compositions such as "Requiescat," have changed the landscape of literature since the late 1800s....