Category: Essays

August 27, 1956 Engl 331 Carefully constructed, The Wedding Banquet tells a tale of love revolving around sexes, cultures and even time. There are two paralleling love stories within the screenplay. The first one is between Wai Tung and his…

April 13, 1996 Engl 311 Set in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Cynthia Kadohata’s novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love uses symbolism in a way that forces the reader to see beneath the surface of the prose. When the…

September 24, 1996 Engl 305 Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Much Ado About Nothing and Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing incorporate the illusion of masks to illustrate the juxtaposition of the characters’ inner and outer feelings towards one another.…

November 17, 1996 Engl 305 In order to prove his existence, Renee Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” This same logic can be applied to rationalizing the existence of the faeries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The reality within…

October 21, 1995 Engl 302 James Joyce’s “A Little Cloud,” depicts the world through the eyes of an Irish working-class man. It is a story about one man’s failure to achieve his dreams and aspirations. The narration and setting work…

September 28, 1995 Engl 302 The first thing the reader notices in Isak Dinesen’s story is the title. “The Ring,” is exactly that, an allegory based around a wedding band and what it represents: marriage, magic, or the object itself.…

December 12, 1995 E 302 Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, transcends the realm between Gothic horror and scientific fact. Its “ultimate message concerning man’s relationship to the acquisition of knowledge and things brought into being out of that knowledge” is a…

August 27, 1956 E160 Since the beginning of written history, man has been obsessed with the ending of the world. The Hebrew and Christian apocalypse myths, or The Book of Revelation and The Book of Daniel, are two of the…

March 9, 1997 Anth 350 Question One Languages become related when they develop near one another and have common traits in their constructions. Languages that are related share common traits in sound, grammatical structure, and spelling– and in most cases,…

April 18, 1997 Anthro 303 In humanity’s search for knowledge there are three areas in which we have yet to agree within the anthropological field of study. These areas being the concepts of religion, magic, and myth. There are so…