Joshua Cruz, Ph.D.

Summary The Home and the World, by Rabindranath Tagore, takes place in Bengal, India, during the Swadeshi independence movement in the early 1900s. The story progresses through the viewpoints of...

There is little description of the setting in Waiting for Godot. All that exists in the text is "A country road. A tree." The fact that there is so little description implies that there is nothing:...

Descartes engages in radical skepticism in his Meditations. Here, he wonders about the extent of what he knows and sets a criteria for himself: he cannot say that he knows anything that he possibly...

One of the major precursors to the modernist movement was Charles Darwin. In the mid-nineteenth century, he began developing his theories of evolution. Over the course of fifty years, there were...

Throughout the novel All American Boys, Quinn is torn between loyalty to his friends, particularly the policeman Paul, and a broader idea of racial justice. Quinn witnesses his good friend and...

Metaphors are common in both literature and day-to-day conversation, as they help us to grasp abstract concepts. The most common metaphors are sometimes called conceptual metaphors; they are so...

In Waiting for Godot, Lucky seems to be anything but lucky; he is a slave to the pompous Pozzo. Lucky must carry Pozzo's belongings, dance, and even think/recite on command. Otherwise, he seems...

Waiting for Godot has been described as a story about nothing. Indeed, very little happens in the play: two men, Estragon and Vladimir, wait by a tree for someone else to come to them (Godot) over...

Post-structuralism is a philosophical position that suggests that all events and ideas in life are inherently unstable, but this is especially true of language. Before post-structuralism, the idea...

To understand what the speaker's "promises" symbolize in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," it is important to understand what the poem is about. The speaker has chosen to stop for a moment in...

"Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth contains a number of elements that are common to postmodern literature. Perhaps the most obvious is the way that the narrator remains self-aware throughout the...

Three of many mythological entities in Dante's Inferno are Charon, Cerberus, and harpies. Charon is the demon ferryman who takes souls, as well as Dante and Virgil, into Hell. Cerberus is a...

One aspect of Lovecraft's writing that sets it apart is its academic or credible tone. His narrators walk a fine line when reporting their own experiences while attempting to relay the information...

Perhaps one of the most famous lines attributed to Sartre is "man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." Sartre's notion of freedom...

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson describes an annual ritual in which all villagers of a small town draw a slip of paper out of a box. One slip of paper has a black dot. The family of the villager...

Despite the fact that Frankenstein was written by a woman (Mary Shelley), women's voices are largely absent in the text. The story is a frame narrative told by Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein,...

If you are trying to prove that Desert Exile is an argument, it would make sense to first explain to your reader what makes something an argument: what are the criteria that compose an argument? An...