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...

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...

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...

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...

Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room is set in post-industrialization, post-urbanization England. Throughout the novel, Jacob lives in cities, relocating from Scarborough to Cambridge University to London. Although the premise of Jacob’s Room is realistic, descriptions of these cities are often accompanied by mystical and supernatural imagery. Through metaphors of light and darkness, Woolf explores the role of the city and of education in man’s increasing estrangement from nature. In spite of the city’s bright appeal, Woolf exposes intellectual urban life as an ineffective barrier against the unavoidable chaos of existence and the inescapable mortality of man. Chapter Three sees Jacob leaving his mother and his home in Scarborough to attend university at Cambridge. His first impressions of Cambridge are of the brightness of its cityscape. “They say the sky is the same everywhere... But above Cambridge--anyhow above the roof of King's College Chapel--there is a difference. Out a...

Chapter Six of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair opens with a direct address to the serial novel's readers. "I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one", the narrator apologizes, "and must beg the good-natured reader to remember that we are only discoursing at present about a stockbroker's family in Russell Square" (60). In an era in which the extent of the readership determined a serial novel's continued existence, the reader-writer relationship was of paramount importance. Thackeray appeases his readers, defends his artistic choices, and refutes their implied concerns about his craft. By examining the dialogue into which Thackeray enters with his readers in the context of the novel, we can gain insight into the role of the reader in the Victorian serial, and the manner in which Thackeray harnesses the reader-writer relationship to engage the readers and enhance the effectiveness of his social critique.  The dependence of the serial...

Mary Hays's novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney features correspondence between its protagonist, Emma, and other characters in the novel's fictional world. Tension ensues between the form of the novel and its content: even though the epistolary genre is inherently concerned with communication between several parties, Memoirs of Emma Courtney does not seem to provide insight into the minds of multiple characters. Hays's self-proclaimed intent in writing the narrative, as detailed in the preface to the book, is "attention to the phenomena of the human mind". However, instead of exploring several characters, the novel repeatedly focuses on a solitary individual – Emma Courtney. Attention to sentence structure, keywords, and thematic focus provides insight into the manner in which Hays harnesses the epistolary genre to explore the psychology of one single character. The novel does not adhere to the epistolary genre throughout. Aside from letters from Emma to various charac...

In her 1923 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf places characterization at the center of the novelist’s concerns. For Woolf, the novelist is defined primarily by his or her obsession with capturing character, a task she deems nearly impossible. “Few catch the phantom [of character]; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair” (21). Despite this ostensible focus on characterization, Woolf has been criticized for creating shallow, incomplete characters in her works. Indeed, in her novel, Jacob’s Room, published in 1922, remarkably little attention is given to the title character. Only a vague outline is provided of the progression of Jacob Flanders from early childhood to his death, and key transitional moments in Jacob’s life are elided from the narrative. Whereas the title character is often absent from the action and narration of Jacob’s Room, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children protagonist Saleem Sinai is omnipresent throughout that narrat...