Oscar Wilde

It remains the charge most frequently leveled against science fiction and fantasy: that these genres offer nothing but an irresponsible escapism, a way for their readers to avoid the grim truths of the real world. It is the same criticism against which J.R.R. Tolkien defended genre fiction in his 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories," but also the one that most relentlessly persists in the sphere of literary studies. Even the harshest of critics, however, would hesitate to describe Guillermo del Toro's…

Sublime Industry and Risky Aesthetics: A Comparison of Edward Burtynsky’s OIL and Karen Solie’s “Bitumen” Karen Solie’s poem “Bitumen” (2015) and Edward Burtynsky’s photography collection OIL (2009) both question the adequacy of sublime aesthetics as a representational mode for depicting the effects of industry. I will explore how the oil industry is represented as sublime in Burtynsky’s OIL and the critical and ironic distance this representation requires. Informing this will be historical…

The Golden Cage The personal journey of Oscar begins during his high school days. It was 2009 and was Oscar’s second year of being here in America; The land of opportunity. Oscar was forced to learn English and took him three years to defend himself by the language barriers. Before any of that art was something that Oscar was always been good at. His high school saw that in him and put him on a lot of art classes. This was the right choice made by his counselor. Oscar’s art teacher Virginia…

The 19th century is a period of time where Oscar Wilde struggles to express sexuality. Unlike most men, he is not the average man that feels an attraction towards women. Instead, he is attracted to men. He lives in a society where he is not able to freely express himself as an individual. He is rejected by the moral beliefs that men are only attracted to, and should be in a relationship with, a woman. However, Wilde disagrees with that. He has a contrary view on how society should revolve around…

portrait intensely, growing “more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul [...] The curiosity about life which Lord Henry [...] first stirred in him [...] seemed to increase with gratification” (Wilde 112). Dorian is aware of how he is no longer the innocent man he once was, and that his soul is possessed by the intense want to constantly remain beautiful. In Robert Browning’s poem, “A Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”, a…

Miss Julie is naturalistic play written by August Strindberg in 1888. A naturalistic piece is a more extreme form of realism that is defined as “An avant-garde movement, which flourished between 1880 and 1914, that portrayed heredity and environmental factors as the primary causes of human behavior through the accurate rendition of external realities,” explains editor Tobin Nellhaus. Miss Julie contains these naturalistic elements as it takes place in real time and focuses heavily on survival of…

Known as the ‘Russian Byron’, Mikhail Lermontov is revered for his radical interpretation of the Romantic antihero in A Hero of Our Time. He sought to fashion “a portrait built up from the vices of our whole generation” (Lermontov, preface), to create a character who would embody the spirit of the contemporary Russian man. In what would be his only prose work, Lermontov employs traits commonly associated with the Byronic hero as the basis for the character of his protagonist, Pechorin, such as…

Introduction Morality is one who conforms and follows the moral standards. The main protagonist named Jean-Batiste Grenouille in the novel Patrick Süskind, Perfume: the story of a murderer, defies such standards. The character is a man obsessed with scent and strives to acquire what he identifies as the “master scent”. In order to obtain such scent Grenouille commences murderous behavior upon young victims, specifically virgin girls as he is lured by the purity in their aroma. Set in 18th…

"Attractiveness is only skin profound," or so individuals say. Assuming this is the case, at that point the nearness of a skin pigmentation ought not influence how its proprietor is seen, to no end the individual did justified the stamp: he or she coincidentally was conceived with this characteristic flaw, representative of human's unique sin. Be that as it may, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark," a little stamp on a lady's face turns into the fixation of her better half, who demands…

Both Dorian Gray and the Narrator of Fight Club when introduced do not have very strong personalities even though they are considered main characters. Dorian Gray is a young, high class individual who follows England laws and is seen as a very innocent and morally good individual until he realizes he is beautiful. The Narrator of Fight Club is a middle class, law abiding citizen who realizes his life is very dull and desires for a different life altogether. Both characters make a form of wish…