Constructivist Theories The area of constructivism, in the field of learning, comes under the broad heading of cognitive science. Cognitive science is an expansive area. It has its roots in the first half of the twentieth century at a time… Read More ›
An unseasonable short story that Bram Stoker wrote in 1893 for Holly Leaves (the Christmas number of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News), “The Squaw” is set in Nuremberg, a city that Stoker had visited in 1885. A self-regarding, unnamed… Read More ›
First published in the Theatre Annual (1887), “The Dualitists,” frequently cited as demonstrating one of Bram Stoker’s favorite themes, male bonding, evokes a world of children’s adventure stories. As in much of Stoker’s fiction, the driving force grows out of… Read More ›
The intense psychoanalytical novel Demian was published by the German Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) in 1919. It was translated into English in 1923 under an English pseudonym (Emil Sinclair), at first in a series hosted by the cultural review… Read More ›
Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered by some to be the most significant urban novel in German literature. Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist of this novel by Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), is an ex-convict who gains his freedom after serving a four-year sentence in… Read More ›
“The question of gender is a question of language.” This statement is Barbara Johnson’s (World 37), and her succinct formulation of the relationship between gender and language does much to characterize the approach of a group of feminists who draw… Read More ›
The Castle is the last novel written by Czech author Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Kafka began to write the book in 1922 in a village and not, as it is tempting to imagine, in the shadow of Prague’s legendary castle. A… Read More ›
Daddy You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you…. Read More ›
Badenheim 1939 is a skillful fictional answer to the question that many have asked about the Holocaust: Why was there not more resistance? Perhaps the answer to the question is something much more simple than has been considered, as Holocaust… Read More ›
One of Henry James’s most anthologized stories, The Real Thing was first published on April 16, 1892, in Black and White and later reprinted in the New York edition of James’s works (1909), a comprehensive, multivolume collection of James’s works…. Read More ›
While many theories of subjectivity pay little attention to the productive role of gender in the formation of the subject, psychoanalysis, for all its limitations, has always been interested in gender as primary in the production of subjects. Freud articulated… Read More ›
Although feminists and socialists have engaged in continuous conversations since the nineteenth century, those crosscurrents within literary theory that might be designated “materialist feminisms” have their origins in the late 1960s with various attempts to synthesize feminist politics with Marxist… Read More ›
This is one of the most famous songs from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long narrative poem The Princess. In the poem’s context, the song is sung in public at the Princess’s command to pass a brief interval in the arduous studies… Read More ›
While the field of literary studies from its inception took as its exclusive object of interest the literary canon, cultural studies has generally been concerned with what is left over, popular or mass culture—newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, popular song,… Read More ›
Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, has a distinct history and process. The term “archetype” can be traced to Plato (arche, “original”; typos, “form”), but the concept gained currency in twentieth-century literary theory… Read More ›
With Mama Day (1988) Naylor charts a different literary terrain. While her first two novels were grounded in known reality, this third novel allows Naylor to explore, and to question, the concept of reality. Set on a mystical island off… Read More ›
Karl Marx’s mature writing from A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy (1859) through the first edition of Capital (1867) offers to analyze social and economic relations as systems and structures that follow scientific laws. In Marx’s vocabulary, a… Read More ›
Ulysses, a perennial favorite and one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s greatest poems, appeared in the 1842 volume of Poems that made Tennyson’s name. However, it was written at age 24, nine years earlier, after the death in 1833 of Arthur… Read More ›
Treatises devoted to the study of style can be found as early as Demetrius’s On Style (C.E. 100). But most pre-twentieth-century discussions appear as secondary components of rhetorical and grammatical analyses or in general studies of literature and literary language…. Read More ›
Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies . . . Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader’s heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes… Read More ›
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