In James Joyce's short story "Clay," fate forces Maria into a nun-like existence and keeps her from realizing her dream of marriage. She seems content with her position on the exterior, but several clues suggest this is not the case. Joyce makes this clear as...
Like character actors or members of an ensemble drama, women are omnipresent in Joyce’s literary corpus. In Dubliners, for example, women are painted and developed within a variety of character framings. The reader is exposed to woman as sister (such as the sisters Moran in...
If cultures are considered unifiable by way of shared stories, it is not inconceivable that cultures may be connected through distinguishable but ultimately similar histories of shame. Whether or not these histories force upon cultures the role of “persecutors” or “victims”, it is more than...
James Joyce’s Dubliners is a fearlessly candid portrayal of his native city, providing his readers a glimpse of a “dear dirty Dublin”, and to his countrymen “one good look at themselves”. Joyce’s collection of stories, virtually chronicling the stages of maturation within a human life,...
The characters whom inhabit Joyce’s world in “Dubliners,” often have, as Harvard Literature Professor Fischer stated in lecture, a “limited way” of thinking about and understanding themselves and the world around them. Such “determinism,” however, operates not on a broad cultural scale, but works in...
Dubliners was published in 1914 and written by James Joyce, who was born in 1882. When applying feminist theory to the Dubliners short stories, one must keep in mind that although feminism had its start in the 19th century, many of the formative feminist essays...
James Joyce’s “Clay” is a remarkable explication of Irish folklore and the societal issues that plague turn-of-the-century Dublin. Following Maria on the night of Halloween, the story combines imagery and symbolism throughout. In S. A. Cowan’s article “Celtic Folklore in ‘Clay’: Maria and the Irish...
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, Doris Lessing crafted fiction that is deeply infused with autobiographical touches, especially from her experiences in Africa. All of her works center around modern themes such as the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial...
When Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus [1], he demonstrated the absurdity of human existence in the indifferent universe with the ridiculous task of pushing a rock up a hill an infinite number of times. Every time Sisyphus pushed the rock to the top...
In Doris Lessing’s short story, “To Room Nineteen” Susan and Matthew Rawling seem to be the perfect couple, until Matthew begins to have affairs and Susan is left alone to her own thoughts and eventually goes mad and kills herself. An underlying theme that Lessing...
In Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child, there are two main characters that are unaware of some, if not most, of the things they do. This unconsciousness the characters experience is what leads to inevitable conflict in the story: the distance that grows between the...
In the unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova, Fyodor Dostoevsky portrays Alexandra’s letter from her former lover S.O. as a parallel for little Netochka and Katya’s relationship/friendship. It is perhaps nclear what a 19th century Russian author intended by this arrangement; nonetheless, this relationship whether romantic or...
In Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago there is an adulterous love affair between Yurii Andreievich Zhivago and Larisa Feodorovna Guishar that is carried on throughout the novel. Although the affair is essential for the movement of the story, it is not the only significant factor in...
Two concepts often appear to be in conflict or contrast at the heart of Gothic fiction; the dualities of good and bad are often critical to the formation of the literature. Within ‘Dr. Faustus’ the battle between good and bad is particularly poignant due to...
Human history is rife with episodes of mass purgings, genocides, and tyrannies, driven by an ideal for purity that transcends all else. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, a dystopian society re-establishes itself in the wake of a radioactive fallout...
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (a novel) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (a film) insist comparison: Ridley Scott’s film is based on the story told by Philip K. Dick’s novel. These works were created about ten years apart from one another...
Sometimes, the Devil—or, at least, one of his most trusted minions—really is in the details. In Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, the most compelling hero is not the eponymous main character. Doctor Faustus, with his puerile egotism and self-absorbed whining, is...
“The Facebook Sonnet” by Sherman Alexie brings up ideas and controversy over social media because it decreases face-to-face communication. Though Facebook allows people to contact old and new friends, it renders away from the traditional social interaction. Online, people are easily connected by one simple...
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a simile as, “An explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or feelings, using the words ‘as’ or ‘like’…” (Baldick 334). In his critically-acclaimed epic poem, Omeros, Derek Walcott uses similes to connect Philoctete’s shin wound to the sea...