Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The use of symbolism in the novel
Importance of Symbolism in literature
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Criticizing the cruelty of society, Baudelaire begins his book, Flowers of Evil, with a warning. To foreshadow the disturbing contents that his book focuses on, Baudelaire describes the unpleasant traits of men. Lured by the words of the Devil, people victimize others. Grotesque images of torture and swarming maggots exemplifies the horrors of our actions. Yes, our actions. Baudelaire puts shame to every human, including the reader, through the word “ours.” Humiliated, the reader dare not to allow himself to be guilty with the worst sin – boredom. Separated by dashes, the last sentence commands the reader to choose whether to fall to the worst or save himself a little bit of dignity. Accused and challenged, the reader is pressured to ponder
To seek to discuss the novel’s construction, for instance, in more comprehensively detailed terms, is to find oneself confronted by the necessity of accounting for the kinds of provocation, refusal, or contempt that seem evident in its many ostensible narrative defects or excesses—for instance, the text’s hasty and foreshortened treatment of plot, its repeated implausibilities and coincidences, its arbitrary, dis integrated, extemporized phases of narration, its gaps and enigmas, the sheer extendedness of its wandering, abandoned, destitute, disorientated, or surreal intervals, its gothic elements, its banal and dismissive resolution of the narrative of the ghostly nun, its exploration of altered, delirious, griefstricken, and disintegrated states of mind, its misleading use of narrative cues, its broadcasting of divergent and synthesized elements within a sentence or paragraph, and so
In spite of the fear which propels him, there is finally hope for Ignatius. Waddling fearfully into the world, he can now learn to accept his common fate with the rest of humanity--his own humanness and inherent vulnerability in a world over which he has no control. In her frustration and resignation, Ignatius' little mother, an unusual Earth Mother at best, once sadly and plaintively tells her son, "You learnt everything, Ignatius, except how to be a human being" (375). Therein lies a lesson for us all.
The kinds of "precepts" instilled by St. Aubert are those that enjoin such "virtues" as moderation, simplicity, circumspection, and respect (5). Throughout the above passage and in her initial chapter, Radcliffe is establishing several binaries through which the novel as a whole can be mapped, and retirement in the country versus involvement in "the world" (1, 4), economy versus dissipation (2), simplicity versus exaggeration, serenity with congeniality versus tumult with incongruity (4), happiness and misery (4-5), affection versus ambition (11), health versus disease (physical and emotional [8, 18]), and life versus death, are only a few ways in which to articulate them. However, in the end, one binary can serve to organize the many: symmetry versus deformity. And it is in apprehending the logic of h...
It is funny and yet tragic to see that no matter where an individual’s geographical location is or for the most part when in history the duration of their lifetime occurred, that they still can share with other tormented individuals the same pain, as a result of the same malignancies plaguing humanity for what seems to have been from the beginning. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” all exhibit disgust for their societies, what is particularly interesting however, is that the subject of their complaints are almost identical in nature. This demonstrates how literature really does reflect the attitudes and tribulations the society and or culture endures from which it was written. The grievances that they feel to be of such importance as to base their literary works on are that of traditionalism and, the carnivorous nature of society. Different societies will inevitably produce different restrictive and consuming faces to these problems.
A Comparison of the Attitudes Shown in The Man He Killed By Tomas Hardy and in My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
With exaggeration, authors craft their writing to have an even greater, more impactful effect on their audiences. This enhanced effect found in Candide serves the purpose of highlighting how humans adopt a type of absolute viciousness and inhumanity in times of war. One example is the instance where Candide - a member of the Bulgar army, at the time - must choose between being “flogged” by the entirety of the military command, or to endure “twelve bullets in his brain” (24). Here, Candide is given a nonsensical, almost ludicrous, ultimatum. Voltaire offers an embellished example that serves to demonstrate the barbaric military practices that come with war. Being a recurring aspect of war, Candide is, essentially, forced to choose between death and death. In fact, along with exaggeration, Voltaire satirizes war even further as the choice of whether it be a gradual or speedy demise is Candide’s own luxury. Voltaire does not just simply antagonize the ramifications of war, but rather, he ridicules all facets of war. Another example within Candide is when the Old Woman reveals the story of her own life as proof of the grim hardship that she too has experienced. In the midst of another battle, “one buttock” was cut off of the live bodies of every woman present in the interest of feeding the starving soldiers (56).
Edith Waugh’s Vile Bodies is a twisted comedy that has the reader questioning whether they should be distressed or amused by the antics of the various characters. It reminds me of paintings from the Rococo period, which are almost exclusively on frivolous, often with scandalous undertones, subjects that do not portray the impoverished and harsh reality of the majority in France at that time.
In Charles Baudelaire’s “The Old Acrobat,” the flaneur describes his encounter with a fallen figure who eventually reveals the lack of humanity in the city people’s hardened hearts. The flaneur finds comfort in people with border personality types because he can easily relate to them. He is an idler in a world which concentrates on excess, over-stimulation and one of which runs on a constant invisible ticking clock that pushes the masses towards desensitization and unhappiness. These, among many other pretentious things, make him seek out the uncommon populace, a breed of seemingly raw people who live their lives in front of the world’s eyes. He is bored and uninterested in the ennui, commonplace people who make up the majority of society because they can create facades to shield their faults from the world’s view. Rather than concentrating on the mundane and masked life of the middle and upper class, the flanuer focuses his attention towards the transient, eccentric “drifting clouds”1 who are not a part of the active social milieu.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents the fascinating notion that human beings are born into the world with an inherently good nature. Nonetheless, this morality turns cold and dark within the steel bars of society. The heavy rules of civilization produce the long, iron chains that corrupt the goodness inside the souls and bodies of mankind. According to SparkNotes, “Rousseau believed modern man’s enslavement to his own needs was responsible for all sorts of societal ills, from exploitation and domination of others to poor self-esteem and depression” (“The Necessity of Freedom”). The philosopher’s intuitive thoughts can be summarized in his quote, “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces” (“Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes.”)
...of alcohol or morphine, thus allowing them to escape their depressing reality. As a consequence they fall into a world of illusions, unfulfilled desires and past regrets that shape and influence their lives in the present, becoming the prisoners of their own conscious and fantasies. Thus, Jacques Lacan’s theory regarding the division of the human psyche can be clearly identified within O’Neill’s play, as evidenced by the characters’ personality traits, along with their repressed desires and lack of any kind of contentment.
No one ever notices it. No one, not even my own family member can detect the frown that concealed under my cheerful smile when I got home. Suppressing one’s feeling and thought for sake of another is tantamount to destroying one’s passion for sake of other. Looking back at my childhood, I can develop a better understanding of Nietzsche’s theme of repression of passion in “Morality as Anti-nature.”
My paper examines Lacan’s reading of the Antigone as an allegory of our own textual and ethical obligations as readers and critics. This paper addresses both the ethics and the aesthetics of our encounter with the text.
Writers during the ‘Dark Romantics’ period took a close, in-depth look at the flaw in human nature. Authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, use feelings, imagination, and nature to show a different vision of the individual than that of the Transcendentalists. The work produced by the ‘Dark Romantics’ suggests that human beings are not divine. Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark,’ and Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ all support this idea by showing the dark side of humanity through their characters’ evil doings.
The traditional canons of romance are therefore flouted as in an ‘anti-roman’. We are denied much of the aesthetic pleasure associated with fully realized imaginative creation. The writer is determined, beyond everything else that his vision shall grate on us. He exploits whatever will grate.
Throughout all of her moralising (a word which I use divorced from its modern negative associations) Byatt writes extremely expressively, bridging the gap between flat text on a page and vivid mental imagery; her short stories are compelling in a way that makes the reader curious, engaging our interest in what is to come. This is the essence of the storyteller's art. Even were it not to be her message, one could not come away from this collection of Byatt's work without the feeling that here, within these words, stories and constructs of art that there was an internal logic which offered a positive alternative to the negativity which seems to be a feature of this dispossessed age; a sense of purpose and innate meaning that channels and releases us, "as though the [emotion] was still and eternal in the painting and the [soul] was released into time." (p230) And be touched by it.