This is my current controlling idea of my essay on the poem "On Pleasure": "The speaker challenges the idea of pleasure in the minds of the audience, and argues that pleasure is an unavoidable part of life; only by accepting this, and giving and receiving pleasure, can one enjoy life to...

There are lots of literary works concerning the failure of the American Dream. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Miller's Death of a Salesman, to name but a few. Now the question is: Is there any literary work taking a positive view on the fulfillment of the American ...

Unfortunately, my previous question was regarded as off-topic. But, I'm not asking for recommendations! While there are many examples of an unfulfilled, shattered American Dream among the literary works, there might be some with a positive attitude toward American Dream. For example, everyone agr...

I recently finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Among the criticisms I felt fair to level at it was that Shadow, the central protagonist, is very much a blank slate. We rarely get any insight to his inner thought processes, and his speech and actions don't seem to imbue him with much character ...

We currently have both a style tag and a language tag. The language tag currently has one question, namely about whether the language used by a 15-year old character intentionally represent the language of a 15-year old (Kafka in Kafka on the Shore). The style tag currently has four questions...

In the beginning of the book, when Eddie Willars confronted Jim Taggart about the poor condition of the Rio Norte Line, they had the following exchange: "Jim, what are you saying? Does it matter that no one blames us - when the road is falling apart?" James Taggart smiled; it was a thin smi...

The site's current description on Area 51 says, Q&A site for scholars and enthusiasts of literature This is a broad description, but just to be sure, I would like to know whether questions about teaching literature would be on topic. I have not seen any questions about this so far and I thi...

Towards the beginning of Atlas Shrugged, Owen Kellogg was described as following: [Dagney Taggart] knew that the superintendent of the Ohio Division was no good and that he was a friend of James Taggart. She had not insisted on throwing him out long ago only because she had no better man to p...

William Shakespeare wrote around 40 plays (depending on how the Shakespeare canon is defined). Except for some of his history plays (Henry IV, Henry VI), Shakespeare did not write any continuations or sequels to any of his own plays. Marlowe, by contrast, wrote Tamburlaine the Great as a two-part...