Contrast
Essays

Formal education is designed to enlighten and help individuals to improve their lives. However, for cultural ‘others,' this experience can also promote internal conflict. Using excerpts from Malcolm X and Robert Rodriguez, the six separate essays here consider different themes relating to this experience of otherness and ways of obtaining an education in spite of said otherness.

Social Indictment and a Religious Vision of Salvation in William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper"

Why Outsourcing Helps and Protectionism Hurts the U.S. Economy

The Formation of Nation-States: Italy and Germany

City Slickers does follow the western genre in that it portrays the main characters in the West and presents them with opportunities to overcome the wilderness. As with typical elements we find in Westerns, the frontier…

John Leonard's 'A Man of the World' and 'A Clean, Well-Light Place'

Being a country renowned for its neutrality when concerning warfare and for the fact that its economy has thrived during the last decades, Sweden offers a perfect recipe of success.

Scientific research throughout history has resulted in medical advances which prolong human life. Stem cell research is one more aspect of these advances and when conducted for therapeutic purposes, should be allowed.

This essay examines how Charles Perrault's use of wild and domesticated animals in his fairy tales serves to reify repressive ideologies regarding class and gender. Male characters are rewarded with animal helpers that allow them to reach the upper classes, while female characters are associated with dangerous wild animals and must suffer if they are to receive any kind of reward. While Perrault was mostly just enacting the ideology of 1690s France, this analysis demonstrates the importance of criticizing popular works in order to see their underlying ideological functions.

Capturing the anguish and agony which consumes those caring for loved ones at the end of life is an exceedingly difficult task, but essayists Katy Butler and Rachel Riederer have harnessed their unique literary abilities in vastly different ways to achieve the same ambitious objective. Published within the 2011 edition of the annual anthology of American creative nonfiction The Best American Essays, Butler's haunting elegy What Broke My Mother's Heart and Riederer's visceral portrayal of her own injurious accident Patient each deploy disparate rhetorical styles to impart a shared premise. With the rancorous debate over health care and its most efficient and effective form of delivery currently embroiling the nation's political, private and public sectors, penning a polemic railing against the medical industry hardly represents an exercise in intellectual courage, which is why the contributions made by Butler and Reiderer are refreshing in their candid and emotionally honest approach to the issue. The different perspectives offered by both writers result in What Broke My Father's Heart reading as a clinical reflection on illness with an emphasis on choices and consequences, while the power of Patient is derived from its ability to describe illness in a more direct way, conveying both the physical and emotional pain with vivid descriptions.