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Watchmen: Impediments, Failures, and Splits in Understanding

Watchmen: Impediments, Failures, and Splits in Understanding

In Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, both Ozymandias and Rorschach think they have found the truth. Ozymandias finds truth in intellectual illumination, like the Gnostic “Eugnostos,” who “is all mind, thought and reflecting, considering, rationality and power” (“Eugnostos the Blessed”).

The Past, Present, and Future in The Road

The Past, Present, and Future in The Road

The past can be a dangerous thing. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, affects one’s future in innumerable ways, molding itself into fear and sadness, leaving one trapped at the bottom of the past’s well, the rope unreachable.

In His Time: How Ernest Hemingway Defines and Promotes Masculinity in In Our Time.

In His Time: How Ernest Hemingway Defines and Promotes Masculinity in In Our Time.

In 1943, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “If you leave a woman, you ought to shoot her” (qtd. In Baker 554). This quote seemingly encapsulates Hemingway’s misogynistic attitude towards women, reinforcing his age-old image as a hyper-masculine, macho man.

Liberty in Leviathan

Liberty in Leviathan

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes presents a world in which people make contracts with each other to create a sovereign, who has absolute authority over them and is responsible for their lives. This paper argues that although Hobbes advocates for authoritarian government, parts of his argument still tilt towards liberty.

Just Ideas? An analysis of the use of political authority to bring about justice in the world

Just Ideas? An analysis of the use of political authority to bring about justice in the world

While writers have long pondered what it means to lead a just life, some of the thinkers encountered in our course have argued for a preferred view of justice as a realizable ideal, and used arguments about political authority to bring this conception of justice into being.

Enlightenment for Dummies: The Simple Guide to ‘Finding Yourself’ by Friedrich Nietzsche

Enlightenment for Dummies: The Simple Guide to ‘Finding Yourself’ by Friedrich Nietzsche

“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason. We have never sought ourselves– how then should it happen that we find ourselves one day?” (GM, Preface, p.1)This is the very first idea presented by Friedrich Nietzsche in his collection of essays, On the Genealogy of Morality.

The Bear, the Bird, and the Irishman: An Examination of the  Loss of Innocence in “The Sound of Singing”

The Bear, the Bird, and the Irishman: An Examination of the Loss of Innocence in “The Sound of Singing”

More than anything else, A Bird in the House is a story of entropy and change. Whether the theme of entropy is visible in Vanessa’s interactions with her elderly family members or in the entry and exiting of characters, it is most constant in Vanessa’s loss of innocence.

The American Nightmare: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

The American Nightmare: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

“I prevented myself as much as possible from making the obvious connection between the crumbling of the world around me and the impending destruction of my personal American dream” (Hamid 93). This is a quotation from Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which tells the story of Changez, a young Pakistani man who goes to America for university and then stays for a job at a valuation firm.

Watchmen and The Odyssey on the Nature of Violence

Watchmen and The Odyssey on the Nature of Violence

by Carter Dungate   No one would deny that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and Homer’s The Odyssey are vastly different works: with Watchmen being a graphic novel and The Odyssey being an epic poem composed nearly three thousand years ago, differences in genre and in historical or cultural context would be evident even […]

“A Lightning Burst of Knowingness”: What Chris Reveals About the Connor-MacLeod Family in A Bird in the House

“A Lightning Burst of Knowingness”: What Chris Reveals About the Connor-MacLeod Family in A Bird in the House

In Margaret Laurence’s collection of stories, A Bird in the House, the story “Horses of the Night” begins with Vanessa’s cousin Chris coming to stay at the Brick House while he attends high school in Manawaka.