All Entries in the "Scholarly Essays" Category

Secular Saviors: Guidance from Religion to Humanism in Ilium–Heather Castille

         In Dan Simmons’s Ilium, humans on Earth are post-literate, sustained by technology that they neither understand nor question. The “old-style” humans live on Earth, confident that their world has always been the way they know it and believing in the post-humans as godlike, omnipotent controllers of the humans’ fate. They also believe that after [...]

Exploring the Intersections of Gender, Judaism, and Christianity in Dan Simmons’ Ilium–Rachel Winchel

Very little scholarship in science fiction is dedicated to recent novels, especially concerning the roles of the female characters and even less is dedicated to analyzing Jewish female characters.  Ilium is a unique novel that challenges traditional science fiction that depicts Jewish people as being separate or unimportant to the plot of the novel, or as Susan [...]

Wordsworth’s Development of the Meaningful Connection between Man’s Spirituality and Nature in “Tintern Abbey” and “Immortality Ode”–Kayla Walthall

Wordsworth begins “Tintern Abbey” with the tranquil scene of nature as he is revisiting this place after “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/Of five long winters” (1-2). This place, a place that represents “interchange between man and nature,” once brought him comfort before he was forced to remain in England [...]

The ‘Binding Briars’ of the Church: William Blake’s Projection of a Parasitic Priesthood Dependent on the Repressed Desires of Man–Anna Wilkinson

The relationship between repressed desire and the creation of institution is explored throughout the works of Michel Foucault. In his book The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that once a strict system of laws or rules is enacted within an institution, this system draws out the desires and “peculiarities over which it kept watch” (1664). [...]

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet: The Use of the Supernatural and Comedy in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream–Derek Newman

Throughout his career, William Shakespeare wrote many literary masterpieces: tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances. When comparing Shakespeare’s plays, it is ironic to discover that his tragedy Hamlet has much in common with his romantic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare wrote, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are [...]

The Superiority of Barber’s Plea for a Democratic Republic in Non-Elite America–Susan Grafton

In William A. Henry III’s “In Defense of Elitism” and Benjamin R. Barber’s “America Skips School,” both authors agree that most students attend institutions of higher education in an attempt to improve their opportunity to earn a more substantial income in the future and that this is contributing to the decay of the higher education [...]

The Barn–Cara Stevenson

She started out slowly but within half of a mile she had picked up her speed. God, she loved the way running made her feel; she loved the stretch in her muscles, the pull in her chest. Pushing herself faster she tried to gain some control over her whirling thoughts; she tried to let the [...]

RE: For Whom Does the Bell Toll?–John Bourgeois

Dear Train Conductor,
I am a student of English at the local university and, as such, have the pleasure of attending a specific class in a particular room whose view provides me with the arboreal majesty (greens bursting forth, growing rich and full until that lusciousness of their palette consumes the reckless foliage and explodes [...]

Waiting for an Exam–Fadia Mereani

An office modernly furnished with a bookshelf full of heavy thick books and volumes on the left of the stage next to the door leading to the bathroom and a desk and a chair on the other side next to the door leading to the bedroom. On the desk, there are a pile of books, [...]

Her South: Connecting Visions of John Kennedy Toole and Flannery O’Connor–Lauren Coleman

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” –Socrates
“Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.” –Christian Morgenstern

It is no small matter that much of the observable world has been formed out of turmoil. Just as pearls owe their existence to irritants that grind against soft tissue, so fiction is [...]