Ghost Story, starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Alice Krige, Patricia Neal, and Craig Wasson pits four elderly men and a pair of twin sons, against a female ghost who is looking for revenge. The movie is based on the book, "Ghost Story," written by Peter Straub. While many horror novels have been turned into well-made and successful movies, (think Steven King), this movie is not one of them. Ghost Story was painfully dull and predictable, failing to instill any sense of suspense or horror.
The premise is that four successful older men living in a small New England town, Melbourne, meet regularly to tell ghost stories while enjoying snifters of brandy and being elegantly attired in tuxedos. They call themselves "The Chowder Society," (not because the screenwriter is a chowder head I would guess). They try to top each other with their horror stories, but all…...
One of the primary functions of ghosts in James' and harton's short stories is as human conscience: to bring the unconscious into conscious awareness and to evoke guilt, shame, or fear. For the governess in "The Turn of the Screw," the ghosts symbolize sexual awakening and social deviance. From the time she arrives at Bly, the governess learns of Miles' misbehavior at school, mischievous behavior that Mrs. Grose attributes to normal adolescence. However, the narrator views the ghosts with increasing suspicion, believing them to herald the social and sexual corruption of Miles' youth. Similarly, Miss Jessel is depicted as having been promiscuous and the governess views her apparition partly as a symbol of unconscious sexual desires. Spencer Brydon's ghost serves a more direct psychological purpose in James' "The Jolly Corner," as the protagonist's own conscience symbolizing the life he never lived and the choices he never took. In both cases,…...
mlaWorks Cited
James, Henry. "The Turn of the Screw." Ghost Stories of Henry James.
James, Henry. "The Jolly Corner." Ghost Stories of Henry James.
Wharton, Edith. "The Lady Maid's Bell." Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton.
Wharton, Edith. "Afterward." Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton.
Ghosts
Whether or not ghosts actually exist is a question that has been debated in almost every culture and region around the world since times immemorial. Those who believe in ghosts point to countless instances of unexplained phenomena in which strange sightings and paranormal happenings have taken place. The skeptics on the other hand dismiss such suggestions about "ghosts" as figments of human imagination that have no scientific basis or proof. This essay explores the question: whether ghosts really exist?
The popular Western concept of ghosts is that souls that could not find rest after death, or have some unfinished business in the material world such as seeking revenge, linger on Earth and sometimes appear as apparitions. A broader concept of "ghosts" includes any paranormal or unexplained happenings like the spontaneous movements of an object, strange noises heard in "haunted" places, or even the feeling of a "presence" in one's surroundings. Certain…...
mlaReferences
"Ghost." (2005). Article in Wikipedia -- the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved on July 27, 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost
'Ghostly Image at Britain's Hampton Court." (2003). MSNBC. Dec. 19, 2003. Retrieved on July 27, 2005 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3760119/
An ancient Palace and Fortress building on the banks of River Thames in London
The 12th Century Archbishop of Canterbury who got involved in a conflict with King Henry II over the rights and privileges of the Church and was assassinated.
Ghosts in Two Novels
Immigration can be a painful and to a certain extent puzzling experience for those who leave behind a culture, which was starkly different from the one, they encountered upon immigration. We have heard and read numerous tales of immigration and related problems and thus there have been numerous books on the subject and some of them have left an indelible impression on reader's mind. Two such books, which we shall discuss in this paper are "The woman warrior" and "How Garcia Girls lost their accents" written by Maxine Kingston and Julia Alvarez respectively. In the first novel, which is part fiction and part autobiography, author has described her experience as an immigrant in the United States with reference to her native culture and its restrictions. In the second novel, we come across immigration problems of a Latin American family. While ethnicity, racism and cultural differences are the…...
mlaReferences
Jerry Berrios, IMMIGRANT FINDS HER VOICE IN GAP BETWEEN CULTURES., The Arizona Republic, 11-01-1998, pp. E14.
Alvarez, Julia, How the Garcia girls lost their accents, Plume Publishers, 1990
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1991.
Ghost Map, written by Steven Berlin Johnson, is a book that is based on the most terrifying epidemic which broke out in London. This book describes how the city and science was changed after this epidemic. This book is indeed a must read because the writer of this book describes one of the most deadly outbreaks of cholera on Victorian London, in relation to how it changed the cities, our scientific approach towards the disease in the modern world and much more. The idea of gemeinschaft was incorporated in this piece of writing, describing how an epidemic affects a city of traditions, values, language and common (Cities, 2001).
There are two main people that have been talked about in this book and play the central protagonists. The first one is Dr. John Snow and the second one is everend Henry Whitehead. The map of the cholera cases is created by Dr.…...
mlaReferences
"Cities." (2001) World of Sociology, Gale. Farmington: Gale. Credo Reference
"Cholera." (2010) Black's Medical Dictionary, 42nd Edition. London: A&C Black.
Kohn, George Childs (2008). Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present. New York: Facts on File. pp. 46
Ghost Soldiers - The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission is a saga of extreme valor of American soldiers and Prisoners of War (POW). The dramatic story of the capture of American and British POW, and their rescue attempt by selected U.S. Army 6th Ranger Batallion took place in Cabanatuan, a province in the Philippine Islands.
Ghost Soldiers is a book that depicts the extraordinary skills and virtue of the soldiers of war. Most of all, it is a chronicle of heroism, sacrifices, and triumph dared by the horror WWII had created. Perhaps, we can say that the story presented by Hampton Sides in Ghost Soldiers is a contribution to the journals of WWII. The book is a breathtaking and detailed account of the horrifying experiences of the POW, the rescuing soldiers, and the rest of the soldiers involved in the rescue mission such as the brave Filipino…...
He uses ample slang and simple sentence construction that is nevertheless sophisticated enough to warrant attention by publishers that aim to reach a broad audience. Readers of Ghost Rider could be motorcycle enthusiasts, Rush fans, or travelogue lovers and "The Loneliest Road in America" would satisfy all three groups of readers. His descriptions are not overloaded by flowery language. Nevertheless, they are vivid and active: "I had almost reached the clouds when the trail petered out at a tumble of boulders marking the base of the actual peak, a rough pyramid of bare, wet rocks," (107). In his attempt to paint pictures of the natural surroundings, Peart also steers away from similes and metaphors that could seem clumsy. For example, he writes, "I looked back at that view from below, the wrinkled, treeless bluff falling into shadow in the translucent twilight, lights beginning to appear from ranches up along…...
mlaWorks Cited
Peart, Neil. Ghost Rider. Toronto: ECW Press, 2002.
And farther west on the Great Plains were the Teton Sioux, among them the Oglalas, whose chief was Red Cloud, and among the Hunkpapas, was Sitting ull, who together with Crazy Horse of the Oglalas, would make history in 1876 at Little ig Horn (rown 10).
After years of broken promises, conflicts and massacres, came the Treaty of Fort Laramie, said to be the most important document in the history of Indian-white relations on the Great Plains (Marrin 94). The treaty basically set aside a Great Sioux Reservation on all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River up to and including the lack Hills, and barred all whites except government officials from the reservation and from a vast "unceded" territory lying between the lack Hills and ighorn Mountains (Marrin 94). Under the treaty, these lands belonged to the Lakota "forever" unless three-quarters of the tribes' men agreed to…...
mlaBibliography
American History since 1865: Wounded Knee
1988. The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Retrieved October 14, 2005 from HighBeam Research Library Web site.
Amerman, Stephen Kent.
2003. Let's get in and fight!" American Indian political activism in an urban public school system, 1973. The American Indian Quarterly. June 22. Retrieved October 14, 2005 from HighBeam Research Library Web sit.
Cho traces the experiences and troubles of the yanggongju across the history of Korea. She does this to document the stories of women who were forced into slavery as comfort women during the war and who by economic necessity ended up turning to the Americans. She calls this emotional suicide the "fabric of erasure" and goes through this process to exorcise the ghost from the Korean national consciousness and the consciousness of women (ibid 1). There is a lot of psychological trauma suffered by the comfort women and Cho adapts to explore these issues across generations of the Korean consciousness. This concept was adapted from studies of the holocaust and fights the emotional erasure. This concept was established by Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham, scholars of the Holocaust. Cho incorporated these in her project. She said that even "Korean wives who led lives of isolation and were the subject of…...
mlaWorks Cited
Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean diaspora: shame, secrecy, and the forgotten war. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, NY: Plume, 1998. Print.
Although the events and characters' reactions to them have their differences in the interest of plot variety, similarities between the cases far outweigh the differences.
Not only are the events that Nel and Crowe experience and their reactions to them similar, but also both characters have striking revelations at the end of their stories that suggest the importance of the events. In Nel's case, the remembering "the death of chicken little" allows her to "[reconfigure] a number of long-held memories" (Matus, 69). One of those memories, and probably the most poignant is that of Sula. After coming back to the Bottom, Nel is less than friendly with her former confidant. In fact, she joins the rest of the town in labeling Sula and her wild ways as evil, a predicament that helps unite the town. Although Nel and manage a brief reconciliation before Sula's death, the force of the reconciliation…...
mlaWorks Cited
Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison: Contemporary World Writers. New York: Manchester
University Press, 1998.
Wesselman, Debbie Lee. "Sula." Mostly Fiction. 2006. June 30, 2008. http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/morrison.htm/
Winsbro, Bonnie. Forces: Belief, Deliverance, and Power in Contemporary Works by Ethnic Women. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
supernatural elements of film and story can be both different and similar. Movies and novels that portray elements of horror and paranormal like ghosts and demons do so in a way that evokes suspense, fear, and a sense of surreal. The movie, The Sixth Sense, directed by M. Night Shyamalan and the novel, The Demonologist written by Andrew Pyper shows ghosts and the supernatural as a means of communication from the afterlife or "other side" and the waking life. Although The Sixth Sense focuses on ghosts and The Demonologist focuses on demons, the way in which the writer/director forms the story share similar concepts.
Pyper creates a protagonist in David who is a skeptic of the existence of the supernatural. As explained on page 7: "A demon expert who believes evil to be a manmade invention." (Pyper 7) His skepticism is born of that of never having truly witnessed an…...
mlaWorks Cited
Maloney, Susie. "The Demonologist: Part horror, part thriller, all page-turner." The Globe and Mail. N.p., 1 Mar. 2013. Web. 8 June 2014. .
Pyper, Andrew. Demonologist: A Novel. NYC: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Print.
The sixth sense. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Perf. Bruce Willis, Hayley Joel Osment. Hollywood Pictures Home Video;, 2000. Film.
ghost of Hamlet's father appears in the very first scene of the play. The guardsmen, who were demonstrably scared, set the tone for the entire story. The ghost's intentions are eventually known when he tells Hamlet the identity of his murderer. The dark and spooky language the ghost uses in the play sums up the negative tone of the exchange and foreshadows the tragic endings for almost all of the main characters. The language used by the ghost negatively provokes the young prince to acts of revenge and murder:
I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear:
'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy…...
colorful period in America's remarkable early history is the gold rush era. In the late 1800's the discovery of gold triggered a flood of immigrants into the country, all intent on making their fortune. These miners shaped the early history of America, and created a great deal of the legend that surrounds the era of the "ild est." hile some of the legends of lawlessness and debauchery are clearly exaggerated, life in the mining towns of the gold rush era was clearly rough and ready.
This paper will examine life in the mining camps of the gold rush era. This will include a look at the people who made up the camps, the general atmosphere, as well as prostitution, gambling, general lawlessness, and the role of religion within the mining camps. The demise of the mining camps will be examined in the context of the development of the railroad and…...
mlaWorks Cited
Arizona's Ghost Towns. 02 December 2003. http://www.carizona.com/ghosttowns.html
Baumgart, Don. Some Mining Camps Faded Others Grew To Be Cities. Nevada County Gold Online Magazine. 02 December 2003. http://www.ncgold.com/History/BecomingCA_Archive22.html
CmdrMark. Travels in the American Southwest. 02 December 2003. http://www.cmdrmark.com/ghosttowns.html
Koeppel, Elliot H. The California Gold Country: Highway 49 Revisited. Malakoff & Co.
Analysis of Michael Almereyda's interpretation of the Ghost in Hamlet 2000:
The Micheal Almereyda version of Hamlet, released in the year 2000, has a contemporary setting. The story takes place in New York City with a modern and corporate twist. Hamlet in this film, is depicted as a lonely, twenty-something aspiring artist, who father was the head of the "Denmark Corporation," had passed away some time ago.
The ghost first visits Hamlet in this version, in his apartment, where he appears on the television screen. The film being set in the modern technological era, with cell phones and credit cards, this seemed appropriate. The ghost in the film appears as a specter. As in life, the Ghost is high up in the corporate ladder at the Denmark Corporation, he is dressed to fit. He commands his son in the same manner in his death as in his life. The level of drama…...
mlaWorks Cited
Burnett, M.T. (2003). "To Hear and See the Matter": Communicating Technology in Michael Almereyda's "Hamlet" 2000. University of Texas Press.
Ebert, R. (1997). Hamlet. Chicago Sun Times.
Goldman, P. (2001). Hamlet's Ghost: A Review Article. Anthropoetics - the Journal of Generative Anthropology .
Heroajax. (2008, July 10). Top 10 Greatest Shakespeare Plays. Retrieved from List Verse: http://listverse.com/2008/07/10/top-10-greatest-shakespeare-plays/
Old Nurse's Story
Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story" uses gothic imagery and Victorian themes to elucidate the role and status of women. Online critics claim the story is filled with themes of "male domination, females' sense of powerlessness due to this dominance, and the ambiguous results of women's struggle against males in the Victorian era," ("The Damning Effects of a Patriarchal Society in "The Old Nurse's Story" and "The Yellow allpaper"). Indeed, these three core elements are absolutely evident in this haunting tale about rediscovering personal identity via encounters with the past. The motif of haunting allows the past to return to the present in eerie ways. Relying on ghosts allows the author to present the suggestion that the past haunts the lives of all individuals, and that women have trouble extricating themselves from negative situations because of the constraints of dead social institutions and norms.
However, Hughes and Lund maintain…...
mlaWorks Cited
"The Damning Effects of a Patriarchal Society in "The Old Nurse's Story" and "The Yellow Wallpaper." Retrieved online: http://www.unc.edu/~hernande/comparecontrast.htm
Gaskell, Elizabeth. "The Old Nurse's Story." Retrieved online: http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Nurse.html
"Victorian Fin de Siecle." Retrieved online: http://www.unc.edu/~slivey/gothic/
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