Newest Literature Essays

The passage of time is something that we all see as inevitable. Eventually in time all things will fade; specifically as noted in the twelfth sonnet beauty, but also that all humans eventually die. Shakespeare’s twelfth sonnet tries to explore the...

Within the poetry of Hughes and Plath, the theme of human relationships is written of in varying and diverse manners. Plath’s work details relationships, such as the parent-child relationship, using powerful and intricate imagery, while Hughes...

It’s impossible to determine all the complexity of a character just based on first impressions. This is especially true for the character Kolya in David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves. On the surface, Kolya appears to be a fearless, comedic,...

Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya portrays complicated relationships between several characters with rather distinct personalities. Staged at the nineteenth century, Chekhov's drama of everyday life stresses conflict amongst his characters through...

‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousnesses’

Above is an extract...

Lao-Tzu, from his work “Thoughts from the Tao-te Ching”, offers political protocols for the leader through the abandonment of action and guidelines on how people should live their lives. Although Mary Wollstonecraft, from her work “Of the...

In Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, one abundantly clear theme is disjunction. Much of the text is fragmented, split up and moving between locations, characters, and time periods. Coupled with what often seems like magical realism, this...

Early on in his Jungian analysis of Japanese female folk archetypes, Hayao Kawai posits that dangerous supernatural creatures can either represent misunderstood and marginalized people or inscrutably villainous forces of (human) nature, depending...

Jiri Menzel’s 1966 film Closely Watched Trains, with its plot that follows a young slacker’s daily routine and its extremely languid pace, at first seems to cast a lazily nostalgic eye toward WWII-era Czechoslovakia. However, during pivotal...

Telling a story through the eyes of a child is by no means a new literary technique. Fantastical novels such as Rowling’s Harry Potter and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Cabin in the Big Woods use the younger generation for their central points of...

In her two decades as a playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks has tackled American history from many angles; while she shuffles themes of race, family, death, and time between each of her plays, they are all linked by the common structure of what she calls...

Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians is a bold experiment of a performance whose successes and failures stem from the same aspect of the show: its tendency to blur the lines between the audience and the performers....

Societal dictum and etiquette are fluid concepts, changing and differing dependent largely on location, culture, time period, and other factors. With reference to carting a carriage of Peaches through rural Japan in the middle of a cold winter...

Rose, in the Midst of Changes

In the course of an enduring history of segregation in the United States, there 1950’s was one of the times when African Americans actively fought for equal rights. Many African American men, such as Martin Luther...

The United States of America is a country that, despite much of the relatively progress in race relations, remains gained by a history of prejudice. Even today, elements of our society have a significant impact on the life expectancy and mortality...

As Medieval (13th century) texts focused on the Viking Age settlement (9th-10th) of the islands of the North Atlantic, sagas can be analyzed as vital accounts of these cultures, both in the era depicted and in the time of composition. For example,...

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, Luo’s attempt to re-educate the Little Seamstress is indicative of his own participation in the class struggle. This protagonist projects his own desire to be a member of the more...

“High Tide in Tucson” by Barbara Kingsolver attempts to enlighten its readers to the harsh reality that results from leaving home and demonstrate how our animal-like qualities keep us going. Kingsolver writes to the people who have already moved...

Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle asserts that our attitudes—as well as the behaviors that stem from them—toward the implications of scientific innovation impact the decisions we make. In doing so, he provokes the reader to investigate the potential...

In The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin utilizes the unique power struggle between George Orr and Dr. Haber to assert that a single person is not capable of addressing all negative aspects of a society. Many individuals may argue that those who...

People have many motivations for working. For some it is more than just a paycheck, but also a fulfillment of something within themselves. Others are truly passionate about the jobs they choose and what they do. Some have the goal to simply get...

There is, perhaps, no other American author whose work has been so hotly debated than Herman Melville. The white whale at the center of his most famous work, a juxtaposition of gender in America, an odd scrivener, and his much discussed story of a...

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” details the end of a southern aristocratic family line in a gothic manner which is to be expected of Poe. While Poe’s writing most prominently focuses on gothic quality, it is...

The 19th century was a time of great development, especially so in the realm of knowledge and representation of disability in literature. Although physical disabilities receive the majority of the attention, mental illness does appear in many...