The Yellow Wallpaper is a much acclaimed nineteenth century short story authored by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It first appeared in The New England Magazine in 1892. Upon its publication it proved controversial and provocative due to its bold portrayal of women’s sexuality and psychology. The story is also unique, for it adopts the epistolary style,…
Neil Postman’s Defending the Indefensible
Neil Postman’s essay titled ‘Defending the Indefensible’ appears in his seminal book ‘Conscientious Objections’, in which he critiques aspects of our culture that we’ve taken for granted. The essays in the book address quality of life issues related to advancing technology, new media and declining education standards. Defending the Indefensible pertains itself to one facet…
Politics of Tolerance vis-a-vis Islamic Republic of Iran
The term ‘Politics of tolerance’ is usually not associated with the ‘Islamic Republic of Iran’. Currently, the country is in the stronghold of radical Islamic forces and no tolerance is shown for dissidents, secularists and pluralists. While Iran has historically been a conservative society, the America backed coup-de-tat of 1953 proved to be a turning…
Politics of Turkey vis-a-vis Comparatives politics
The ‘Politics of Turkey’ holds relevance to the subject of comparative politics due to the uniqueness and multi-dimensional composition of the nation’s polity, culture and geography. Moreover, Turkey’s political history has had many notable achievements and as well as some obvious failures, lending itself to a longitudinal comparative case study. Geographically located at the joint…
How true is the claim by some Western scholars that Islam is on a collision course with the West and is inherently inimical to the modern age we live in?
Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations has evoked a broad range of responses from political commentators both in the United States as well as abroad. Huntington asserts that the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 had marked a new beginning in the history of international politics. While prior to the collapse of the Soviet…
Critical Analysis of Colleen Burke’s ‘Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Metaphor of Jungian Psychology’
The article by Colleen Burke titled Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Metaphor of Jungian Psychology is well written, insightful and instructive. The author draws on parallels between the works of two great intellectuals in the form of Joseph Conrad and Carl Gustav Jung. Although Conrad and Jung were not contemporaries, one could see striking…
The Color Purple: Critical Analysis
The novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker is a ground-breaking work in American fiction. The topic of emotional/physical abuse, especially that endured by black American women of earlier generations is not openly spoken about or documented in history books. By bringing focus to this sensitive, yet saddening, experience of black women, the novel attracted…
On Orientalism featuring Edward Said
Orientalism, a concept coined by the renowned American intellectual Edward Said has attracted praise and controversy in equal measure. While remaining Said’s definitive scholarly work, its thesis is a condensation of themes found in his other works such as The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam. To be concise, Orientalism can be defined as the…
Criticism of Efficient Market Hypothesis
“When the price of a stock can be influenced by a “herd” on Wall Street with prices set at the margin by the most emotional person, or the greediest person, or the most depressed person, it is hard to argue that the market always prices rational…in fact market prices are frequently nonsensical.” The Efficient Market…
Media Literacy and Ethics
In Chapter 2 of Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication, “Media Literacy and Ethics,” we are introduced to the concept of media literacy and how to develop it in ourselves. Explain what media literacy is and discuss how media literate you yourself are. How many sources of news and information do you consult…