During the early 1900's miners in southern West Virginia were fighting, literally, for simple rights that every worker deserves. A 40-hour work week, decent pay that wasn't in scrip, and a sense of safety. On May 19 of 1920, members of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency arrived in the town of Matewan to evict union miners from houses owned by the Stone Mountain Coal Company. After catching wind of the detectives’ activities, Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman and a pro-union sheriff named Sid…
reputation or certainty. Most are far too worried about appearing foolish or putting time into something that will not have quick results. Maybe that is part of the reason that the fool of Miguel De Cervantes still touches something in the heart of readers. Don Quixote tells his neighbor farmer Pedro Alonso, “I know…
historical novel genres together worked allowed Scott to consider political and social issues of the day through the medium of the socio-political battles and debates of a previous era—sixty years since. Comparatively, Byron’s poetical piece-de-resistance Don Juan, published periodically, branches across many genres, using their conventions as its own pleasure to generate a shockingly unique work from an amalgamation of many pre-existing genres through the appropriation of their conventions. To…
makes you who you are and what you categorize within the human race. Cervantes also connotes the term “stumbling” (33); when we see the word “stumbling”, we often see it as an action that is when one trips over another, but Cervantes means to connote it as one who is struggling with more internal thoughts. “Bullets” (19) are being personified to be the “eyes” or the superior race, those who are there to “kill slowly” (19), being those who take down the minds of those with colored skin, slowly…
Truth in Fictional Literature One of the themes in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the opposition of truth and imaginary in literature. Various characters within the novel, including the priest, state that literature’s purpose should be to only illuminate the truth and even suggest censorship on books that could rot one’s mind, like Don Quixote’s mind. However, one of the aspects of fictional literature that the priest and others do not understand is that fictional literature does contain…
Have you ever read the spectacular novel Don Quixote? In the novel, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote and his squire share a friendship. Sancho, his squire, always helps Don Quixote. Whether it’s telling Don Quixote not to attack the windmills or even advising him not to worry about the princess, Sancho is always helping Don Quixote. The painting, Young Girls at the Piano by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, two girls are at a piano and one girl is helping the other read the sheet music. The…
one can escape death. Death is probably one of the most feared words in the English language. Death is this undesired uncertainty that threatens our belief that our lives will never end. Its causes most people to panic due to its unpredictability. Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise tells the unusual story of how Jack Gladney, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, and his family illustrate the postmodern ideas of religion, death, and popular culture. The theme of death’s weight over the…
Chat Sumlin A View of Eighteen or So Side Columns “A View of Eighteen Side Columns” by Giovanni Battista Piranesi a beautiful piece of art designed to be printed and bought by patrons. Its visual depiction of what can initially be associated with Roman architecture after the fall of its empire is what initially captivates the viewer into looking deeper. The painting communicates using the placement of seemingly foreign figures amongst ruins to signify the survival of life and human…
The poem ‘Leda and the Swan’ by William Butler Yeats retells a renown story from Greek mythology. According to the myth, Leda, a queen of Sparta, was raped or seduced by Zeus in the guise of a swan. Leda then gave birth to three eggs, one of which did not hatch. The other two gave life to Helen (of Troy) and Pollux, who are assumed to be children of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra, children of Leda’s husband Tyndareus. In the poem, Yeats alludes to the Trojan war and depicts unusually violent…
Today, in Egypt, we are left with the ruins of art and architecture. The pyramids, sphinxes, and tombs were torn apart by the later Egyptian Dynasties and destroyed by looters. Some of the loss of artifacts this have to do with time, earthquakes, and past looters, but the biggest culprits, that many do not think of first, are the early Egyptologists. It was all about getting the biggest and most impressive objects and not really about the importance of the object in context to the area. Because…