Exploring the Complexity of Antiheroes in Literature
Introduction

Antiheroes have long fascinated readers with their moral ambiguity, flawed characteristics, and unconventional approaches to heroism. Unlike traditional heroes who embody virtues such as courage, honor, and selflessness, antiheroes often exhibit qualities of selfishness, deceit, and cynicism. These complex characters challenge societal norms and offer a unique perspective on the human experience.

In literature, antiheroes are often portrayed as outsiders or rebels who resist conformity and question authority. They may engage in morally questionable actions or adopt unorthodox methods to achieve their goals, blurring the lines between right and wrong. Despite their faults, antiheroes can be compelling and relatable figures who navigate the complexities of a morally murky world.

One of the most famous examples of an antihero in literature is Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the ye." Holden's rebellious nature, disillusionment with society, and struggle with authenticity make him a compelling character….

Odysseus: The Greek conception of heroism vs. our own
The ancient Greek poet Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were considered to be two of the most important works of literature for ancient Greeks to study, particularly during the classical era of Greek civilization. However, for many modern readers, the values embodied by Odysseus are surprisingly self-interested. In modern culture, the conventional conception of a hero is someone like Superman or Luke Skywalker: he is naive, trusting, good, puts the common welfare above his own needs, and is willing to listen to those older and wiser than himself. Odysseus is none of these things. He is clever, full of guile, perfectly willing to lie and trick people to get his way, and full of a quality even the Greeks considered dangerous, that of hubris or a willingness to defy the gods. But the Greek still considered Odysseus a noble and admirable hero, within….

American Lit
Definition of Modernism and Three Examples

Indeed, creating a true and solid definition of modernism is exceptionally difficult, and even most of the more scholarly critical accounts of the so-called modernist movement tend to divide the category into more or less two different movements, being what is known as "high modernism," which reflected the erudition and scholarly experimentalism of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and the so-called "low modernism" of later American practitioners, such as William Carlos Williams. Nonetheless, despite the problems of reification involved with such a task, I will attempt to invoke a definitions of at least some traits of modernism, as culled from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:

First, [in modernism] "realization" had to replace description, so that instead of copying the external world the work could render it in an image insisting on its own forms of reality... [and] Second, the poets develop collage techniques for….

Clint Eastwood’s career spans more than six decades, and is one of Hollywood’s few luminaries that is equally as renowned for his acting as his directing. Born in 1930 in San Francisco, Eastwood’s formative years were spent during the Great Depression, during which his family moved around in search of work. Eastwood has one younger sister (“Biography: Clint Eastwood” 1). Eastwood worked a series of odd jobs, mainly manual labor, until he was drafted into the army in 1950. During his time in the Army, Eastwood proudly recalls how he managed to skillfully avoid combat in the Korean War by becoming a lead swim instructor (Schickel 50). Eastwood exhibited traits of the proudly rebellious antihero that many of Eastwood’s films would later depict. He was discharged from the Army three years later, after which he moved to Los Angeles and became interested in acting. His rugged good looks are what gained….

The workers of Jante are in a kind of 'perfect prison' where they self-monitor themselves, and one another's behavior for deviation. Deviance, social unrest, resistance to authority -- even challenging the factory owner who oppresses them -- is seen as getting too big for one's britches and a violation of Jante Law. A true Marxist would hope that a worker would be outraged at the behavior of the factory owner, and his actions towards Espen's family. However, a Jante resident is more apt to be angry at Espen's mother for wanting to improve her home, or daring to ask for a gift from the factory owner that others were not receiving. Despite the catastrophically low wages of all of the residents, the workers ineffectually blame one another, and make a virtue out of their own unnecessary suffering.
This focus upon the purely personal at the expense of real social change….

Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our ime places a Russian piece of literature in the Western context of literary influences without sacrificing the Russian characteristics of the writing. At the time of its first publishing in Russia the critiques of Lermontov's short stories novel were mostly controversies over the real values of such a literary undertaking. Lermontov's novel, published in the 1830s, a period of confluences in international literature, when the romanticism was slowly dying out and the realism had not yet started to make statements, led to powerful reactions, especially at home.
Lermontov's antihero was in fact creating confusion: many were not able to understand him, others were not willing to see through, while still another part of the readers and critics alike were considering him a threat to the old values they had grown fond of. Buracek, a reputed professor of science and Lermontov's contemporary "considered the novel a….

Faced with a social system that has no place for him, Tom does not rebel or repress himself, but merely creates a place for himself by dissolving into the background, becoming part of the hidden (and criminal) world that is a de facto product of any inequitable social system.
As mentioned above, Highsmith wrote for a number of comic books in the 1940s, and almost all of them were concerned with white male superheroes who had been given extraordinary powers or technology. There is a subtle joke about this fact early on, when Tom notes that his most recent victim "was a comic-book artist. He probably didn't know whether he was coming or going" (Highsmith 14). Thus, almost from the beginning Highsmith has made a connection between Tom and the world of comic books, a connection that helps explain Tom's eventual narrative journey.

hen looking at Tom's story in broad strokes,….

Salinger is an American literary treasure, best known for his novella Catcher in the ye. However, Catcher in the ye is but one of many in the canon of Salinger works. Salinger's short stories have recently garnered renewed attention because several unpublished Salinger stories were leaked online in November of 2013, three years after the author's death (uncie, 2013). Salinger died a recluse, and a man of mystery who was as much an American antihero as Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the ye. There have been numerous cultural allusions of Salinger's iconic novel and its quintessentially postmodern protagonist. Although no film has ever been made directly from the story of Catcher in the ye, Morgan (2010) points out that there have been allusions to Salinger stories in films like The Collector (1965) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993). Additionally, a 2013 documentary film about J.D. Salinger promises to reveal the….

Duncombe, Stephen. 2005. The Bobbed Haired Bandit. New York: New York University Press.
Stephen Duncombe, an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communications at the Gallatin School of New York University, wrote a true story of a dark-haired woman in Brooklyn in January 1924. He, teaching politics of media and history wrote The Bobbed Haired Bandit to show snippets of 1924 life from the perspective of the small, dark-haired woman robber. The woman wore a fur coat with a beaded dress underneath and as she was about to pay for the eggs and took out an automatic pistol from her coat pocket to rob the grocery store worker. It was here that reader gets to see the scope of not just the story, but also the character. The character and the argument of the book shows how a woman could overcome her circumstances through daring and risky action.

Page….

Though he has vowed to destroy as many vampires as he can and to protect humankind, he is faced with the paradox of destroying part of his identity while trying to save the other. Blade possesses many qualities of a hero, particularly the qualities imbued by his vampiric semi-transformation and his ability and resolve to be courageous for the betterment of humanity. Mythological heroes, much like Blade, often had a close, but conflicted, relationship with their supernatural adversaries and benefactors. Though Blade possesses characteristics of a classical hero, he is also a Byronic hero, as well as an antihero. Like the Byronic hero, Blade comes from a troubled past, is emotionally conflicted, intelligent, and mysterious, but is also considered an outcast. Because Blade is not human, nor is he demon, he struggles to find his place in the world and is forced to live on the fringe of both….

death conveniently resolves the problem of the murder of the Soc and is followed within hours as Whissen puts it, "Dally is made into a tragic antihero. He 'fought for Johnny,' and when Johnny dies, Dally, too, must die. And what he dies for is the absence of fairness in the world, for as all teenagers know, life is anything but fair. Again, though, where adults may guffaw at the sentimental silliness of Dally's way of death, Hinton makes it all quite credible -- even moving" (p. 185).

These events also serve as the basis for Ponyboy redeeming himself academically with his English teacher who cautions him that, "Pony, I'll give it to you straight. You're failing this class right now, but taking into consideration the circumstances, if you come up with a good semester theme, I'll pass you with a C. grade" (p. 178). After calling his English teacher late….

Journal Part 2

Odysseus is obviously the protagonist of the story -- seeing as how it's got his name on it -- but is he a hero? Would he be considered a hero today, based on contemporary standards? What evidence can you find to support both sides (heroic and not heroic)?

Odysseus takes revenge upon the suitors occupying his house, both the good and the bad, and he is not condemned for this by the author. Homeric Greece was a pre-Christian 'dog eat dog' society very different from our own. Odysseus is avenging the will of the gods as well as his own honor and his wife and house's honor, given that it was considered a sin to act in an inhospitable manner to a host. A hero today would likely show more mercy -- and also be physically faithful to Penelope. But Odysseus has an almost 'action hero' like quality when….

Many critics consider the name Godot to be a hidden name for God. Godot in the end is a paradox. The dramatist described in his play the person at the end of the World War II. It is a person who can be characterized as master and victim of will. The characters have a will but their wishes destroy them. The characters are waiting for someone or something to save them.
From the aesthetic point-of-view the postmodernism movement pleads for an anti-narrative structure of the work. Tarantino's film, "Pulp Fiction," doesn't have a classic plot. Two stories that seem unrelated come together in a "non linear plot." The first story is about two thieves, Honey unny and Pumpkin who decide to rob a restaurant, and the second story of two hit men working for mob, named Vincent and Jules.

The novel "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce is constructed using strange loops….

One can almost consider that American filmmaking contains fixed ideas where Japanese motion pictures produced by Kurosawa are the result of complex concepts coming from a series of cultures being brought together. In spite of the fact that Kurosawa's film goes against some of the most respected Japanese values during the 1950s, it is nonetheless related to the general context involving Japan. It follows Japanese film-making rules in an attempt to captivate an Asian public through having viewers identify with the characters from time to time. While the fact that the ronins in the film are shown as being glorious and as generally being responsible for the fact that the situation is saved, this type of people was considered to be predisposed to performing immoral acts at the time when the motion picture was released. The Japanese had just survived an international conflict that claimed the lives of many and….

film and events in American history. There are five references used for this paper.
Some events in history and various aspects of the entertainment industry have been known to affect each other. It is interesting to determine whether the Great Depression affected American Comedy, as well as why newsreels were important during orld ar II, and how they influenced fictional combat film.

The Great Depression

hen the Great Depression occurred, many Americans went from living in comfortable homes with plenty to eat, to living on the streets and begging for money and food on corners. These people did not have many reasons to laugh, and therefore it was important for the entertainment industry to find ways to take their minds of their troubles.

The Screwball Comedy

Since the "earliest days of cinema, there has been the existence of clown comedy, however the screwball variety arose during the Great Depression. One might liken it to….