Henri Bergson

“A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.” In comedy, the only characteristic shared between comedies is their want to make people laugh, and it can be difficult to pull off such a seemingly simple task. As defined by the New Oxford…

The Industrial Revolution was a pivotal point in the history of our nation; it brought about change and it led to the development of machinery that transformed the nation. Parts of the world began to thrive and invited the change; other parts never had the chance to change. As more machinery was developed, common industries were greatly affected which impacted the working class. This caused many people to find new jobs; some traveled into the Yukon territory in search of gold . During this time…

Paper Is Tougher Than It Appears American gothic literature was an unusual and specific genre addressing the social dilemmas of the time through poetry, haunting tales and insane stories. It is the strangeness within the familiar and the familiar within the strange. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an accomplished American author who wrote on the subjects of social reform, feminism and oppression in the late nineteen hundreds, the American gothic era. Gilman’s most debated work is undoubtedly “The…

The relationship between Vitalism, and the opposing Mechanism in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries was complex, and often fraught with the confounding effects of religion. Depending on the social and historical context, vitalism has either been radically opposed to accepted Christian teachings, or a very quaint, and somewhat religious pseudo-scientific explanation for biological phenomena. In some sense, it seems as though the very concept of vitalism is analogous to the belief in…

Emile Durkheim’s Ideas on Suicide in the Modern World “Suicides, in short, are simply an exaggerated form of common practices,” once said by David Emile Durkheim, a great sociologist, social psychologist, and even philosopher. Emile Durkheim began his work with suicide in 1897 with a warning against “notiones vulgates, together with an insistence that our first task… must be to determine the order of facts to be studied under the name of suicide (Robert Jones)”. Though Emile Durkheim would…

Patnaik Vikram Professor Wood LMC 3102 20 October 2014 Lucretius vs Sophocles: Contrasting theories for same problem Since ancient times, supernatural ideologies have been in constant clash with scientific ideologies to provide explanations for the creation of mankind and their behavior. While on one hand there exist theories where the earth and man were created in six days by God and the first woman was made from Adam’s rib, on the other hand science explains the creation of earth and mankind…

Four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and American Poet Robert Frost, is vastly admired for his realistic depictions of natural life and his use of American colloquial speech in his poetry. While most poets tend to disguise themselves in their stories, Frost uses literary elements such as structure, diction and most of all symbolism to portray themes strictly relating to his own personal life. Referred to by many as the greatest poet of the twentieth century, Frost was undoubtedly inspired by the…

Are the benefits of synthetic biology significant? Pros: Synthetic biology holds major benefits for humanity and promises much. It promises better drugs, less thirsty crops, greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. Synthetic biology can help fight climate change and pollution. It has the potential to reduce the dependence on oil and to address climate change. Developed microbes would produce oil, giving a renewable fuel that could be used interchangeably with gasoline without…