«Dostoevsky’s classic, Notes From Underground maintains the transient ability to pass through the realm of classic literature and into the incendiary realm of the literary fiends who feed on accumulated grotesqueries. This transmutability is...» Document abstract
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4 word format
Language : english
literature
school essay
date published
29/10/2007
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level : General public
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Summary Dostoevsky’s classic, Notes From Underground maintains the transient ability to pass through the realm of classic literature and into the incendiary realm of the literary fiends who feed on accumulated grotesqueries. This transmutability is painfully not shared with the fabricated persona of the “Underground Man” one of the most pathetic yet endearing characters ever to exist in prose. As his title suggests, the “Underground Man” shuns humanity yet simultaneously and with a forceful dynamic believes that humanity is superior to him. The narrative voice is constantly in conflict with itself with equally robust ideologies cannibalizing themselves and pushing themselves forward so as to create an infinite stasis that he cannot transcend. The atomic theme of alienation and of the outcasts that society engenders is one constructed seamlessly well by Dostoevsky and the romanticism of the persona objectively watching itself is one admitted in earnest. The persona’s shunning of humanity is similar to the irony of a little boy lashing out at an animal and laughing--the irony being that the little boy hurts as well. No other literary character is so absolutely self-effacing and filled utterly with inconsistent bile.
«The death toll during World War I surmounted fifteen million. The second World War erased the lives of fifty-five million, nearly five million of which were civilian Jews exterminated throughout Hitler’s tyranny. Nine million died during the...» Document abstract
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4 word format
Language : english
literature
school essay
date published
28/10/2007
review : not yet assessed
level : Advanced
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SummaryThe death toll during World War I surmounted fifteen million. The second World War erased the lives of fifty-five million, nearly five million of which were civilian Jews exterminated throughout Hitler’s tyranny. Nine million died during the Russian Revolution, and twenty million more died during the reign of Stalin. Almost sixty thousand American soldiers died during a small phase of the Vietnam conflict, a small phase that was eventually abandoned as a failure. Yet such numbers, relied on by every modern media source, are only mathematical representations. While striving to paint an honest portrait of war for those on the home front, for those distanced by land and generations, body counts succeed only at numbing the reality of death. They “reduce human suffering to cold statistics” (White). However, “human suffering” has been reduced to ideals far more pathetic than cold statistics for far longer than statistics have even been a common practice of describing war. Death means almost nothing in the modern era. It has been accepted to the point of expectation, and war has become only another means by which to fulfill the promise of finite life. Nations abuse death tolls for political defenses and political attacks, numbers that lie and erase the moral fiber of proper respect for those soldiers and civilians alike sacrificed in the name of the progress of freedom and democracy. Beyond numbers, death is such a common occurrence that soldiers, breathing it and tasting it day to night and year to year forget that it is not inevitable, a phenomenon explored by Joseph Heller in his book Catch-22. Death has become a tool, an object, not a means within itself, but a means to an end result molded in the hands of time and civilization. And war, its greatest ally, with its death tolls and body counts, its endless thirst for blood blurred in the minds of its very victims, the men and the women in uniform and the men and the women hoping and pray and trying to remember the men and the women in uniform in the midst of an easier path, the path to forgetting; war bleeds death in its most carnal form, that of innocent forfeiture.
«It is almost amazing, the overwhelming feeling of disgust that infiltrates a high school classroom whenever the subject is history. A kind of primitive competition to find the few kids who actually enjoy the class and bribe them for photocopies of...» Document abstract
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4 word format
Language : english
literature
school essay
date published
28/10/2007
review : not yet assessed
level : Advanced
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SummaryIt is almost amazing, the overwhelming feeling of disgust that infiltrates a high school classroom whenever the subject is history. A kind of primitive competition to find the few kids who actually enjoy the class and bribe them for photocopies of notes and exam answers suffocates like a humid day. Add to the humiliation the impending doom of an essay test from a teacher who expects everyone to care enough about ex-presidents and military leaders to memorize precise battle plans and dramatic mistakes and it makes perfect sense that an entire junior class will quake at the thought of United States History. Even in college, notes fade to slight scribbles and heads fall, an hour and fifteen minutes of British monarchies and Roman empires barely distinguishable from any other opportunity for sleep. Yet history is tightly embedded in almost every other course in a liberal arts education, courses that students are honestly excited to attend. Literature that is merely a reflection of cultural movements, psychology that looks to some of the most famous individuals as its most important case studies. One cannot read Virgil’s Aeneid without knowing something about Augustus and the fall of Troy. And searching the years of George Washington’s childhood for hints at a future Revolutionary hero requires as much knowledge of history as it does psychology. So why is history such a dreaded subject? Why is it seen as a necessary evil instead of as a positive experience? The problem is that history dehumanizes.
«Descartes’ Meditation One sets out his purpose of creating a new scientific paradigm to be based on a foundation built above the wreckage of his former opinions. He sought a reason to doubt the entire canon of his opinions so that he might begin “to...» Document abstract
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4 word format
Language : english
humanities/philosophy
school essay
date published
28/10/2007
review : not yet assessed
level : Advanced
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SummaryDescartes’ Meditation One sets out his purpose of creating a new scientific paradigm to be based on a foundation built above the wreckage of his former opinions. He sought a reason to doubt the entire canon of his opinions so that he might begin “to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences (A&W, p. 27a).” He finds that his opinions might all be doubted based on their origin either from or through sense perceptions that are prone to deception. He cites as evidence the seeming reality of dreams, based as they are on sense perceptions of what we believe to be ‘real’ things. In his first meditation, Descartes argues that because the components of dreams are no different in nature from those of waking life, we cannot trust our waking perceptions anymore than those experienced in sleep. Thoughts are constructed from images of corporeal things, which are bodies that extend in space. In the search for a firm science, Descartes uses this argument to cast doubt upon the physical sciences. However, mathematics studies truths which are independent of extension and so could form the basis of a lasting science; the ideas of arithmetic are true in life or dream, and thus cannot be doubted. The existence of a good God, by contrast, is something that, at this stage of the meditations, must be doubted along with all other long-standing opinions misinformed by the senses. Descartes thus assumes the existence of “an evil genius (A&W, p. 29b)” whose intention it is to deceive man away from knowledge. The existence of such a god leads Descartes to suppose all of reality to be no more real than the ‘hoaxes’ of his dreams.
«Taking their cue from the scientific philosophy of Francis Bacon, the thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed that the mind acted as a mirror, simply reflecting images of outward objects onto the subjective self. Immanuel Kant proposed a reorientation...» Document abstract
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Language : english
humanities/philosophy
school essay
date published
28/10/2007
review : not yet assessed
level : Advanced
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SummaryTaking their cue from the scientific philosophy of Francis Bacon, the thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed that the mind acted as a mirror, simply reflecting images of outward objects onto the subjective self. Immanuel Kant proposed a reorientation in which the relation between subject and object was recognized as necessarily interactive; Kant suggested that “objects must conform to our cognition (638a)” of them. Independent of experiencing objects themselves, all we are able to think about them is that which the mind itself “puts into them (638b).” The preconditions laid down by consciousness-in-general mark the limits of our rational understanding of reality. Kant’s philosophy establishes the distinction between the appearance of an object, as we experience it, and the thing itself. This distinction is framed within the greater task of the Critique of Pure Reason, of investigating whether metaphysics can be secured as a science. The end of metaphysics is to cognize what Kant calls the unconditioned. If our cognizing about a thing reaches only as far as the appearance of a thing, and not to the thing itself, then our experience cannot be of the unconditioned. If our faculty of representing things conditions the appearances that compose our experience of things, then knowledge of metaphysics- an attempt “to get beyond the boundaries of all possible experience (639b)”- is beyond the grasp of our representational minds.
«The Buddha’s teachings, although expressive of ultimate reality, have been conveyed through the relative medium of language. This discrepancy has led to the invocation of dichotomies such as “reality versus unreality”, “existence versus...» Document abstract
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3 word format
Language : english
humanities/philosophy
school essay
date published
28/10/2007
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level : Advanced
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SummaryThe Buddha’s teachings, although expressive of ultimate reality, have been conveyed through the relative medium of language. This discrepancy has led to the invocation of dichotomies such as “reality versus unreality”, “existence versus nonexistence” and “truth versus untruth” to express in words what is ultimately beyond the utilized dualities. Because ultimate knowledge, as discussed in the Prajna-Paramita Sutra, is beyond distinctions, duality is not an ultimately existing construct. However, even to express that thought requires resorting to the duality of existence/nonexistence. So, the Buddhist canon spends many verses explaining that which is “true” and “false,” that which “exists” ultimately and only relatively, and the dichotomy of reality and unreality. The Lankavatara Sutra, a proponent of the Cittamatra (mind-only) tradition, expounds the notion that the only truly existing thing is mind. Buddha-nature is the only un-conditioned, and thus uncreated and undying, element of existence. It is only in our clouded perceptions of things, through our relatively functioning vijnana consciousness, that we do not realize the ultimate nature of our Tathagatha-garbha (buddha-nature).
Essay about The Once And Future King by T.H White, Henry IV by Shakespeare, linked to the archetypal values in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Adventure.
«Perhaps the very word “hero” should suffer a live vivisection for all of its purported morality and bloody, patriarchal implications. There are many universal components of the hero as explored and anatomized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s...» Document abstract
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4 word format
Language : english
literature
school essay
date published
28/10/2007
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level : General public
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SummaryPerhaps the very word “hero” should suffer a live vivisection for all of its purported morality and bloody, patriarchal implications. There are many universal components of the hero as explored and anatomized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s Adventure. You’ve seen it many times before; a young boy leaves and denies the whims of maternal dependency and suddenly the external world itself simply unfolds in all of its grandeur before him. All that he has to do is follow the prompts, and somehow, legitimize the world in his endeavors with this new god-like knowledge he stumbles upon. The texts that contain these presupposed heroic adventures and notions are many times seen as living and breathing with us in the contemporaneous realm. Stories such as Shakespeare’s Henry IV and T.H. White’s opus The Once and Future King provide us with a powerful reference in all of their didactic yet flawed nature of what a hero truly is. Ultimately, a hero is someone who breaks out of the mechanized system we all are confined within and is brave enough to be truly human.
«Flannery O’Connor was the unmitigated master of her particularly esoteric craft of assaulting the all-devouring gray spaces of the humanistic spectrum. To those who merely make a skeletal browsing of her work or simply are first time readers may...» Document abstract
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5 word format
Language : english
literature
school essay
date published
28/10/2007
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level : General public
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SummaryFlannery O’Connor was the unmitigated master of her particularly esoteric craft of assaulting the all-devouring gray spaces of the humanistic spectrum. To those who merely make a skeletal browsing of her work or simply are first time readers may find her to be unnaturally grotesque in her stark portrayal of the often heinously morally and socially contaminated characters featured in her stories. Nevertheless, her tough-minded short stories give staggering cultural and spiritual commentary when one takes heed of the profuse blend of the serious and ironic in her work. She does not in fact, stringently admonish the inherent faults of her characters but brings them to fruition in order to expose and enervate these faults with her belief in the rather morbid preternatural tool of grace. For this reason, the protagonists, or often times, jaded Christ figures in her works who seem the farthest from being deemed spiritually or socially “good” are the characters who are given redemption most frequently by those characters who are supposedly socially seamless. Although her writing is exponentially filled with her spiritual and cultural awareness, the mundane and dialectic styling of her prose allows for a very neutral and unbiased body of work. It is only when the reader regards the symbolism behind the seemingly blatant grotesqueries in her work that they begin to grasp the fundamental themes of hypocrisy, prejudice, and arrogance that are so thickly elucidated in each story.
«When Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle...» Document abstract
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2 word format
Language : english
literature
school essay
date published
23/10/2007
review : not yet assessed
level : General public
requested 5 times
SummaryWhen Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” The novel itself is a monstrous patchwork of text opening into more text, allowing a great and terrible license for the reader to denote their own sense of morality using these valence levels of perspective. Like Mary Shelley, James Baldwin in his essay “The Creative Process” recognizes the indispensable need to understand the vast internal topography of the human in order to legitimize the living continuation of human experience. More importantly, he recognizes the need to create a world that is itself more human. Mary Shelley disturbs the ignorant peace of her reader to force them into discovering that the inhuman themes that are so prevalent within the novel exist within themselves. What the novel consummately accomplishes with the organic convergence of the literal and metaphorical is the final actualization of the reader of his or her own ghastly nature. It is a tale of unchecked Prometheanism, only more terrifying because it lacks the complicity to humanity that even Prometheanism would entail.
«Bram Stoker’s Dracula is undoubtedly one the most consciously sentient and hyperbolic literary incarnations of the excessive fear of women’s sexuality that still survives with a vast legitimacy for its content today. Much like Mary Shelley’s...» Document abstract
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2 word format
Language : english
literature
school essay
date published
23/10/2007
review : not yet assessed
level : General public
requested 2 times
SummaryBram Stoker’s Dracula is undoubtedly one the most consciously sentient and hyperbolic literary incarnations of the excessive fear of women’s sexuality that still survives with a vast legitimacy for its content today. Much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the novel is satiated with the fear of the modern technology and scientific advances of the industrial era to superannuate the need for morality. Unlike Frankenstein, however, what Dracula is most suffused with is the fear of the progressiveness of an era to challenge the patriarchal power structure that so defined Victorian society. Every possible corner of the book is exhausted with the phallocentric motifs of successive generations of men believing in their “divine” Christian autonomy over the reproductive rights of women. This fear of women still exists today but takes on new, more dangerous pervasive and politic forms.
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