Metamorphoses

Ajax. The reason towards these mixed emotions falls down to how Odysseus can resemble himself in Ajax, both physically and mentally. “He’s excellence moves me to do it… for I myself will someday reach the state he’s in, as well.” Nonetheless, in Metamorphoses, Ulysses shows a more vicious side of hatred towards Ajax. In great detail, Ulysses, points out to the many “failures” Ajax has committed, but somehow still gets appointed as the greatest “war-hero.”…

gangrene-causing bacteria thrive. They also excrete compounds that are lethal to bacteria they don't happen to swallow. Meanwhile, they ignore live flesh, and in fact, give it a gentle growth-stimulating massage simply by crawling over it. When they metamorphose into flies, they leave without a trace—although in the process, they might upset the hospital staff as they squirm around in a live patient. When sulfa drugs, the first antibiotics, emerged around the time of World War Ⅱ, maggot therapy…

immortals have the ability. Prophecy serves as a guide and a warning to mortals, and prophecy is also an evidence of showing the interaction between mortals and immortals. The important purposes of prophecy are demonstrated in Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? Throughout the Odyssey, many prophecies related to the main plot guide people like Odysseus and Penelope and provides them strength. Prophecies implicate they are doing the right thing and gods…

When I was very young, I remember that my mother held me in her arms, telling me stories about China and her culture. She told me that I was a snake, and I, naive at the time, didn’t understand why. She explained to me that the zodiac system in China, shengxiao, was a running cycle of twelve years. The year that I was born in, 2001, just happened to be the year of the snake. I thought that snakes were scary and ruthless: not a great representation of who I am. A prime example is the…

Apuleius’ The Golden Ass is the only surviving novel of the second century Roman Empire. The Golden Ass can be interpreted to having many themes. In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses; politics, religion, and violence are conjoined, but can be analyzed into their own characteristics. Regardless of the novel being fiction, Apuleius purposely injects stories with meaning to be extracted for different understandings. These stories were written with comedic purposes to emphasize how often the crimes,…

Moving on, Homer’s Odyssey is narrated by Odysseus himself, who speaks of his journey after the Trojan War. The story shifts from the Iliad’s fame and glory theme to the Odyssey’s family and homecoming theme. The Odyssey takes place ten years after the fall of Troy, where the hero Odysseus has yet to return to his home and kingdom of Ithaca. His home is overrun with a large amount of suitors courting his wife Penelope, who has remained loyal to her husband. Held captive at Ogygia, homesick…

Tessellations are arrangements of closed shapes without overlapping and without gaps that completely cover the regular division of a plane. Escher took a special interest in what he called "metamorphoses," in which the shapes change and interact with each other, and at times even broke free of the plane itself. According to Smith, Escher's interest in tessellations began in 1936. Escher had traveled to Spain and viewed the tile patterns in the…

Titian’s earlier paintings of the same name, created as a part of a six-piece series commissioned by King Phillip II of Spain. Titian called the paintings in this series ‘poesie’, or poems, because each illustrates a mythological story inspired by ‘Metamorphoses’ by the Roman poet Ovid. Titian’s other works in this series include Danaë, Perseus and Andromeda, The Rape of Europa, Diana Callisto, and Diana and Actaeon. Through Titian’s artistic method, use of symbolism, and his own personal…

Over the past three years I have been able to study and learn more about Technical Theatre. I have always had a love for the arts, but I originally thought I would go into acting. When I was about nine years old my sister started her endeavor through High School. She got started in the Theatre department and instantly fell in love with the set building and designing. For the next three years I went to every single one of her shows from Aida to Scarlett Pimpernel. I began to discover that I was…

Hypocrisy is rampant in human nature - we say one thing and do another; we believe one thing and renounce it with one event. This condition seems amplified in Dostoevsky’s Underground Man – a man of ‘high conscious’ and intellect. “To be overly conscious,” the Underground Man writes, “is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness” (Dostoevsky 2006, p.6). This extreme state of consciousness is the undoing for the Man; perhaps even the main cause of his paradoxical nature. The unreliability of the…