Terra incognita

In Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Terra Incognita,” Vallière narrates his time in the jungle before his death. The story raises the question of how much reality is affected by imagination, and conversely how imagination is affected by reality. The title itself translates to mean “unknown land,” and this land is where Vallière finds himself in before his death. One cannot determine whether or not Vallière’s narrative was real or imaginative because the jungle was his own reality up until the moment of his death. “Terra Incognita” creates a metaphor of life and death as unknown lands that can be interpreted through different perceptions of reality and imagination. In the story Vallière relays an account of his trek through the jungle as it happens; but a few details in his story present the question of whether his account is simply of his imagination. Both viewpoints could be argued, but even in Vallière’s final moments he…

In both ancient and modern narratives, recognition scenes have proven to be some of the most emotionally charged moments in a story. Choephori is no exception, as siblings Electra and Orestes’ recognition of each other after a long separation and multiple familial tragedies stirs up a strong emotional reaction in the audience. This popular narrative device has persisted over time, and is still present in modern fiction. The Spanish film La Piel que Habito closes with a powerful recognition…

In Testaments Betrayed Milan Kundera describes a situation during the Prague Spring where someone’s private life is intermixed with their public life. This person was Jan Prochazka, who was a major figure during the Prague Spring. Prochazka commonly had conversations with a opposition figure, Professor Vaclav Cemy and their conversations were recorded and broadcasted throughout several radio stations. Milan Kundera depicts this as a horrid act and explains how people, no matter who they are, act…

Mystery, insecurities, and the feeling of loneliness. These two short stories include the two points of loss of identity and loss of innocence, with the slight combination of the three traits listed above, all five examples are consistent throughout these two short stories. Loss of innocence and mental alienation, the feeling of being alone in the short story “The Road out of Eden”, is how both examples come together to form the theme alienation. They’re able to tell us how the main character…

He could see the injustice the indigenous people were facing. He was very passionate about this issue and wanted the Aboriginal people to be recognised for their land rights. He was particularly fighting for the land rights of the Merriam people which are a group of people in the Torre Strait Islands who share the same beliefs and language and is where Eddie Mabo grew up. The existing law at the time of Eddie Mabos beginning campaign was based on the principal of terra nullius meaning empty…

into an island. The island of Bora Bora was not always an island inhabited by humans. Long ago, around 4000 B.C. humans from southeast asia made there way to the Tahiti islands. These ancient people became the first human inhabitants of the islands of the French Polynesia. Later on around 1500, during the golden age of European sailing, the island of Bora Bora was discovered by Europeans. The first of these European sailors to spot the French Polynesia was Magellan, who saw the atoll of…

The first record of Europeans sailing into Australian waters was noted in 1606. They were said to be observing the Terra Australis Incognita, which is translated to the unknown southern land .The first ship, known as Duyfken, to sail to this land was led by captain Willem Janzoon, a Dutch navigator and colonial governor. From 1606 to 1770, 54 European ships sailed to South Australia. Many of those ships came from Dutch East Indies Company (“Australian Stories”). In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook,…

extra food, which eventually enabled them to start a new way of life: settling down in more stable social groups. DNA Breakthroughs Enter the geneticists, who have long wondered if they could help solve the riddle of agriculture’s origins with DNA from human remains discovered in places like Ain Ghazal. Ancient genetic material can survive in skeletons for thousands of years, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of years. Scientists have been able to reconstruct entire genomes of ancient…

precipitation, photochemical ‘smog’ and climate warming” as a result (Crutzen, 23). The problem then, becomes that the industrialized world is acting upon a significant amount of energy that could be reduced. Having immense populations, it would be unwise to simply unplug New York City or Los Angeles, but it would be necessary to determine how much longer Americans want to live in the lap of luxury until their children inherit an apocalyptic Earth with severe weather effects from the atmosphere.…

voluntarily, however, most of the time it was forced upon the natives. Religion and evangelization practices had the most profound effects on the indigenous natives of the New World. This paper will analyze and discuss the effects of the evangelization practices of the indigenous people of the New World and the problems it erupted. In 1493, a year after Christopher Columbus arrived in Hispaniola, Pope Alexander VI’s bull, gave Spain the “Islands and firm land” located in the “western part of…