Both Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney display an acute understanding of human pathos, which is manifest in their works. This essay peruses Waiting for Godot by Beckett and the poems The Grauballe Man & Strange Fruit by Heaney to illustrate the social awareness contained in them. Social awareness (sometimes also referred to as social consciousness)…
Category: Literature
Holden Caufield’s take on Much Ado About Nothing
I find Much Ado About Nothing quite amusing. Some of the characters in the play sound phony. The high-intensity romance between Claudio and Hero comes across as especially phony to me. After all, most whirlwind romances come crashing to ground one day. The way Claudio and Hero express their love for each other betrays their…
Review of ‘The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot’ by Noami Wolf
For this essay Chapter Five ‘Surveil Ordinary Citizens’ of Noami Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is chosen for analysis. Wolf talks about the dangers of succumbing to internal security measures, which are just a facade for government control over civilian thought and act. Wolf makes salient comparisons between…
Critical Analysis of The Submission by Amy Waldman
The novel chosen for this research exercise is The Submission by Amy Waldman. Waldman has had a successful career with the New York Times before embarking on this debut novel. Given her background, the subject of her work of fiction reflects her work as a journalist, centered on one of the most pressing topical issues…
Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl – A Happy Ending
The Holocaust is undoubtedly the most tragic event in the history of modern human civilization. One has to go back many centuries in time to point a catastrophe of such magnitude – for example, the Black Death that afflicted most of Europe and wiped out nearly a third of its then population. The difference of…
A psychophilosophical perspective on Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce’s short story titled An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is one of the classics of the art form. The story could be read from several different angles, such as the social, cultural, psychological, political, etc. First, the American Civil War of the 1860s provides the political angle. Second is the cultural angle, whereby…
Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”: Clarifying the relationship between oppressors and the oppressed
Even after a hundred years since its publication, Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ continues to be debated, discussed and reinterpreted in various ways. When we look at the context in which the poem was written and published (originally written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations), it becomes clear that Kipling is promoting the…
An analysis of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous letter from Birmingham Jail captures some of the core elements of his public discourse. Although the letter had not been orated in public, it is similar in style to his more popular public speeches and brings out the inspirational and charismatic aspects of King’s personality. The letter was first published…
Feminist perspectives of Song of the Hummingbird & The Book of the City of Ladies
The two literary works in question are stellar illustrations of the dichotomous views of men and women in medieval Catholic Europe. The two works are truly exceptional in that they represent the rare women’s voice in a cultural and intellectual milieu dominated by men. The Book of the City of Ladies (which originally appeared in…
Critical Analysis of God is Alive (1966) by Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen is one of those artists of rare breed who drew creative inspiration from the rapidly changing social and cultural atmosphere after the Second World War. He is also one of the most versatile and accomplished artists, in that his genius is evident in various art forms such as music, poetry and the novel….