Freudian Script: Silent Sex, Repressed Requests, and the Abetting Audience in Mulholland Drive
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive prods the viewer with an analogous query: if no one views a performance, does the story still go on?
Mud Money: An Exploration of Knowledge
This essay will argue that since money is an obstacle as demonstrated in Plato’s Republic and Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, people must transcend material dependence to seek intellectual truth effectively.
“Stranger on the Shore”: The Relationship Between Host and Guest in Homer’s The Odyssey and Melville’s Typee
The relationship between ‘the stranger’ and a host society is one that has fascinated readers throughout history, recurring across a variety of genres and offering unique insights into the culture of both host and guest. These relationships […]
Nietzsche on Christianity: The Necessary Sickness
In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche places a lot of emphasis on the dangers of religion. (…) In the Genealogy, Christianity is initially portrayed as an extension of ressentiment, [….]
Return to Eden? Melville on Christian Transgression in Polynesia
In his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical work, Herman Melville (1819–1891) critiques this colonial mission by way of calling into question the ostensible advantages of this burgeoning ‘enlightenment.’
When Fiction Becomes Reality: Hypocrisy, Appropriation and Misogyny In and Beyond ‘Brecht’s’ Life of Galileo
Originally entitled: “I’ll Be Your Eyes: Virginia as Men’s Vision in Brecht’s Life of Galileo,” this capstone was intended to be a sharpened deep dive into Brecht’s hypocritically portraying a misogynistic Galileo […]
Bonds Beyond Human Relationships: Horses, Place, and Identity in All the Pretty Horses
In Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the relationship between humans and non-human beings, specifically horses, demonstrates a meaningful, reciprocal connection that is more intimate than many human relationships in the novel.
The Ascetic Disease: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity in On the Genealogy of Morality
This essay will evaluate the methods through which Nietzsche denounces Christianity, specifically in his portrayal of the ascetic ideal, slave morality, and ressentiment, and address how what he acknowledges as “positive” aspects of Christianity [….]
Hold Your Horses!: Examining the Passage of Time in All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
As the clocks tick faster and John Grady is reminded of events from his past, it becomes clear that the further he is from achieving his dreams, the quicker time moves in the story, ultimately indicating his lost chances in life.
Comfortably Numb: Nietzschean Morality, Suffering, and Anesthetization in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov’s struggle in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, when read through the framework of slave morality, dramatizes the process through which suffering is internalized, moralized, and given meaning.