Heroes
Essays

The story of Beowulf is summarized, from the reader's personal point of view. This is a reaction paper that reflects on themes of heroism in the saga and Beowulf's sense of 'specialness,' apart from the other warriors of his time and era. It also examines how Beowulf affirms cultural values, such as the need for charity and the need for a special, noble figure to sacrifice himself for others.

Chester Himes and Americo Paredes tell stories that compel readers to be concerned about structural racism in America. Though the settings are circa 1900s and 1940s, the stranglehold that bigotry has on America --…

Ancient mythology as never ceased to amaze and fascinate its readers and followers. Especially Egyptian and Greek mythology, having followers everywhere; in the current times it has found a new fan, that is the movie…

"The soldier's heart, the soldier's spirit, the soldier's soul, are everything. Unless the soldier's soul sustains him he cannot be relied on and will fail" (U.S. Army 2001,-page 4).

This paper examines all the factors by which a child can be impacted from seeing violent images, in both media and through video games. The paper takes a look at how this impacts the child's brain and behavior as well as how these effects can be mitigated, both by adults and by the government

In ancient Greek, the word "myth" literally means "word" or "story." It refers to authorless tales perpetuated by ancient Greek communities. The characters in Greek myths are typically gods and heroic humans.

Life sucks and then you die, is a popular saying among Gen-Xers to describe the futility of it all. The phrase may be original, but the sentiment certainly is not. Long before Generation X came on the scene, Ernest…

¶ … foundational mythological structures upholding the Greek system of belief in martial valor is the tale of the Trojan War. This tale has continued to hold ideological weight even today.

Dennis McDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000) is a book that was always guaranteed to upset orthodox Christian theologians and biblical literalists and fundamentalists everywhere, since its main thesis held that the author of the first gospel used the Iliad and the Odyssey as literary models. He compares Mark to the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, a Gnostic book, and describes it as a "hypotext" that "relies somehow on a written antecedent" (McDonald, p. 2). Specifically, Mark used Books 22 and 24 of the Iliad as models for the death and burial of Jesus, in which Achilles brutally kills Hector and then releases the body to his father, King Priam of Troy. Hector's soul went to Hades and never returned, but of course Jesus was resurrected on the third day, even if his rather dim disciples in Mark failed to recognize him initially.

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.