The character Ahab's pursuit for Moby Dick is similar to society's pursuit for Hester's as a symbol of their passion for (and against) sinfulness. For Ahab, Moby Dick is a desire that has turned into a passion because its elusiveness; his not being able to capture the great whale became a source of frustration from him. Passion eventually develops as a result, where Ahab does not care anymore whether he lives or not, just as long as he lives long enough to capture Moby Dick. As Ahab tells Starbuck, his pursuit for Moby Dick is guided by his own passion, claiming that he is "Fates' lieutenant." Poe in the Imp of the Perverse is perhaps the perfect example of Hawthorne's and Melville's interpretation of the "great blackness" embedded within works of literature. In Imp, the narrator talks about his passion for secrecy, death, and insanity, forbidden concepts and behavior that society would not talk about...
What makes death and insanity objects of humanity's passion are, like Melville's Moby Dick and Hawthorne's Hester, their elusiveness. It is only through courageous disclosures such as Poe's Imp that human society knows the true nature of experiencing death and/or insanity.
Both emotions and gods must be respected, according to Racine's overall dramatic conception. Neither reason nor passion is 'bad' merely an excess or an imbalance of one at the expense of the other. Similarly, Swift's dry, droll tone suggests his love of reason, wit, and his arch view of social niceties and conventions for which people have a great deal of emotional affection. But Swift is not advocating a
Natural Sciences and Geometry in Metaphysical Poetry Love in metaphysical poetry: Donne and Marvell "Metaphysical texts, primarily characterized through the conflation of traditional form with seditious linguistic techniques such as satire, irony, wit, parody and rhetoric, generate a microcosmic emphasis in many of the texts" even while the authors ultimately address 'macro' concerns of religion and man's place in the universe (Uddin 45). In poems such as John Donne's "The Flea"
OCTAVIO PAZ "TRANSPLANTED LANGUAGES" Octavio Paz's 1990 Nobel Lecture accentuated the issue of transplanted languages and the literature that emerged in a transplanted culture. Latin-American and Caribbean literature is good example of the use of transplanted languages since the influence of European and American cultures is quite pronounced. When people migrate from one place to another or are forced to endure foreign rule, the impact on the language is usually the
Plato, Marx, And Critical Thought David Richter's book is absolutely indispensable, as it is one of the few anthologies willing to acknowledge the existence of and include well-chosen examples from the long history of critical thought and how it helps us understand what we read, why we read, and what we value. The greatest strength of Richter's work is that it simply starts at the beginning of classical literature and moves forward
Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion In Stephen B. Oates's The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion, Nat Turner was the Black American slave who led the only useful, unrelenting slave rebellion (August 1831) in U.S. history. Spreading terror throughout the white South, his action set off a new wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves and stiffened proslavery, anti-abolitionist convictions that persisted in
Passion: overwhelming erotic love. Passion: zeal, intense interest in a thought, ideal, belief, person, or activity. Passion: anger, rage, fury. Passion: suffering. Perhaps most commonly used in reference to romantic, erotic love in modern culture, the word passion actually evokes any strong, overpowering emotion. Mel Gibson's recent film The Passion of the Christ reminds viewers that in Christian thought, passion refers explicitly to Jesus's suffering. Christian passion is frequently depicted
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