Philip Roth

Raymond Chandler’s The High Window introduces Philip Marlowe as a private detective. Mrs. Murdock is in need of a private detective, and she heard Marlowe can get the job done. He is hired and his duty is to find Mrs. Murdock’s daughter-in-law, Linda, without anyone getting arrested. Linda has stolen one of the valuable coins that Mrs. Murdock’s deceased husband collected. Already the suspicion starts when Marlowe senses that Mrs. Murdock is not telling him the entire story; she doesn’t want her…

King Lear is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare sometime in the early 1600s. The play was first performed in front of an audience on December 26, 1606 at Whitehall Palace as part of his company’s Christmas celebrations. According to the introduction of the book “King Lear is Shakespeare’s most perfect embodiment both of his own artistic vision as a “poet” and of the tragic genre he and other early modern dramatists inherited from classical authors” (Ioppolo viii). The story is about a…

Good can be viewed as morally right or righteous while bad can be defined as immoral or malevolent. Human nature isn’t good or bad but daily surroundings in our lives affect our decisions. In the novel Lord of the Flies (1954), some boys get stranded on an island and lose sense of their personal identity and most become complete savages, because of the lack of civilization. On the contrary, in Hamlet, every decision Hamlet decides is not because he is evil or mad but, because of his beliefs or…

The Iraqi prison twenty miles away from Baghdad Abu Ghraib is now infamous for maltreatment. It is unknown how many people the prison held. The vast majority of prisoners were civilians picked up by the military at traffic stops. They were undocumented in the prison or placed under an ambiguous category of "common criminals" or those suspected of "crimes against the coalition". Most were not meant to be in Abu Ghraib, but since many prisoners were undocumented, this went overlooked as did the…

In 1973, Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University conducted a summer experiment showing how humans in would react towards being in closed in a prison environment. He recruited college students and offered to pay them, too many it was more interesting than a summer job. The experiment was supposed to continue for two weeks and the participants would be divided into two group’s containing prisoners and guards. As volunteering prisoners of this experiment they would have to…

Through Phillip Zimbardo 's work, nearly 45 years ago, it was discovered what a person could do to another human being when they have near absolute power. A vast majority of people believe that they would never be able to do all the harmful things that were conducted during the prison experiment; yet I feel, after reading about this experiment and other similar experiments, that everyone is susceptible to the tantalizing taste of power. As an example, just recently I had a spat with my older…

STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT Stanford Prisoner Experiment Dr. Paul Zimbardo was a physiologist at a Stanford University Professor. He took interest in the nature of prisoners and prison guards. He was interested in finding out if the brutality among prison guards was because of their personalities, or if it was a result of the prison environment. He hypothesized that it wasn 't the nature of the guards that made them brutal, it was the roles that they were expected to play that lead to their…

The Three Villains and Their Character in King Lear King Lear is a play written by William Shakespeare in the Renaissance era. Set in ancient Britain, King Lear is about King Lear retiring from his post, and deciding to separate his kingdom into three parts, one for each daughter. In order to swell his ego, Lear puts his daughters through a test of telling him how much they love him. Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia, does not go through the scheme and is disowned. Cordelia leaves to France,…

Women in The Big Sleep As I have mentioned before, this was true in the case of the rise of feminism. Before the turn of the century, “Women arrived, en masse, [to the Western frontier], and the ‘male-dominated homosocial world of gold rush California’ gave way to a ‘settled domestic Victorian discipline’” (Hoefer 49). That ‘Victorian discipline’ gave way in the 1920s to a deviant social norm, exemplified by Carmen and to a lesser extent Vivian. Right before Marlowe expresses how much he…

Sidney’s Virtues, Shakespeare’s Passion Throughout time, literature has tested a variety of roles within society. Much of early English literature was of a highly religious nature, and often used to teach lessons of morality and virtue, chivalric romance, and epic historical sagas. The purpose and role of poetry and other originative writing has been the topic of much controversy since its very beginning. As we have bared witness to in this class, poetry comes in many different forms, and with…