Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” examines a relationship that has lost its passion and fallen into a state of near-death. In the poem, Hardy uses the environment as an objective correlative to invoke a state of melancholia in the reader, which is the same feeling the speaker had about the relationship in the poem. Essentially, Hardy ...
Through his works The Cultural Turn, A singular Modernity, and “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson provides a standpoint from which postmodernism can be viewed and understood. Jameson defines postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, or the cultural counterpart of what he calls present-day multinational capitalism, referring to postmodernism ...
Volpone is the story of five people – Volpone, Mosca, Voltore, Corvino and Corbaccio – who are led into folly by their love of money. As Act One opens, Volpone, a wealthy Venetian, and Mosca, his “parasite,” are talking. Volpone is admiring his store of gold when three visitors arrive in succession. All three are ...
Throughout the novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne emphasizes the intricate themes of isolation and alienation. Using a variety of literary techniques and descriptions of emotions and nature, Hawthorne is able to fully depict the inner feelings of hurt suffered by the central characters as a result of severe loneliness and seclusion. This, therefore, further ...
Are we rational? In Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver sure seems to think not, nor does the Houyhnhnm society in which the traveler finds himself living for years. In the most curious of circumstances, Gulliver finds himself in a place where he is thrust upon living amid a land where his fellow bipeds are ...
Although many writers are criticized for peppering their work with short sentences on the grounds that such representations are choppy or linguistically unremarkable, such suppositions are not necessarily correct. Indeed, short sentences can make use of language in iconoclastic and/or interesting ways that-in addition to constituting a new manifestation of creativity-make words and the meanings ...
One of the central thematic elements of As I Lay Dying is the distinction between what is a fact and what is an interpretation of a fact. Clearly, any objective fact can result in a multitude of subjective interpretations because the characters all have singular points of view. Their perspectives of any empirical truth is ...
Time: 47 minutes (one class period) Setting: Classroom (desks in a horseshoe shape to enable/encourage class discussion) Objective: After this lesson, students should be able to identify the following literary devices: alliteration, simile, metaphor, personification, and onomatopoeia Background: Students have spent the last two weeks studying the elements of poetry. Usually, we have focused on ...
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury takes its title from the most famous soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. By taking the title of his novel from an immortal line of Shakespeare, Faulkner set himself on the verge of a perilous height. That title presumes greatness in comparison to Shakespeare. And it succeeds triumphantly in this ...
It seems really ironic that a poem could be both an outcry during the Harlem Renaissance and a rallying song for Winston Churchill to persuade his country to fight against the Nazis, but that is exactly what this poem was. Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” was originally written about the race riots in Harlem ...
