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HISTORY
By faction, I am assuming you mean a division within a political movement or organization that splinters from a larger group to form its own independent one. Based on this definition, there are…
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THE GOLDFINCH
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that follows the coming of age of narrator Theo Decker, who survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while…
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THE GOLDFINCH
Donna Tartt’s novel, The Goldfinch, is a Bildungsroman in which New York City native Theo Decker survives a terrorist attack on an art museum, stealing the titular painting in the aftermath….
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SCIENCE
I do think life probably exists on another planet. There are hundreds of billions of planets in the universe, and it seems against all the odds of probability that the Earth is the only one of them…
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FRANKENSTEIN
Both of these are seminal works that illustrate the Romantic period’s interest in the irrational and supernatural. Though Frankenstein is usually considered a gothic masterpiece (which it is) the…
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SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a novel by the British author Alan Sillitoe and centers on the life of the protagonist, Arthur Seaton, a lathe operator in a bicycle factory. This quote is from…
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SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is a classic novel of social realism; rather than glorifying life, it exposes its seedy side. The author, Alan Sillitoe, portrays a grim picture of working class life…
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SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
The struggle for survival. Arthur Seaton, the novel’s protagonist, leads a pretty one-dimensional existence. He toils away at a dead-end job in the local factory all week, then come the weekend…
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SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe tells the story of Arthur Seaton, a young British man who spends his days doing repetitive work in a bicycle factory in Nottingham and dreaming…
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SOCIAL SCIENCES
Arguably, propaganda is antithetical to the basic principles of democracy. Ideally, in a democracy, people choose freely and each voice counts for one. Democratic leaders are elected by people on…
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THE PIECE OF STRING
In the short story “A Piece of String” by Guy de Maupassant, most of the suspicion in the story is focused on Maitre Hauchecorne, a peasant who has arrived in Goderville to sell his wares at the…
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LAW AND POLITICS
I will assume that this is a debate question. For the record, abortion is legal in the United States and in most other developed nations, though we will focus on the United States. The Supreme…
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THINGS FALL APART
Many words in Things Fall Apart can challenge students. Since the story takes place in Nigeria (around 1900), many of the words are unique to their culture. Chapter one, for example, is filled with…
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SYMPOSIUM
In Plato’s Symposium, seven very different men get together for a drinking party (“symposion” in Greek, literally ‘drinking together’) and talk about the definition and nature of love; each of the…
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THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
After first meeting General Zaroff, in Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” Rainsford believes Zaroff to be quite civilized and cosmopolitan. Later, however, he learns the truth…
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THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
In the opening scene of The Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s feeling quite down, and he doesn’t know why. His friends Salerio and Solanio offer their own suggestions as to what the cause of Antonio’s…
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JOHN KEATS
Multiple interpretations can come out of an analysis of the Grasshopper in Keats’s poem “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” but this question can be more accurately answered when considering the…
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ON KILLING A TREE
In this poem, Patel is emphasizing the fact that killing a tree is not something that happens accidentally—it requires a prolonged attack and is an effort of will. He illustrates this by…
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OTHELLO
One theme common to both works is jealousy. Both Othello and Jake feel inadequate in the eyes of the woman they love. This influences their actions and makes them jealous. Othello is a middle-aged…
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THE TROJAN WOMEN
In this passage, Cassandra the seer, daughter of Hecuba and Priam (erstwhile Queen and King of Troy), attempts to convince a group of women that Troy is better off than most Greek states. This…
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THE TROJAN WOMEN
Euripides’s The Trojan Women picks up where Homer’s Iliad leaves off and offers a moving and philosophically provocative portrait of the most prominent Trojan women in the aftermath of Troy’s loss…
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THE TROJAN WOMEN
Euripides’s The Trojan Women is set during the aftermath of the Trojan War, as described in Homer’s Iliad (several centuries before Euripides) and alluded to in many other literary texts since. The…
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THE TROJAN WOMEN
Here are two of the most important themes of Euripides’s The Trojan Women: Fate and freedom: The play makes several references to “fate” and “destiny”; the people in the play almost seem like…
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THE TROJAN WOMEN
Euripides’s The Trojan Women begins with the aftermath of the devastating decade-long Trojan war between the Trojans, led by Priam, and the Greeks, led by Agamemnon. The eponymous Trojan women have…
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HISTORY
Proslavery arguments in the South were economic, religious, historical, and social. Southern whites argued that their economy would collapse without slave labor. This was the “necessary evil”…
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WILFRED OWEN
This is a broad question, and the poem gives you a lot of scope for argument. If we consider first what you are being asked to do here, this might give an indication of what the options are. The…
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LAW AND POLITICS
The punitive model or the model of retributive justice certainly has alternatives that are both more humane and more efficacious. They are more efficacious because they do a better job of…
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HISTORY
The abolitionist movement was motivated by a number of factors that largely depended on the experiences and values of the individual. In some cases, abolitionists were motivated from personal…
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LITERATURE
Beowulf might be interpreted as a Christ figure because of his selfless bravery. When he defeats the greedy dragon as his final quest, Beowulf is fatally wounded. The dragon, as a clear…
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CEREMONIES IN DARK OLD MEN
Blue Haven’s a pretty tough character. But as one of the biggest gangsters in Harlem, he needs to be. The man has a menacing, intimidating air about him that is entirely in keeping with his…
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THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
The debate over whether The Pilgrim’s Progress is a true allegory or a precursor to the novel has raged over centuries. The great poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge regarded it as a…
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OF MICE AND MEN
Within the context of the novel, the relationship between our two protagonists is indeed unique. George states in chapter one that, as far as relationships go, he and Lennie share something…
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ARTS
Theater, like all the arts, was used as a tool of propaganda in totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Everyone involved in the theater had to be politically reliable;…
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IMMANUEL KANT
According to Kant, it is not permitted under any circumstance to treat another rational being as merely a means to an end. Kant held the belief that all humans hold value simply through their…
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JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French writer, philosopher, and political activist who was widely influential in the burgeoning existentialist movement of the twentieth-century. Existentialists believe that…
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IMMANUEL KANT
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher in the 18th and early 19th centuries who had a profound affect on modern moral philosophy, especially through what many have dubbed the “Mere Means…
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IMMANUEL KANT
Throughout his voluminous writings on moral philosophy, Kant emphasizes the point that maxims of morality must be capable of being applied universally to everyone, in all times and all places….
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THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY
We need to look at Book 3 to find Lady Philosophy’s advice on false goods and the attainment of happiness. She says that a true good would make the attainer so happy that he would not be able to…
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HISTORY
The Great Awakening is generally regarded by historians as sowing the first seeds of what would later become a full-scale rebellion against colonial rule. Like all religious revivals, The Great…
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SPEECH TO THE VIRGINIA CONVENTION
Patrick Henry makes use of several allusions—indirect references to an event, text, person, etc.—in order to borrow the weight and emotional tenor of the original. He asks the president,…
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THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
One could certainly argue that negative experiences in life shape individuals into whom they become. Janie Crawford is a woman whose romantic life has been tumultuous, to say the least. After the…
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FRANKENSTEIN
As defined by Rene Descartes, dualism refers to the separation between one’s mind and one’s body. Together, the mind and body form the whole person, but each is its own distinct part of the…
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HISTORY
Both World War I and World War II led to the development of international organizations intended to maintain the peace. The League of Nations, created after the First World War, and the United…
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THE SUN ALSO RISES
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has Jake Barnes narrate a story in which people watch bullfights, travel through the South of France and Spain, and indulge themselves in ample amounts of food and…
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PLAYER PIANO
Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian novel Player Piano is set in a future post waves of industrial revolution, where all the workers have been replaced by machines that are more efficient. The only human…
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PLAYER PIANO
To understand Player Piano, we need look no further than its protagonist, Dr. Paul Proteus. At first, it seems that he has an ideal life: he is the highest-paid worker at Ilium Works, and he is…
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PLAYER PIANO
Here are some of the most important characters in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano: Dr. George Proteus: We encounter him at the beginning of the book and learn that when he died, he held a position…
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PLAYER PIANO
The central theme of Player Piano is one that resonates even today in 2018, half a century after the book was written; this is the theme of machines versus humans and of science versus humanity….
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PLAYER PIANO
Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novel, Player Piano, is set in a future world and centers around a man named Paul Proteus, an exceptionally smart engineer and manager of a company called Ilium…
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THE SUN ALSO RISES
The empathy we feel for Jake is probably due not so much to his narrative unreliability as to the style in which Hemingway presents the narrative. Jake is burned out. Different elements of the…