"Oh Memories! Treasures in darkness born! Murky horizon of our ancient dreams! Dear brilliance of a past that brightly beams! Casting a radiance on things dead and gone" (Hugo 116)!
In a foreign land, in a foreign era, an extinct sound resides in the atmosphere. It's the sound of a world that has never experienced or conceived of anything like an automobile or a jet, a television or a radio, a microwave or even an alarm clock. It's the sound of a small population, people that live on the amusement they find in polite conversation, art, theatre, and primarily literature. When night falls, the only illumination casting a glow on this world comes from the flickering of a lantern or a small bedside candle.
In the midst of this existence a war was brewing amongst the citizens of France, and the peaceful simplicity is interrupted. Republican armies in conflict with the aristocracy lace the country in tents and encampments by night and in battlefields by day. Soldiers regularly intrude upon the homes and properties of rural citizens to stay for weeks or even months. Life is one interruption after another.
On one fateful occurrence a charming young general led his troops across the French countryside in search of temporary shelter. They came upon a small farm, home to a family of devout royalists by the name of Trebuchet. Here the troops would stay for over a year.
Over the course of that time the young general became infatuated with the young daughter of the household, Sophie. Sophie was strong willed and opinionated. She could hold her own ground in the midst of masculine politics and war. But despite their differences the two were married. They would become the parents of three children -- Abel, Eugene, and Vi...
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...cannot die. It is our souls, then, that love, and not our bodies." (Maurois 66)
In a new era, a noisy era, someone wanders through an oversized book emporium. They find their way to the "literature" section. Browsing the shelves they come across a thick novel with a pretty cover. They leaf through the pages wondering whether it's the story they want, and after a hasty decision they purchase it for only $9.95. They return to their home and sit in their chair with a bright lamp glowing beside them. It doesn't flicker as the candlelight that once illuminated the world did. The cars rush past in the street outside creating hum that with adaptation can be ignored. The reader scans the words across the page. He becomes involved with the story of a man from so long ago, and he smiles. He is moved by the work, for the work will never perish. It will never be dead and gone.
The Return of Martin Guerre written by Natalie Davis gives the audience a rare glimpse into the world of peasant life in sixteenth century France. It also allows a modern day audience a chance to examine and to compare their own identities and questions of self. What makes the story so interesting to modern day viewers and readers is how relevant the story and the people in it are to our own times. This story is about a history of everyday people rather than royalty and generals, history's usual subjects.
The Return of Martin Guerre, written by Natalie Zemon Davis, is the tale of a court case that takes place in sixteenth century France. Martin Guerre is a peasant who deserted his wife and family for many years. While Martin Guerre is gone, a man named Arnaud du Tilh arrives at Martin’s village and claims to be Martin Guerre. Bertrande, who is Guerre’s wife, Guerre’s sisters, and many of the villagers, accepts the imposter. After almost three years of being happily married, Bertrande takes the fraud to court under pressure of Pierre Guerre, her stepfather and Guerre’s brother. Arnaud du Tilh is almost declared innocent, but the real Martin Guerre appears in the courthouse. Throughout this tale, many factors of the peasant life are highlighted. The author gives a very effective and detailed insight to a peasant’s life during the time of Martin Guerre. Davis does a successful job of portraying the peasant lifestyle in sixteenth century France by accentuating the social, cultural, and judicial factors of everyday peasant life.
To summarize the book into a few paragraphs doesn't due it the justice it deserves. The beginning details of the French and Ind...
He arrives back at his town, unused to the total absence of shells. He wonders how the populations can live such civil lives when there are such horrors occurring at the front. Sitting in his room, he attempts to recapture his innocence of youth preceding the war. But he is now of a lost generation, he has been estranged from his previous life and war is now the only thing he can believe in. It has ruined him in an irreversible way and has displayed a side of life which causes a childhood to vanish alongside any ambitions subsequent to the war in a civil life. They entered the war as mere children, yet they rapidly become adults. The only ideas as an adult they know are those of war. They have not experienced adulthood before so they cannot imagine what it will be lie when they return. His incompatibility is shown immediately after he arrives at the station of his home town. ”On the platform I look round; I know no one among all the people hurrying to and fro. A red-cross sister offers me something to drink. I turn away, she smiles at me too foolishly, so obsessed with her own importance: "Just look, I am giving a soldier coffee!"—She calls me "Comrade," but I will have none of it.” He is now aware of what she is
Neglect and painful insecurity tainted both Truman Capote and Perry Smith’s childhoods, resulting in common fears and experiences that Capote translates in his writing of In Cold Blood. Truman Capote lacked a stable childhood upbringing, internalizing a fear of abandonment, which he echoes through Perry Smith. Capote demonstrates an intense emotional attachment with one of the killers, Smith. Throughout the five years in which Capote worked on his project, he thoroughly examined Smith and ultimately befriended him because Smith’s troubled childhood that resembled his own. Capote’s parents, Lillie Mae and Arch, divorced at a young age, leaving Capote in the care of others, and as a result, he spent much of his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama (Truman Capote about the Author). This abandonment by his parents haunted Capote and allowed others to harass him for his effeminate ways. Although he found comfort in his lifelong friend Harper Lee, his relatives and friends in Alabama failed Capote by not providing the love and understanding of a mother and father (Truman Capote Biography). Smith’s youth, although more severe, paralleled Capote’s. In Smith’s childhood, “there was evidence of severe emotional deprivation…This deprivation may have involved prolonged or recurrent absence of one or both parents, a chaotic family life in which the parents were unknown, or an outright rejection of the child by one or both parents with the child being raised by others'" (Capote 191). Smith’s abandonment was due to his mother who “turned out to be a disgraceful drunkard” (Capote 78), and his father who deserted Smith after his separation. Because of his parents’ neglect, orphanages became the primary caretake...
Dr. Manette is imprisoned in the French Bastille for eighteen years by the cruel French government and unknown to him those many years of pain and suffering serve as a great sacrifice in the eyes of the Revolutionists. He is recalled to life from the time he served when he meets Lu...
Ernest Hemmingway is one of the greatest writers of all time. Like many great authors he was influenced by the world in which he lived. The environment that surrounded him influenced Hemmingway. These included such things as serving in the war and living in post war areas where people went to forget about the war. Another influence on his writings was his hobbies. He loved the great outdoors. He spent a lot of his time deep sea fishing and enjoying bull fighting. These influences had an impact on Hemmingway and they were expressed in his writing.
When Antoine is thrust into the public society facing the police and a juvenile reformation center he finds it harder to cope with the new life than his old life where he was constantly yelled at and forgotten. The police put all their attention on him for stealing a typewriter and the juvenile reformation center focuses on changing his behavior. Antoine is no used to the societal norms and while he knows stealing the typewriter is wrong, hence why he tries to return it, he is not accustomed to sharing a cell with various vagrants. This sudden change in his environment forces him to the center where he once again, is unwanted. The center questions why he steals, why he lies, why his dislikes his mother and Antoine’s answers are all easily given. He has always struggled to find a life where he is wanted as his Grandmother didn’t want his mother to have an abortion, but lost the money needed to raise him. Since no one will believe him he lies and because of his mother disliking him, not wanting him having once spoken of getting an abortion, he sees her resentment and reflect it himself, back to her. Every society he has ever been a part of, has found him useless and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, was an American writer. He was the descendent of a long line of Puritans, including the magistrate during the Salem Witch Trials, John Hathorne. The “w” in his name was added to distinguish himself from another writer with the same last name as himself, and also to distance himself from his family’s involvement in the Salem Witch Trials which brought upon a great deal of shame. After his father, died of yellow fever at sea when Hawthorne was but four years old, his mother became overly protective and pushed him toward scholarly things rather than hobbies of any physical danger. His childhood left him fairly timid, intelligent, and bookish, which formed the mold for him to become a writer.
Much of the critical literature regarding All Quiet on the Western Front concerns the binary relationship between the symbols of present and past. For example, critics Barker and Last assert: "This rupture with the past is one of the most dominant themes of Remarque's work, the discontinuity of life, this jolting from one place of existence to another, for which man is completely unprepared" (54). This opposition is represented in Remarque's descriptions of the contrasting environments of present and past.? The present is depicted as a state of unpredictability, uncertainty, and impermanence in which the soldiers merely exist on the edge of life. The narrator, Paul Baumer, imparts the dismal desperation of the front: "Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks--shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus‑scalding, choking, death" (Remarque 283). In contrast, the past is...
How is a masterpiece inspired? In many cases, a creator will see a problem socially and offer their work as a solution. In the case of the 2012 film Hugo by Martin Scorsese, a critically acclaimed and award-winning film, was inspired by Scorsese’s wife Helen. The wife of the genius director implored her husband saying: “Why don’t you make a film our daughter can see for once!” So, in a response to this statement by his better half, Scorsese created Hugo. Hugo is a film dedicated to the life of Georges Méliès, the inventor of special effects and one of the primary pioneers of movies. It follows an orphan named Hugo in a Paris train station, as he works to maintain the clocks and works to fix an automaton to
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1850. He also wrote Twice-Told Tales. Hawthorne also wrote short stories like “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Nathaniel Hawthorne used a great deal of imagery and symbolism in his stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an early American author whose novels and short stories shaped American Literature.
While “The Song of Roland” is, an epic poem dissected by a dichotomy with mirroring to rival that of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables”, a story with a clear bias as to which side is in the right with their actions. Yet once you realize that it is written in such a way to vilify the Muslims, even though had any other culture done this while they would not be portrayed as hero’s they would not be so vilified as the Muslim in the author’s attempt to slander them and feed the flames of the Crusades with their demonization of the Muslims. King Marsile of the Muslim kingdom of Spain at first attempts to parlay with Charlemagne, but upon hearing of the demands of Charlemagne on top of what he, King Marsile had already offered, Count Ganelon did not have
Sophie was a Polish women and a survivor of Auschwitz, a concentration camp established in Germany during the Holocaust in the early 1940s. In the novel we learn about her through her telling of her experiences, for instance, the murder of her husband and her father. We also come to learn of the dreadful decision she was faced with upon entering the concentration camp, where she was instructed to choose which one of her two children would be allowed to live. She chose her son. Later we learn of her short lived experience as a stenographer for a man by the name of Rudolph Hoss, the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. During her time there, Sophie attempted to seduce Hoss in an attempt to have her son transferred to the Lebensborn program so that he may have been raised as a German child. Sophie's attempt was unsuccessful and she was returned back to t...
to the life of the country and age of its production, and true also to