Essays Help

Essay Help and Achebe, Chinua Nigerian

admin — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:25:05 +0000

Chinua Achebe is the first major African novelist to be widely read and recognized both inside and outside Africa, and is also renowned for his role as the founding editor of the African Writers series published by Heinemann. His career as an essayist is limited to two collections of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) and Hopes and Impediments ( 1988), as well as The Trouble with Nigeria ( 1983), a long essay (essay help) which diagnoses the reasons for the political stagnation of post-colonial Nigeria. However, the influence and importance of his essays have far exceeded their actual number. They have been instrumental in establishing the critical and theoretical issues with which other African writers such as Ngugi was Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, and the bolekaja critics (Chinweizu and Madubuike) have had to grapple, and along with the work of the Frantz Fanon are among the earliest examples of the type of critical writing that has come to be known as "postcolonial" criticism.
Achebe’s essays (essay help) are mainly conversational in nature, written for lectures that he has been invited to give in response to specific questions and situations. In the essays in Morning Yet on Creation Day and Hopes and ImpedimentsZ (which reproduces five essays from the earlier collection), he articulates three characteristic concerns in his self-appointed role as spokesperson for the African novel. In essays such as "Colonialist Criticism" ( 1974), he is critical of the failure of European critics to understand African literature on its own terms. In their demand that African fiction be concerned with issues and themes that are "universal," Achebe sees European critics as perpetuating a colonialist attitude which views " the African writer as a somewhat unfinished European who with patient guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European" (essay help). For Achebe, evidence of the autonomy and uniqueness of African literature from its European counterpart can be seen, for example, in the very different role that the African writer must have toward his or her society. In “The Novelist as Teacher" (1965), he attacks the notion that the African writer should adopt the Western Modernist pose of the angst-ridden writer living on the fringes of society (essay help). The African novelist has an obligation to educate, to "help society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement." Achebe is aware this might mean that ". . . perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important, but so is education of the kind I have in mind." The Igbo ceremony of mbari, a festival of images in which every member of the society participates, provides him with an example of artistic production in which "there is no rigid tension between makers of culture and its consumers. Art belongs to all and is a ‘function’ of society" (Morning).

Custom essays on Agee, James American

admin — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:04:26 +0000

Custom essays: Although James Agee produced journalism, review essays, and short nonfiction pieces throughout his career, his reputation as an essayist derives primarily from his book with Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ( 1941), a long study in prose and photographs of the lives of three Southern sharecropper families. Agee both documents the lives of his human subjects — families with whom he and Evans lived during the summer of 1936 — and reflects on the problems of documenting without either inventing or concealing. Because Agee confronts the philosophical problems of truth-telling so directly in this work, because he enacts these problems stylistically, and perhaps above all because these have been critical, recurring questions for the essay throughout the genre’s history, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men holds great interest for students of the essay, as well as a place of increasing importance in the canon of 20th-century American literature.
Custom essays: For Agee, as for Montaigne, the essay was not a form for conveying a whole and universal truth clearly perceived; on the contrary, it was useful for highlighting both the partiality of any one observer’s vision and the great difficulties involved in perceiving the world and communicating one’s experience of it to an audience. A form of truth is possible, says Agee, if one is as faithful as possible to one’s own knowledge and experience of the world, but it will, of course, be at best a relative truth. Moreover, it is no simple thing to confront that world in an immediate way, "without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands"; to do so an observer must strip his or her consciousness until it stands "weaponless" before its subject.
Custom essays: This confrontation of two existents, observer and subject, is crucial to Agee’s understanding and use of the nonfiction essay form because the meaning of his real, human subjects does not derive from the writer’s work (as it does in fiction); both the subject and the writer’s writing about this subject have their meaning in the fact that subject and writer both exist. Thus the essayist’s responsibility is not to "art" but to that experience, the confrontation of living people. The essay is a form that Agee uses to reveal himself as a "spy," one with the specific goals of observing, recording, and exposing the lives of these families. He uses the reflective, questioning, and self-revealing aspects of the essayistic persona to give voice to the moral and ethical problems of his position — that of an anxious, indignant, and sensitive person, alive to his subjects and at times agonizingly self-conscious about what he is doing.

Essay writing: essay form in the late 20th century

admin — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:20:22 +0000

Essay writing: This pessimistic but aesthetically productive analysis of the state of the essay form in the late 20th century seems to have inspired Adorno to produce many of his essays in the Notes on Literature. the title of this work in itself (which could equally be translated as "notes for literature") indicates that Adorno accords poetic language a central significance, viewing literature in terms of musical composition. Most of the essays consider the role of language in society and in the modern age. In his essay "Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie" ( 1974; On the classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenia), for example, Adorno recognizes the redemptive power of language as a medium of truth and appeasement in Goethe’s classical work. Language helps unravel the entanglement of barbarism and civilization. "Language becomes the representative of order and at the same time produces order from freedom, from subjectivity," is Adorno’s verdict on Goethe’s treatment of the Iphigenia story.
Essay writing: Here, Adorno turns against the traditional view that Goethe’s work "denied the power of negativity and fabricated a spurious harmony." He quotes directly from the text to show that Orestes "by dint of his stark antithesis to the myth, threatens to fall victim to it." In this way, according to Adorno, Goethe’s play prophesies the transition from Enlightenment to mythology. This farsighted and controversial critique of the Enlightenment through the interpretation of Goethe’s Iphigenia can succeed only because Adorno presents it in the form of the essay, which can incorporate antithetical elements and in which a dialectical method of argumentation can be deployed to the full.
Essay writing: The contradictions which, according to Adorno, arise from the fact that language simultaneously represents and creates order, are becoming ever more acute as the modern age progresses. Just as the possibility of order seems to be increasingly elusive, so the utopia of language is disappearing in the representation of this impossibility. For this reason, as Adorno describes in his essay on Beckett ("Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen" [ 1961; "Attempt to Understand Endgame"]), the language of modern art is now no more than a differential of silence. The failure of language, which Beckett expresses in a number of ways, is interpreted by Adorno as the crisis of an existential terror which is literally lost for words. Beckett’s existentialism gives expression to the catastrophe of the modern age, by reducing the drama (Endgame) to silent gestures.
Essay writing: the organized meaninglessness that characterizes Beckett’s work is apparent in the fact that the play has neither beginning, end, nor dramatic progression in between. Instead the whole drama is composed using techniques of reversal and negation. For Adorno this is a dramatic depiction of the final stage in the historical disintegration of subjectivity. The suffering of the figures in the play, and that of the reader who recognizes this existential finality, become for Adorno the measure of human awareness.

Essays Help (Achebe, Chinua Nigerian continued).

admin — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:48:55 +0000

More controversially, Achebe has defended the use of English and other European languages in the production of African fiction against those critics who suggest that authentic African experience can only be represented in an African language. On the one hand, this is because for Achebe, English — being "a language spoken by Africans on African soil" (Morning) — is an African language. As he suggests in "The African Writer and the English Language" ( 1964), English (as well as French and Arabic) also makes it possible for there to be national literatures in Africa which cut across the enormous linguistic differences present within each nation (essays help). Although he feels that the English language can express his experiences as an African, it is important to recognize that "it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its African surroundings" (Morning) — a point which critics of Achebe’s stance have often failed to understand.
One of Achebe’s most famous and important essays – an essay (essays help) which he has described as his "standard-bearer" (Hopes) — is "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness" (1975). While admitting that Conrad is "undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction," Achebe draws attention to the fact that he is nevertheless "a thoroughgoing racist." In Achebe’s opinion, Western critics have praised Conrad’s novella while never addressing the racism at its core; Conrad depicts Africa as incomprehensible, frenzied, dark, grotesque, and dangerous, and Africans as ugly, inarticulate, inhuman, and savage. Achebe criticizes this failure, and effectively deals with a range of rejoinders which might be used to "save" Conrad from being labeled a racist (essays help). For example, while it may be possible to see these attitudes as those of Conrad’s character Marlow, Achebe claims that Conrad "neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative form of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters." While it is now common for literary critics to approach fictional works through a consideration of issues such as race, Achebe’s criticism of Conrad is an early and influential example of the shift of literary criticism toward a more explicit treatment of the broader politics of fiction.
It is Addison’s immersion both in the world of academic learning and in the work of the politicized civil service which gives particular experiential weight to his essays. But, although written at a time of bitter partisan controversy in politics and religion, the essays endeavor to be nonpartisan in expression. Their success, in this respect, is indicative of Addison’s major historical role in establishing the parameters and discourse of a generally acceptable "polite" culture in the 18th century (essays help).

Propos sur le Bonheur (essay help)

admin — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 08:51:48 +0000

Essay help: In the Propos sur le bonheur ( 1925, 1928; Alain on Happiness), Alain contended in general that passions are the major cause of unhappiness, which affects us physically as well as emotionally. Willpower plays a central role in these propos, as in so many others, but Alain was quick to recognize that while we are not able to control our thoughts or emotions, control of the physical body and movement can modify or alleviate causes of unhappiness. It is not through accident that we are happy or unhappy, and happiness must be cultivated, since it is only through individual efforts that we can attain our own bonheur. the physical and mental faculties cannot be separated. the wise and happy person should strive for a healthy mind and body, which will serve for both reflective thought and judicious action. Happiness is equated with virtue, liberty, and justice, as revealed in the wisdom of the classical writers of antiquity, of whose work Alain was a passionate and happy admirer.
Essay help: A contemporary of Freud, Alain disagreed with the founder of psychoanalysis on the importance of sexuality in human conduct, as well as with Freud’s views concerning the composition and role of the unconscious in mental activity. the basis for Alain’s disagreement can be found in his belief that the soul, and by extension consciousness and thought, are not states of being, nor entities apart, but functions of an integrated self. For him, there can be no unconscious which exists separately, or which contains material hidden from the self. But rather than attempt to refute what he considered "Freud’s ingenious system" with logical arguments, he chose instead to refuse it, claiming that Freud’s views on psychic activity were vague and ultimately useless.
Essay help: According to Alain, consciousness, thought, judgment, and reflection are all interconnected, so that critical reasoning and examination are elementary to all conscious states. By opposition, the unconscious, including sleep, is merely an absence of functionality and rationality. Alain applied his theories on states of consciousness in his observations ( Les Arts et les dieux [ 1958; the arts and the gods]) on Paul Valéry’s La Jeune Parque ( 1917; the young fate), a poem describing the transitional states of mind.
Essay help: Consciousness is characterized as reflection and light, which allows no partial states, but either is, or is not. Alain also commented on Proust, who "speaks of the unconscious, but doesn’t need to in order to account for human actions and passions" ( Propos de littérature [ 1922; Remarks on literature]). As for thought, which reveals consciousness, it is considered to be primarily a critical, negating activity. Alain’s style of writing is aphoristic in nature; one of his better-known sayings is "Thought is saying no, and it is to itself that thought says no" ( Propos sur la religion [ 1924; Remarks on religion]). By these negations consciousness is highly moral in its workings, frequently contrasting an ideal self with the real self. It is the morality of the human will that Alain placed in opposition to Freud’s model of the unconscious.

Free essay: Adorno, Theodor W. German

admin — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 04:14:03 +0000

Free essay: Theodor W. Adorno, the son of a Jewish merchant and an Italian singer, became famous as a philosopher and aesthetic theorist, not only for his many essays on literature and art, but chiefly for the critical theory he developed together with Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. His most famous work, written with Horkheimer during the years of exile in America, is the Dialektik der Aufklärung ( 1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), which tackles the question of how the horror of National Socialism could have happened in a highly civilized country. In answering this question Horkheimer and Adorno provide a general critique of the modern age and capitalism, which reaches far beyond the narrow historical context of World War II to examine how Enlightenment thought made way for positivist philosophy as a "myth" of reality. With the resulting disintegration of reality into isolated facts, Western rationalism reaches its limit. This terminal state of affairs has had a destructive effect on the Western world itself.
Free essay: In this work, and in his second, pessimistically tinged philosophical work, the Negative Dialektik ( 1966; Negative Dialectics), Adorno stands in opposition to his more optimistic colleague Ernst Bloch, whose Das Prinzip Hoffnung ( 1953; the Principle of Hope) he dismissed as naive. In what is known as the positivism dispute, Adorno also accused conventional philosophy ( Karl Popper and Martin Heidegger) of positing an object independent of the subject, when the object is in fact subjectively defined and equally arbitrary. This, according to Adorno, obscures the real interrelations between individual and society, subject and object, essence and appearance. He therefore calls for a fundamental redefinition of the evaluating subject in society and art. In consequence, the posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie ( 1970; Aesthetic Theory) refers mainly to the concept of art in the context of the modern age, a bias that is also apparent in the subjects of his many essays on art and literature produced from 1930 onward.
Free essay: Both Adomo’s style of philosophy and his critique of social systems, based on the theories of Hegel, Marx, and Freud, are shaped by his predominant dialectic mode of thought. In historical reality and therefore also in philosophical thought, Adomo sees contradictions that cannot be resolved. These contradictions also give art a dual character: on the one hand art is socially determined, yet on the other the work of art is autonomous and independent of the social conditions that produced it. According to Adomo, we should not seek to resolve this contradiction but rather should accept it as it is, using the work of art as a means to achieve knowledge. He therefore criticizes the rigid, dogmatic conception of realism in art (as represented by Georg Lukács and Marxist aesthetics), which assumes that art’s only function is to reflect social injustices. On the other hand, Adorno declares himself in favor of an art of protest, an art that refuses to endorse existing social conditions. His essays give new form to the concept of the avant-garde. Especially in the period following World War II, after his return in 1949 from exile in America, Adorno produced some of his most important writings on art and literature, written in his distinctive dialectic-artistic style; these works can themselves be considered as avant-garde works of art.

Free student essays: The Adventurer British periodical

admin — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:17:55 +0000

Free student essays: Together with Joseph Addison’s Spectator and Samuel Johnson ’s Rambler, the Adventurer was one of the three most influential English-language periodicals of the 18th century. Published serially twice a week by London bookseller John Payne, and running to 140 numbers between 7 November 1752 and 9 March 1754, it was consciously designed to succeed the Rambler, which made its final appearance on 14 March 1752, but greatly outstripped the Rambler’s popularity, peaking at a circulation three times that of Johnson’s publication.
Free student essays: A contemporary hack journalist, Arthur Murphy, author of the competing Gray’s Inn Journal, complained in print about the "attachment to the Adventurer" felt by so many readers and the impediment such loyalty placed in the way of his own efforts to generate a reliable circulation (no. 53, 20 October 1753). Another indication of the Adventurer’s success was the personal profit it brought to the publisher John Payne, who netted the then considerable sum of £422 from the sale of the 2000 sets of the second edition of the complete Adventurer and an additional £120 from the sale of half the copyright.
Free student essays: When Payne decided to follow up the Rambler with another serial of moral, aesthetic, and reflective essays, he turned to John Hawkesworth, then a little known but widely employed journalist and a fellow member of the Ivy Lane Club, which met at the King’s Head, a tavern and beefsteak house located in Ivy Lane near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Hawkesworth was a particularly astute choice on Payne’s part: he was a regular contributor to Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, where he worked closely with Samuel Johnson and developed an essayistic style so like Johnson’s that contemporary and subsequent readers have struggled to distinguish among their many contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine.
Free student essays: Furthermore, Johnson had used the weekly Tuesday night meeting of the Ivy Lane Club to test and develop ideas for his Rambler papers. Johnson was the star attraction of that literary society, whose membership included, with Payne and Hawkesworth, the dissenting clergyman Samuel Dyer, the magistrate and editor John Hawkins, and three physicians, William McGhie, Edmund Barker, and Richard Bathurst. The Ivy Lane Club became Hawkesworth’s finishing school as an intellectual, and it was there that he learned to emulate so convincingly the moral and literary voice of Johnson.

Amar y Borbón, Josefa Free essays

admin — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:47:25 +0000

Free essays: During the last few years of the 18th century, Spanish letters focused almost exclusively on the essay. These writings, much maligned by 19th-century Romantics who saw little of value produced during the Spanish "enlightenment," provided a critical step in the development of the modern Spanish essay. Josefa Amar y Borbón belongs to a group of intellectuals who read prohibited books, met periodically to discuss issues of concern, and wrote extensively on topics that were bound together by a common theme — a concern for the decadent conditions of Spain and a desire to rectify the situation through education. Whether these writings were called discursos (speeches), cartas (letters ), memorias (memoirs), or ensayos (essays), they are recognized today as basic elements of the Spanish essay. Aragonese by birth, but reared and educated in Madrid, Amar y Borbón was the product, as well as an example, of the enlightened elite in Bourbon Spain.
Free essays: Well versed in Greek, Latin, French, English, and Italian, Amar y Borbón translated many works from these languages into Spanish. In the 1780s she began publishing essays and treatises whose subjects fall into three broad categories: those concerning science and medicine, those dealing with the study of letters and the humanities, and those combating superstition. Aside from her translations, the author’s original literary production, as catalogued to date, includes eight essays published between 1783 and 1787, and a book, Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mugeres ( 1790; Discourse on the physical and moral education of women). Each of Amar y Borbón’s essays has three main structural components: authority, tradition, and synthesis. Authority is expressed by numerous citations of classical sources.
Free essays: These autoridades, whom the author quotes in the original language before translating, are from all epochs. Tradition refers to Spanish customs; this component not only provides a point of comparison and contrast with "authority," but is also a minute description of 18th-century society. Tradition also provides the reader with some insight concerning Amar y Borbón’s point of view in many instances. the last component, synthesis, combines what "should be" (authority) with "what is" (tradition) to form what "might be" — the synthesis.While these structural components appear in most of the author’s essays, her style is far from simple, for like many of her contemporaries, she interjects numerous digressions in the form of philosophical musings: questions about the nature of religion and the religious education of children; diatribes against current practices in Spanish society such as men reserving all honors, awards, and recognition for themselves and wishing to deprive women of their intellects; or historical cataloguing of a subject such as the history of corsets from ancient times to the 18th century.

Medical school essay help: writings of Achebe, Chinua Nigerian (continued).

admin — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 19:07:38 +0000

Medical school essay help: That polite culture was centered upon “the club," both in the real world (where Addison was a member of a Whig literary group, the Kit-Cats) and in the fictional world of "Mr. Spectator." As the first numbers of the Spectator indicate, it purports to be the record of a small club of representative gentlemen, including Sir Roger de Coverley (an old-fashioned country squire), Sir Andrew Freeport (a man representative of the trading interest), Captain Sentry (the military), Will Honeycomb (a man about town and a wit), and "a clergyman, a very philosophic man, of general learning, great sanctity of life, and the most exact breeding." The Saturday Spectators are a form of lay sermon by Addison (earning him the sobriquet "parson in a tie-wig"), and major influences in the promulgation of Anglican rationalism. Mr. Spectator himself claimed to write the papers of the club and is a peculiarly neutral figure, being a man of learning who has traveled widely, frequents London as an observer, but keeps free from political and religious strife.
Medical school essay help: The creation of a club of characters was an important element in providing variety in the journal and establishing the modes of discourse which united a wide-ranging body of contributors. Individual columnists were invited to assume an appropriate persona, with that of the Addisonian Spectator as normative. This was a new mode of organization of the journal as miscellany, as represented by the earlier Tatler and the subsequent Guardian. It has its roots in Horace’s satires and epistles (rather than in the formal model of the Senecan philosophical essay) and in the Socratic and Ciceronian symposium. Diverse points of view are put in friendly exchange. The Horatian statement nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri (it is not my habit to swear by the words of any master) had been recently adopted as the motto for the Royal Society, and this skeptical empiricism (rather than dogmatic enthusiasm) was the sign of polite society. To the classical examples should be added Montaigne’s equally skeptical essays and those of the weary, worldly-wise Epicurean, Sir William Temple.
Medical school essay help: These formal models carry an ideological implication. Even in summary it is apparent that this is a masculine society and the readership was being shaped from male norms. Within the club itself certain members are privileged over others. Sir Andrew Freeport represents all that is best in developing commercial society, whereas Sir Roger, although a delightful comic eccentric, signifies an out- of -date, small-world squirearchy (and thus votes Tory). In morality, the clergyman is normative, whereas Will Honeycomb carries with him certain aspects of "Restoration" society whose libertinage had been corrected or purged by societies for the reformation of manners. Likewise, in matters of taste, a correct canon of literature is representative of proper thinking. Addison was a major influence in establishing Paradise Lost as an English classic (Milton being purged of his republican and regicide views expressed elsewhere).

Free English essay: The Adventurer

admin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 17:44:26 +0000

Free English essay: The Adventurer followed Johnson’s Rambler in its thematic content and varied in style only in being a little less difficult in its vocabulary and less baroque in its sentence structures. There were, however, two deliberate breaks with the editorial practice of the Rambler: Payne decided to solicit contributions to the Adventurer from several hands, rather than leave the entire burden of the writing to Hawkesworth; and it was decided from the outset that the number of issues would be finite. The number of 140 was determined with an eye to publishing the complete Adventurer in ready sets as soon as the final paper had been issued. seventy essays printed in folio made an ideal single volume, and Payne guessed from its conception that the Adventurer would sell best as a two-volume first edition in folio and a four-volume second edition in pocket-sized duodecimo. Whatever moral excellence we may now attribute to the Adventurer’s reflective essays, its format was entirely determined by a bookseller’s understanding of what would be the most valuable way to approach the marketplace.
Free English essay: Along with Hawkesworth, the principal contributors to the Adventurer were Johnson himself, the literary critic Joseph Warton, and the journalist Bonnell Thornton, author of the periodical the Connoisseur. Various individual papers have also been attributed to Thomas Warton, his sister Jane Warton, the early feminist Elizabeth Carter, Hester Mulson, George Colman, and Catherine Talbot. Certainly Hawkesworth and Payne approached a wide community of possible contributors with the intention of insuring that the Adventurer offered a variety of style and opinions in its essays. Despite the ultimate range of hands evident in the Adventurer, Hawkesworth found himself solely responsible for most of the early papers. Johnson first appears with Adventurer no. 34; he would contribute 29 essays in all.
Free English essay: There is some speculation that Richard Bathurst of the Ivy Lane Club was originally solicited to contribute but failed to do so, and that Hawkesworth urged Johnson to take Bathurst’s place as the periodical prospered and Hawkesworth himself felt the strain of compensating for the delinquent Bathurst. At any rate, the three main authors of the papers each took up different essayistic approaches: Johnson contributed papers that continued the moral reflections which had characterized the Rambler; Joseph Warton wrote on aesthetic matters, producing papers on literary criticism, taste, and scholarship, including memorable pieces on Shakespeare; and Hawkesworth, who wrote the lion’s share of the periodical, was particularly predisposed to contribute short fiction, especially oriental tales.