The Past, Present, and Future in The Road
by Keeley Seale
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 Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the past plays a contrasting role to the role it plays in PTSD; the past is something to desire, something to strive for, something that awaits after death.
In His Time: How Ernest Hemingway Defines and Promotes Masculinity in In Our Time.
by Henry Chung
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. However, this culturally-ingrained conjecture does not accurately reflect Hemingway’s intentions in writing In Our Time.
Liberty in Leviathan
by Chenyang Li
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
by Benjamin Johnstone
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. This essay will explore these uses of political authority beginning with the works of Sophocles, Plato, Hobbes, Hemingway, and Marx.
Enlightenment for Dummies: The Simple Guide to ‘Finding Yourself’ by Friedrich Nietzsche
by Taylor McClement
“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?” 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”
by Fisher Kliner
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. Over the course of the stories, Vanessa is consistently alone in her naivety and innocence, surrounded by an adult world which confounds her…
