Antithesis Essays

  • Antithesis In The Tempest

    1532 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout The Tempest, Shakespeare uses antithesis to represent opposition to express conflict. For example, in act 5, when Ferdinand discovers that his father is not dead, he says “though the seas threaten, they are merciful” (V.i.184). The use of antithesis become very important when the actors speak. Unless the antithesis is played by the actor, the meaning and force behind the speech is lost. The antithesis shape and clarify the thought behind the verse. How do the words

  • Cat's Cradle

    914 Words  | 2 Pages

    the reader aware of them. Show the reader humans being human and make them aware of all the stupid, silly, rude things we do and say everyday. Consider the ignorance of Miss Pefko, who neither finds science the very antithesis of magic nor understands the meaning of the word antithesis, the rude curtness of Marvin Breed and Philip Castle, and the duping of the entire population of the Bokonon religion based not on God, but upon socialism and lies. Cat's Cradle is full of characters that display very

  • Free Essays on Frankenstein: The Gothic Motif of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

    861 Words  | 2 Pages

    principles. The Gothic novel allowed the reader to pass from reason and order of the day to a region born of the supernatural which inspired dread and abounds in death and decay as nature's only true end. In Frankenstein, Shelley is able to create the antithesis of nature from various aspects of nature itself, creating a monster that is born of death and of decay yet enveloped in Rousseau's ideology. "It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishments of my toils. With an anxiety that

  • Analysis of I wondered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth

    1320 Words  | 3 Pages

    inversion on the eleventh line and personification on the last line. On the third stanza, we have assonance, alliteration and repetition of the word “waves” on the first line, and again repetition on the seventeenth line. On the forth stanza, we have antithesis on the twentieth line and a metaphor on the twenty-first line. We also have alliteration on the last line. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Part II of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner The sun now rose upon the right: Out of the carne he

  • Disaster in Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art

    559 Words  | 2 Pages

    Disaster in Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art Art is not life. More, it is a deception, mirroring experience and emotion, but never truly becoming that which it reflects. Art is attractive in that it is a controlled balance between rigid structure, which is too mundane for its purposes, and chaotic discord, which is too feral. Poetry is art. Loss is not. In her villanelle “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop proves this to be so. The poem itself is an emotive crescendo, and while its speaker struggles to hold

  • Oedipus, The King Summary

    545 Words  | 2 Pages

    human thinking and communication along with its ability to change as more information and knowledge is acquired. His primary focus as the story begins and progresses is the growth of Oedipus from an unintelligible and unenlightened mentality to its antithesis. Because the story was one familiar to most of its viewers in its time, there are certain things that they are expected to already know. Among them is the background to the legend. Most generally it was that it was prophesied that Laios and Jocasta

  • Stings By Sylvia Plath Essay

    536 Words  | 2 Pages

    In lines 51-60 of “Stings,” imagery, allusion, and antithesis are employed by the author, Sylvia Plath, to develop her attitude towards men. In this section of “Stings,” Plath uses the “queen bee” as a symbol of herself -- a fiery, angry, vengeful daughter who rises up in spite of the man (her husband Ted) described in lines 38-50. Because much of Plath’s work is confessional poetry, it can be analyzed not only by her use of poetic devices but by her personal history as well. This poem was written

  • Love

    1756 Words  | 4 Pages

    depict love with some sense of perfection, sweetness, and chastity, with the beautiful, infallible blonde as the love object, however both with a sense of unattainability. Shakespeare’s later sonnets, 127-152, dealing with the “dark lady”, the antithesis of the Petrarchan model of love, however, may be a more accurate predecessor, nearly all dealing with the torments and imperfections of love and its source, after its having been attained. Sonnets 141-142 are a pinnacle of the later part of the

  • The Style of Beowulf

    2167 Words  | 5 Pages

    “The Style and Structure of Beowulf” takes note of two important features of the poem’s style – the irony and the tendency to antithesis: This tendency to antithesis, frequently verging on paradox, and the constant play of irony are but stylistic manifestations of those movements of the poet’s thought which shape the very stuff of the poem (Blomfield 58). Antithesis abounds: The poem has a reference to the burning of Heorot included in the description of its first glories, and the prediction

  • Use of Polarization in Goodbye, Mr. Chips

    660 Words  | 2 Pages

    tension in the story; however, he makes greater use of this polarization to develop the character of Chips.  Mr. Chips and Katherine Bridges may be viewed not only as opposites but also as arguments.  Hilton uses thesis in the form of young Chips and antithesis in the form of Katherine Bridges to arrive at synthesis, the personality and character of the mature schoolmaster. Hilton portrays young Chips as lacking in confidence.  During an interview, Chips, a schoolteacher in his early twenties, admits

  • Heart Of Darkness

    920 Words  | 2 Pages

    for selfish and commercial purposes. In "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness ," Achebe accuses Conrad of racism as the essential "heart of darkness." Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality...it is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For

  • Ethics of Psychoanalysis - Lacan’s Antigone and the Ethics of Interpretation

    771 Words  | 2 Pages

    position that transcends the comfortable binary oppositions that structure our daily ethical and social lives. Because her choice of death cannot be understood according to strictly rational norms, she cannot be read as representing some simple antithesis of freedom to tyranny, or the individual to the state (Lacan 1986: 281; Zizek 1992: 77-78). In fact, as she acknowledges, she had chosen death before Creon’s decree against the burial of Polynices, and she defines herself to Ismene as one already

  • Oedipus and Creon in Sophocles' Oedipus the King

    1143 Words  | 3 Pages

    effectively portrays the idea of the classic “flawed hero”. He becomes arrogant and brash. He accuses Creon and Tiresias of treachery. Even worse however, Oedipus goes against the gods. This causes them to punish him severely. Creon is the exact antithesis of Oedipus. He thinks before he acts. Creon is wise and loyal. In Sophocles’ other play, “Antigone”, however, he undergoes a drastic personality change. He becomes more and more like Oedipus. Creon commits acts of hubris, kills and humiliates people

  • Main Street

    523 Words  | 2 Pages

    rejected by the social elite at the Jolly Seventeen club on page 78. Her attempts to open the minds of the Jolly Seventeen to the issues of the lower class, backfires into a discussion of foreign incompetencies and laziness. Her reputation becomes the antithesis of Gopher Prairie social beliefs and structure. After presumably months of social reclusion, Carol is coe...

  • Black is Beautiful in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Astrophil and Stella

    1273 Words  | 3 Pages

    interior lightness that radiates beyond the funereal veil of hair or eyes‹raven-hair or jet-eyes is acceptable only if there is an innate brightness that illuminates the sensuality of the superficial. Most of the poems addressing the light/dark antithesis choose at some point to make an open declaration that embraces or undermines the dichotomy and lays the groundwork for the rest of the poem. The dichotomous lines tend not to be as straightforward as they suggest. "I can love both fair and brown

  • John Dewey's Critique of Socioeconomic Individualism

    4133 Words  | 9 Pages

    potential. In the final chapter of his work The Public and its Problems (PAIP) John Dewey suggests that, despite the insistence of most social theorists, if we regard the so-called individual/social distinction as a gap to be bridged or as an antithesis to be synthesized then our nose for public & democratic reform has been tricked by a central red herring of political modernity: The preliminary to fruitful discussion of social matters is that certain obstacles shall be overcome, obstacles residing

  • A Different Look at Flannery O’Connor

    548 Words  | 2 Pages

    A Different Look at Flannery O’Connor A murdering messiah. A Bible-selling prosthesis thief. A corpse in full Confederate regalia waiting in line a Coca-Cola machine. One of the most haunting qualities about Flannery O'Connor's fiction is the often shocking but always memorable images adding intensity to her stories. Her violent comedy is a fusion of opposite realities--an explosive meeting between contradictory forces. She creates characters from the southern grandmothers, mothers, preachers

  • Thomas Jefferson, the Hypocrite

    528 Words  | 2 Pages

    upon the white man, while he, himself was dependent upon the slaves. Jefferson also was hypocritcal in his acquisition of the Loisiana territory. In Jeffersonian principles, large expansive governments were bad, and small was good. This was a antithesis of that principle. Jefferson knew that the acquisition of the Loisiana territory was beneficial to the welfare of the U.S. According to the constitution, nowhere in the constitution is the acquisition of land a right of the government, Jeffersons'

  • Prejudice and Racism - No Racism in Heart of Darkness

    1109 Words  | 3 Pages

    the main character Charlie Marlow racist, and is Marlow an extension of Conrad's opinion? Achebe says yes to both notions. He points to Marlow's speech about the Thames and the Congo as revealing his view of "Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization," and notes the description of the Africans as "limbs [and] rolling eyes," or, in Conrad's words, "ugly" (315). When they are not incomprehensible "savages" or "brutes," the Africans are farcical: "[The fireman]

  • The Formation of Capitalism in European History

    1352 Words  | 3 Pages

    self-interest. Because property is privately owned, it can be used in whatever manner its owner chooses (Ragan and Thomas, p. 46)." Europe had its capitalistic beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century. However, medieval Europe is characterized by the antithesis of this kind of economy. Who caused the pendulum to swing? Historians, with their tendency to generalize, often lose in the aggregate, or barely touch upon the root reformers of this era. The Northern Italians laid the foundations for the dissolution