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Darkness
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What is Darkness?

Darkness as a literary and philosophical concept appears across multiple disciplines, including literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. It functions both as a physical condition and a symbolic register for moral ambiguity, psychological depth, and the unknown. Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness dominates academic treatment of this topic, drawing sustained attention in courses on modernist fiction, postcolonial literature, and narrative theory. The novella's characters—Marlow, Kurtz, and the colonial world of Africa they inhabit—give students a rich framework for exploring how darkness operates as metaphor, critique, and narrative device. Beyond Conrad, the topic extends into other works, including Milton's Paradise Lost and H.G. Wells's short fiction, as well as philosophical frameworks such as Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith from Being and Nothingness.

Student papers on this topic take several distinct approaches. Many focus on close literary analysis of Conrad's novella, examining how Marlow's journey and Kurtz's character embody moral and imperial darkness. Comparative essays are also common, pairing Heart of Darkness with texts such as Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych or with film adaptations like Apocalypse Now. Some papers analyze modernist techniques, while others place the work in historical and cultural context, particularly regarding power and Africa.

A strong essay on darkness stakes a clear interpretive claim rather than simply cataloguing symbolic instances. Evidence drawn from specific scenes, character behavior, and narrative voice tends to carry the most analytical weight. The most common pitfall is treating darkness as a self-evident symbol without accounting for how a particular text constructs and complicates its meaning.

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Paper Doctorate

Absurdity and Blues: Camus and Baldwin's Stories Analyzed

Albert Camus was a great existential thinker and philosopher, yet he is most known for his works of fiction; essentially, Camus uses his fictional stories as a way to best put forward his own philosophical treatise.

Research Paper Doctorate

Monster Motivations and Heroism in Beowulf Explained

¶ … Old English poem Beowulf offers a number of contrasts in telling the story of the hero Beowulf and his fight to save a community not his own first from the monster Grendel and then from Grendel's mother.

Paper Undergraduate

Gender and Feminism in Fowles and McEwan's British Novels

[Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other. -- Simone de Beauvoir.

Paper Doctorate

Red Wolf: Taxonomy, Behavior, and Conservation Status

In this essay, I have written about the red wolf and different aspects related to this species. I have included information about its taxonomy, morphology & anatomy, distribution, habitat, feeding, predators, behavior, reproduction, development and economic value. Over all, I have given thorough information regarding the life and habits of the red wolf that is now an endangered animal.

Paper High School

Symbolism in "The Open Boat" and "Diving into the Wreck"

Although Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" is a short story, and Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" is a poem, these two pieces of literature share many thematic and symbolic elements in common.

Research Paper Masters

Richard Wilbur's "Boy at the Window": Imagery and Meaning

"Boy at the Window" by Richard Wilbur is a poem about the reciprocal pity that a young boy and a snowman have for each other as they both watch the other interact in an environment in which they cannot exist.

Essay Doctorate

Western Imperialism: Justification vs. Colonial Reality

This essay shows that imperialism was largely lauded by Western colonializers. According to them they were educating the illiterate; teaching the savage the ways of Jesus Christ; showing the primitive how to till and cultivate his soil as well as manage his business; and, in all ways, positively affecting the inferior race with the gentility and keener intelligence of the superior. Others admitted their stake of personal self-interest, but pegged on the same rationalizations: they were benefitting the inferior savage by occupying his land.

Paper Doctorate

Masculinism in Science Fiction: Le Guin vs. Haldeman

Science fiction has always been a masculine genre, no matter that Mary Shelley invented it in her novel Frankenstein. Until fairly recent times, most science fiction writers were men, and they dealt with subjects like technology, power, space battles, featuring male heroes, explorers and adventurers. In film, science fiction has been a perfect subject for ultra-masculine actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, although Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien trilogy proved that women could be masculine heroes as well and very effective at destroying hostile creatures that threaten humanity. Joe Haldeman's novel Forever Peace certainly fits within this conventional masculine narrative in science fiction, since the story is related by a male narrator named Sergeant Julian Class, an alienated soldier of the First World who opposes his own government and society. He is a class type of alienated and disillusioned male hero who nevertheless hopes that the world can achieve peace and prosperity through better use of technology. Even though it was written thirty years before, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is a radical departure from these types of themes and characters, since it takes place on an underdeveloped planet called Gethen far in the future.

Paper Undergraduate

Fascination and Repulsion: Otherness in Calcutta Fiction

In this chapter, I examine similarities and differences between The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre (1985) and Song of Kali by Dan Simmons (1985) with regard to the themes of the Western journalistic observer of the Oriental Other, and the fascination-repulsion that inspires the Occidental spatial imaginary of Calcutta. By comparing and contrasting these two popular novels, both describing white men's journey into the space of the Other, the chapter seeks to achieve a two-fold objective: (a) to provide insight into the authors with respect to alterity (otherness), and (b) to examine the discursive practices of these novels in terms of contrasting spatial metaphors of Calcutta as "The City of Dreadful Night" or "The City of Joy." The chapter further argues that these spatial metaphors are redolent of what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) refer to as the "phobic enchantment" (p. 124) of the Occidental social imaginary for the poverty, squalor and the horror of the Third World.

Thesis Doctorate

Puritanism in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Short Stories

The life of Nathaniel Hawthorne many times was played out in his stories as his life events and experiences bled forth into his works demonstrating the struggles that the writer faced within himself and his own life. Running through the threads of the stories of Hawthorne is the theme of Puritanism and this is clearly perceived as one reads the stories of Hawthorne entitled "The Scarlet Letter", "The Minister's Black Veil and "The Birthmark". In order to understand Hawthorne's view it is necessary that one understand what Puritanism is, believes, and represents.

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