ESSAY CEMETERY

"Let me play the Fool. With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."  (Gratiano, 1.1.79-80) In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice , different powers are at play, directing the fate of the characters. While many readers have focused on the thematic tension between Christianity and Judaism, the play's secondary plots involving Lancelot, Gratiano and Nerissa contain elements of the Elizabethan theological debates over Calvinist predestination. Lancelot's consultation with his conscience and "the devil" holds many parallels to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus , a play whose theological content was in Shakespeare's time and still is much debated. A secularized account of the Elizabethan discourse on free will and predestination, randomness, and fate is evident in the text: Antonio feels doomed to sadness, Portia feels tied to her father's will, and Lancelot feels bound to his master, but in fact, the three are able to assert control over their futures...

The list can be found here: http://grammar.about.com/od/advicefromthepros/a/TwainTips.htm . The interpretation is my own. ---- Use good grammar . Is Twain being cheeky? This statement is so obvious it is almost self-evident. Use all of the grammar guides at your disposal when in doubt. Do not automatically accept your word processor's suggestions of grammar (and spelling) suggestion. Refer, instead, to the ubiquitous writing guides online, or even this class's writing tips! Damnation (if you will allow the expression), get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls. . . . There is one thing I can't stand and won't stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality. While I cannot condone Twain's blatant sexism, his point is a good one: refrain from value judgments. Take into consideration only the facts about the text you are analyzing. When writing, base your arguments on the text itself, and any critical ...

Who doesn't wish he could write like Mark Twain? No one is probably the answer, if only for the purpose of getting through our B.A. unscathed. Experts before me have gathered some writing tips from the 19th century master of American wit, and I will now try to explore briefly the wisdom behind some of his recommendations. The tips in Twain's words I copied from a list at about.com .  Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please . This suggestion is very pertinent to us when writing our seminar papers, because of the quantity of information we have to process. First, make sure you understand the argument that your secondary source is making. After you have understood exactly what the author tries to say, you may – elegantly of course – utilize their words in a way that suits your argument. Use the right word, not its second cousin . If you are uncertain whether the word that comes to mind is the exact right word, take some time to use the thesaurus. ...

It is often helpful to pause and remember that words are the most basic building blocks of language. Just as the choice of brick helps determine whether a building will appear rustic or flashy, word choice helps lend preciseness to every text. Paragraph and sentence structure are crucial to the clarity of a text, but attention to shades of meaning contained in the words that you use will help give your paper particular focus. Certain conventions of writing should be followed and broken only in very particular cases. In the third edition of the Bedford Handbook for Writers, Diana Hacker provides several valuable tips regarding word choice. First, she recommends scanning sentences for redundancies. If a sentence contains any repetition, eliminate it. For instance, she proposes the following changes: Mr. Barker still hasn't paid last month's rent yet. >> Mr. Barker still hasn't paid last month's rent. Our fifth patient, in room six, is a mentally ill patient. >...

Some problems are universal to all writers, regardless of background or accomplishment. As Daniel points out, even Woolf and Tolstoy suffered from writer's block. Unfortunately, some issues occur more frequently in the writings of certain types of authors. Ardent watchers of television might form brilliant arguments, without the slightest comprehension of paragraph structure or punctuation; speakers of certain dialects have trouble spelling words phonetically. These tendencies more often than not are easily mitigated by simply reading more. For non-native speakers of a language, however, certain problems seem to persist regardless of the volumes of literature consumed. For me and many other non-native speakers of English whose work I've reviewed, prepositions seem to be the most elusive part of speech. Getting those prepositions right generally takes a lot of conscious hard work. The University of Ottawa website provides us with a useful alphabetized list of prepositions: abou...

The 1973 National Theater film production of The Merchant of Venice packs several surprises, particularly in terms of the heated controversy over Shylock's character. Although sympathetic interpretations of the villain aren't uncommon, director John Sichel manages to keep the play fresh with a few clever cinematic manipulations of Shakespeare's text. The movie occasionally becomes overly sentimental to create pathos for Shylock; however, Sichel's portrayal of Antonio's character, Bassanio's character, and Shylock's relationship with Jessica results in an unusual and generally convincing take on the Shakespearean play. To invoke sympathy for Shylock, Sichel makes Antonio and Shylock into ostensible doppelgangers. In the courtroom scene, Portia cannot tell them apart, implying that the two are similar not only in appearance but in essence too. The two are of similar height, both well into middle age, and in some scenes identically garbed in black suits and a t...

Jesse Prinz argues against empathy. He considers himself a Humean sentimentalist, in the sense that he accepts the Humean assumption of approbation and disapprobation as the bases of moral judgment. That is, Prinz agrees that our assessment of actions as moral or immoral is based on our evaluation of them as praiseworthy or condemnable. But Prinz doesn’t agree with Hume’s thesis that approbation and disapprobation are rooted in empathy. He doesn’t accept that empathy is a precondition of approbation or disapprobation and argues that these are rather founded in emotions such as anger, disgust, and admiration. In J.M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, the title character offers a view of empathy that is useful in considering the implications of empathy as a foundation to morality. I will attempt to expose the weaknesses in Prinz’s dismissal of empathy as a precondition of approbation and disapprobation, focusing on the constitutive and causal preconditions. I will then discuss Coetzee’s...

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go both explore the topic of personhood. In both novels, a group of humanoid beings is brought into existence for a specific purpose; in both novels, these beings are utilized and killed by their creators and are denied the privileges of their human counterparts. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, six androids are pursued by bounty hunter Rick Deckard after they kill their human masters. In Never Let Me Go, the English boarding school students of Hailsham are in fact children who have been raised to serve as organ donors for humans with cancer. In both books, the creative capacities of these beings are examined as evidence of their possible personhood. Although creativity does not serve as sufficient evidence of personhood, it can provoke a reassessment of the status of these beings that is necessary for their ultimate consideration as persons. On its own, artistic capacity is neither a sufficie...

Through the title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello , J.M. Coetzee explores the moral responsibilities of the writer. In Chapter Six of that novel, Elizabeth reads a book about the attempts of German soldiers on Hitler’s life. She is struck by a fictional passage in which a hangman taunts the plotters he is about to execute. Elizabeth finds the passage vivid and terrifying; she feels it is evil. Elizabeth feels some of the evil must have transferred to West through the mere act of imagining and writing the hangman’s words, and likewise to the novel’s readers. “I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on.” In The Sublime and the Beautiful , Edmund Burke defines the sublime. The sublime, he posits, is “the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling” (Ch. 1.7). It is evoked by feelings of pain or danger. Most interestingly, pain that is far enough removed from danger elicits pleasure. ...

Can morals embedded in a work of literature influence our real-life behavior? The question becomes more complex when the work in question is fictional, with imaginary characters navigating imaginary dilemmas. When a work is set in a hypothetical future in a world governed by laws vastly different than our own, its links to our own reality become even further obscured. Philip K. Dick's 1967 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? presents a future in which Earth has been ravaged by nuclear warfare. Earth is populated by humans and androids, artificially constructed biological humanoid beings. Some androids kill their owners for a chance at a life of freedom. These are sought and killed by bounty hunters like protagonist Rick Deckard.  The parallels to our own reality are quite transparent. The maltreatment in the novels of androids mirrors sexist and racist attitudes in recent Western history. Throughout the novel Rick grows to feel empathy toward these beings wi...

Summary Eliot begins the essay by saying that women produce a lot of silly stupid novels which she terms “mind and millinery” novels. These feature a particular type of heroin that is either rich, witty, accomplished, religious, and moral, or all of these except rich. In all these, men play the minor role of worshiping the heroine. The plots too are predictable and the heroine always ultimately comes out on top. Crappy writing is excusable if the authors are underprivileged but they are not – they are upper-class women. They are not good at representing any class of life, including their own. They misrepresent the speech of children and endow their heroines with unrealistic linguistic skills. She gives examples of novels with such failings. Also, novelists tend to have their characters exemplify unrealistic conversational skills. Other times they use complex language to express simple ideas. Often they create frivolous plots and character behavior with high morality. The other kind of ...

Problems with fiction about horror: it can be pleasurable; it doesn’t do justice to the horror (but at least there’s exposure) Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse? How do you compare two evils? Can you? Is there an ethical problem with such a comparison? Having to choose between telling a story and doing good. Elizabeth would choose good; he would choose to tell a story. Basically he is an aestheticist and she is an ethical writer. The answer, as far as she can see, is that she no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself, whereas for West, or at least for West as he was when he wrote the Stauffenberg book, the question does not seem to arise. If she, as she is nowadays, had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather, she thinks, do good. West, she thinks, would rather tell a story, though perhaps she ought to suspend judgement until she hears it from his own li...