Aristotle Visits Bed-Stuy: The Practical Wisdom and Rhetorical Virtue of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing has centered itself as a quintessential piece of cinema regarding the issue of American race relations. At its core, the film asks a rather obvious moral question: What is the right thing to do regarding racial struggle? Throughout the multi-layered picture, Lee consults several viewpoints on the matter—including the ideologies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—in how to address racial injustice and marginalization, challenging what “the right thing to do” exactly is. To develop authenticity and his overall message, Lee relies heavily on Aristotelian rhetoric, of which rhetorical virtue and practical wisdom stand out.
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“A Jew’s Daughter”: Metaphorical Bilingualism and the Tragedy of Religious Assimilation in The Merchant of Venice
To leave your religion is to destroy your entire upbringing—this is familiar advice from my fifth-generation Jewish American parents. Although the “Jewish bloodline” runs matrilineally[1] and my parents care less than previous generations about the religion of whom I marry, I know that if I were to convert, it could shatter my family. Perhaps this is why I sympathize with Jessica, from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and understand the gravity of her decision to marry a Christian and convert. In this essay, I will explain Jewish identity, modern feelings towards conversion out of Judaism, and linguistic assimilation models in order to fully dive into the loss of self in Jessica’s conversion.
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Laundry and the Monk's Robe: Buddhism in the Modern Era
Hygiene and cleanliness are undisputed expectations for members of civilized societies across the globe. Such hygiene may be achieved in a myriad of ways, depending on the location and resources available. The use of soaps and water is often the norm when it comes to the cleaning of clothing and fabrics. The introduction of washing machines has made cleanliness convenient, removing the need for households to spend hours scrubbing and drying fabrics. Certain fabrics demand special care, such as precious satins or embroidery, which present cleaning difficulties on a physical level and must be washed manually. There is difficulty in cleaning certain fabrics beyond the physical limitation due to sentiment or symbolic importance. In Southeast Asia, Buddhist monks living in monasteries are held to the same societal expectation of hygiene as any other civilian, but are also presented with religious demands on their outward presentation.
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The Discoverie of Motive: Key Events that Motivated Reginald Scot to Write The Discoverie of Witchcraft
Behind every conscious decision, there is a motive. It is what drives us all to achieve a better life and world around us. Reginald Scot, an early modern English demonologist, was no different. During the later decades of sixteenth-century England, the height of the witch persecution was impending due to societal ignorance, religious tensions, and poverty. While this era did not see as many witch persecutions as the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, Scot nevertheless set forth a radical treatise titled, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, that argued against women who confessed to causing maleficia, or demonic harm, because they could not have manifested it.
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From d’Aulnoy and Perrault to Disney: A Comparative Study of Fairy-Tale Adaptations and Fan Fiction
The adaptation of fairy tales is a tradition that has lasted for centuries. Early fairy tale authors, such as d’Aulnoy and Perrault, enjoyed considerable freedom when adapting fairy tales. However, the rise of Disney restricted access to further fairy tale adaptations through the company’s persistent enforcement of copyright laws. Nevertheless, with the arrival of the internet, users found unprecedented avenues to engage in the reimagining and adaptation of fairy tales without fearing copyright laws, echoing an era predating Disney.
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The Social Pressure on Janie in Zora Neale Hurtson's Their Eyes Were Watching God Through an Intersectional Lens
Individuals are heavily influenced by significant figures around them- for better, or for worse. Janie Crawford, the protagonist within Hurston’s literary work Their Eyes Were Watching God, is shaped through social pressures related to her race and gender on her own journey to self-discovery and acceptance.
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Art Nouveau as Avant-Garde: Redefining ‘Nature’ through Metamorphosis and Interrelationship
Art Nouveau was an art reform movement of the late nineteenth century in France that sought to revive nature in response to the industrial standardization of art and design. This project introduces that Art Nouveau involves metamorphosis and interrelationship as key principles that unify the construction with ‘design fitness,’ incorporating utility and beauty, and examines Art Nouveau as an avant-garde turning point that led to the emergence of Modernism, breaking free from traditional representations of nature and architecture.
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From Angst to Ashes: The Complexities of Addiction in the Lives of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley, 1987-2002
In the rain-soaked streets of 1990s Seattle, a seismic shift was brewing. The pulsating guitars and angst-ridden lyrics of grunge did not just define a genre; they became the battle cry of a generation hungry for authenticity. Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden emerged as icons, their raw sound echoing the disillusionment and alienation felt by millions. Yet, amidst this musical revolution lurked a shadowy presence: drug culture.
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Booker T. Washington: A Strategist, Not an Apologist
After visiting Booker T. Washington’s school in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1908, Len G. Broughton wrote, “Perhaps no man in this country is better known than Booker T. Washington, and perhaps no man is more poorly understood or incorrectly reported as he.” This assessment remains true today, as historians often misrepresent Washington and his accomplishments.
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Behind the Scenes at the Ballet: Body as Art and Business
In the decade of the 1830s, there was a rise in ballet as an art form to be casually consumed by the mostly upper-class public, and with it, the idea of the basic archetypes for female characters that we still see today, such as the young and innocent girl and the provocative seductress.
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Utilitarian Aesthetics: The Function of Art and Individuality in John Stuart Mill and George Eliot's Middlemarch
In his two seminal works, On Liberty and Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, one of the leading philosophers of the 19th century, argued for the import of a broadened conception of individuality and the general utilitarian good of intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. Utilitarianism is a philosophy that promotes happiness above all else, it is often understood under the motto “the most good for the greatest number of people”.
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Disentangling Synonyms: How Resistance to Nazism and Antisemitism Were Distinct Movements in Occupied Norway
After Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, a resistance movement gradually emerged from numerous sectors of Norwegian society, including the government in exile (comprising both Norway’s Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold and Royal King Haakon VII), the Church, businesses and industry, political and social organizations, and individual citizens.
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Visualizing War in The Digital Age: Feminist Aesthetics and Open-Source Investigations
In examining open-source aesthetics, which are often clinical and exacting, this article explores how feminist methodologies might offer reparative modes of envisioning conflict to ensure greater social justice. The case study presented in this paper analyzes an open-source report produced by the New York Times Visual Investigations Unit, including a formal analysis of a contemporary video documenting the Ukrainian/Russian conflict, examining the way that truth claims are asserted through the “right to look,”, as theorized by Nicholas Mirzoeff. Through the prism of this theory, I contend that open-source counter-visualities can effectively challenge state power and could benefit from the deployment of feminist aesthetics that humanize digital formations of marginalized subjects with greater empathy, more robust ethical protocols, and efficacious strategies.
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All-Star Superman: Exploring the Harmonious Dichotomy of Dual Identities
Superman tends to be a divisive superhero, and the main issue is centered around his superpowers. While some fans are drawn to the immense scope of his powers, others find it a source of contention, as his abilities sometimes lead to questions about narrative tension and relatability. The ongoing discussion about the vast magnitude of Superman’s powers inherently delves into the complex nature of his dual identity. All-Star Superman (created by the author Grant Morrison and illustrator Frank Quitely in 2011) is a story that beautifully displays the dichotomy and harmony of Superman and Clark Kent. On a single page of the graphic novel, Superman’s narrative is challenged by seamlessly blending his two opposing sides into one through the visual integration of his dual identities.
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The “despised Hebrew”: Identifying Antisemitism in Victorian Popular Culture, 1835-1895
In nineteenth century English society, antisemitism resulted from long-standing antipathies towards Jewish people combined with societal conditions. Historians and literary scholars explain how Victorian authors encouraged antisemitism. However, they view these works as separate incidents of antisemitism, disconnected from both each other and places, like Eastern Europe. This limited perspective precludes a comprehensive understanding of the interwoven character and global ramifications of antisemitism during the Victorian era. By analyzing Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and George du Maurier’s Trilby, this paper argues that while Victorian authors used antisemitic stereotypes because of historically ingrained hostilities towards Jews, antisemitism also arose as a response to particular circumstances and conditions that emerged in England during the nineteenth century. Exploring these works in relation to each other reveals how antisemitism in Victorian popular culture is part of an interlinked historical phenomenon of hostility toward Jews.
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Model Off Duty: The Life of Elizabeth Siddall in Poetry and Paintings
A “supermodel” of the Victorian Era, Elizabeth Siddall (1829–1862) is forever memorialized in the paintings and poetry of the men she sat for, the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, including her eventual husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). However, the depictions of Siddall created by these men are not authentic. They captured her likeness to create characters, using her image to tell stories of literary and historical figures and heroines of myths and legends — all with an aesthetic, romantic, and sensual undertone. Siddall was a face and body used for the Pre-Raphaelite method of art for art’s sake. An artist in her own right, Siddall is survived by her poetry and paintings. After Siddall’s death, few of her letters and diaries remained. Any conclusions made about her actual life and personality are drawn from these bodies of work. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s portrayal of Siddall in their art and poetry created a narrative of her life that, when compared with Siddall’s own art, romanticized and glorified a life of struggle, illness, and addiction. To tell the story of Siddall, one must acknowledge both her art and that of the Brotherhood.
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Translating the Imaginary Space in Poetry: An Example of Translations of Emily Dickinson into German
The imaginary space is a significant element in any verse text, establishing a unique discursive situation between the poet and the reader. The creation of it involves a lot of riddles, hints, and specific pointing gestures, making it especially hard to translate. Is there even a way to translate the unique poetic effects of this section of the text into another language? In my research, various translations of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into German provide a source for the analysis of possible strategies of translators, among which Paul Celan is the most noticeable.
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The Female in Frankenstein: Man’s Attempt to Abort Femininity
Although Frankenstein speaks exclusively through the voices of men, feminist ideals persist through the characters’ conflicts with each other as the novel unfolds. The prime example is Frankenstein’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, whose main conflict manifests between himself and his creation. This relationship parallels the emotionally complex experiences of women through the journey of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood. Shelley uses Victor, to introduce issues of birth and creation without disrupting the status quo of male-dominated narratives popular at the time she was publishing. Shelley effectively creates a monster, both literal and metaphorical, that induces the same fears of getting pregnant and giving birth that women encounter in a society that already restricts and controls most aspects of their lives.
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Capturing Difference: Depicting Blackness in the Roman Empire
When analyzing these snapshots of native and North Africans, a few questions start to emerge: If ancient historians discriminated against these individuals, what do their sculptural representations say? Were they depicted similarly to their Italian neighbors? If so, can we say that they were equals? The Romans’ view of their new African subjects is nuanced and paradoxical. I argue that although Roman artists depicted politically powerful North Africans such as Juba II of Mauretania (ca. 50 BCE–24 CE) and Septimius Severus (ca. 145–211 CE) with reverence, common Black Africans were depicted as household items with exaggerated physical characteristics.
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Inculturation: The Influence of Bartolomé de Las Casas on the Jesuits
The European discovery of the Americas and its cultures introduced theological and anthropological questions for Christians that had not yet been fully answered on such a grand scale. The Catholic Church, not accounting for different cultural groups, seemingly had the anthropological question, “Who am I?” The Hebrew Bible most clearly proclaims that the human race was created in the image of God. Yet, despite this, Christians throughout history have struggled and failed to recognize and affirm the full humanity of all peoples. In turn, Christians have oppressed, enslaved, and killed countless persons whom they deemed not worthy of the title: “human.” The European Christians alongside the Indigenous inhabitants of these lands encountered cultures that were entirely different to their own. Two essential questions arose out of this cultural dichotomy for European Christians. The first was not, “Who am I?,” but “Who are these indigenous peoples?,” as their culture was evidently different from the European Christians.
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