James T. Kirk

Shakespeare, through his characters in King Lear, offers an ambiguous study on the theme of nature. Various definitions can be applied on the term “nature,” but the three most prominent are the structure of society, the cosmic order , or faith, and the innate impulses all humans inhabit. Lear begins his monologue by announcing that, “O, reason not the need: our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous…” (Shakespeare 2.4 264-265) Lear was recently denied housing by Goneril and…

Poems are often catalysed by personal experiences, expressing a poet’s concerns about life and encouraging audiences to embrace their unique perspective. T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est, are examples of modernist poetry, through which both poets aim to reflect the sense of disillusionment and impotence they experienced as the horrors of World War 1 mounted. Owen firmly rejects the idea of heroism in war that was created by Romanticist…

Frederick Douglass and the Power of Knowledge Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was an influential African-American writer, news paper editor, orator, civil rights activists, and diplomat. He was born into slavery and had a deprived and tragic childhood, which he has described in his Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Once he escaped the suffocating chains of slavery he proved himself an intelligent and powerful figure, and become the symbol of the abolitionist movement, which was blooming in the…

Eliot’s The Waste Land is often a confusing and difficult poem to understand. However, in terms of its style and content, it is clear that the poem speaks about the decay of the periods culture. The Waste Land is a eulogy to the decaying society of modern Europe post-World War One. Eliot’s use of fragmentation made him infamous in the literary world; and it is through this use of fragmentation that we the learned find it very daunting to appreciate. The poem consists of five sections, all of…

The seafarer is an old Anglo Saxon poem. This poem is told through the perspective of a man who is constantly traveling. The speaker seems to be in despair whenever he travels because he’d rather find a place for himself. He then goes on tangent about Fate and Faith. The tone of this poem is somber. His imagery is used to express his loneliness. For example, he foretells his experience by, “How the sea took me, swept me back, and forth in sorrow and fear and pain, showed me suffering in a…

Based on Booker T. Washington’s ideologies and leadership style one can note the correlation between the visions for Tuskegee Institute and the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (S.T.E.M.) programs currently offered in most learning institutions of today. One key factor that has been denoted in response to the National Defenses Act of 1958, which supported a transition from humanistic education in the late 1800’s to scientific learning outcomes during the nineteenth and twentieth…

The 2016 election was a result of the large division in our nation in which people of certain races, financial status, gender, and ethnicity were looked down upon by other members of society. Prejudgment of others ran rampant throughout our nation after citizens began to turn against others, causing a deep barrier to be formed. The formation of this barrier was a result of the tendencies of people to be afraid of others that are depicted as being different from themselves, either socially,…

Yellow Fog and Indecision The term “modernism” refers to a movement which started in the late 1800s, following immediately after World War I, and was prominent past World War II into the late 1940s, when postmodernism began to take hold. The modernist movement included poetry, fiction, drama, painting, and music. As with any movement, it’s time table of influence is gradual and hard to pinpoint. In any case, the true birth of modernism in poetry is frequently noted as starting during T.S.…

Entry 1: Today we discussed the public sphere. In summary, we discussed the emergence of the “mass audience”, the low/high culture binary, and determining where the idea of “the public” comes from. We have a conception of the public sphere from the bourgeois class. The set ideal is that of a private (civil society) and the public (state-mediates crises). This public sphere is formed and operated through the norms of publicity. There are five norms that make up publicity: status as person is…

“Text means tissue” Roland Barthes once stated, emphasizing that a text should not be viewed as a finished product “behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth)” but rather as a fluid entity which “is worked out in a perpetual interweaving” (64). Thus, a text does not hide one single truth, waiting to be discovered, but – in perpetual interaction with its readers – creates or at least permits a multiplicity of meanings. Symptomatic of the complexity of meanings woven into a single…