Adriane Walther February 22‚ 2011 Prompt: The meaning of some literary works is often enhanced by sustained allusion to myths‚ the Bible‚ science‚ history‚ art‚ or other works of literature. Select a literary work that makes use of such a sustained reference. Then write a well-organized essay in which you explain the allusion that predominates in the work and analyze how it enhances the meaning of the work as a whole. Tom Stoppard escorts the mind on a journey in search of knowledge through
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Allusion Literal meaning How it develops theme Sources I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant (II‚ii‚14) It out herods Herod (III‚ii‚14) I would whip a guy for making a tyrant sound too tyrannical. That’s as bad as those old plays in which King Herod ranted. Please avoid doing that. In this allusion to a Moslem god (Termagant) and to Herod‚ the Biblical King that beheaded John the Baptist. Hamlet is talking to the troupe of players and advising them not to overdo their
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In Act four‚ of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible from 1953‚ he demonstrates that one must bend to the will of the court of Salem or follow their own moral guidelines. Miller uses dramatic dialogue‚ ethos and allegorical allusions‚ showing that the people in Salem have to make person choices to follow or abandon their morals. This act’s purpose is to show the mental strain on the characters in the play in order to show the difficulty of the decisions the characters must make. The implied ethical
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painting by Caravaggio in 1608. The biblical allusion tells the story of Herod‚ the tetrarch‚ imprisoning John the Baptist for divorcing his wife and uptaking his brother’s wife‚ Herodia. Furthermore‚ Herodia’s daughter Salome requests for John’s head on a platter from Herod who promises to fulfill her desires (Graves). Eliot utilizes the tale to convey the degradation of power Prufrock will experience under the infatuation of the woman. Under
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My own research for the Interactive Oral‚ regarding Bolaño’s allusions to artistic and political figures within his novel‚ Amulet‚ largely facilitated my developed understanding of the text. Previous to my research‚ my analysis considered Bolaño’s stylistic techniques‚ temporal distortion‚ kaleidoscopic memories within Auxilio’s narrative‚ structural sequencing of the text‚ awareness of motifs and themes‚ and Deleuzean nature of something “becoming.” However‚ beyond my contextual understanding
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Hamlet written by Shakespeare during the years of 1599 – 1601. Throughout this play there are many allusions that are portrayed towards the Elizabethan audience that only people from their time period would understand. When I first read over these lines I thought nothing of it and did not understand these words thrown at me‚ which required me to do research. If a line in a play requires research for an audience t understand it then those lines need to me modernized‚ which is why I have come up with
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In “How to Read Literature like a Professor” he uses many literary terms like symbolism and allusion but the one literary device I’ll be focusing on in this essay will be how he used allusion throughout it. One of the allusions used is in chapter five “When in doubt… it’s from Shakespeare”. The author alludes to past Shakespeare plays and how they’re depicted later on in the 1970s and around the 1980s. Some of his plays have transformed into completely different ideas from what they originally were
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Throughout the book Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli‚ there are many literary allusions. Most relate to other books‚ but some relate to real life. Stargirl is cheering at a basketball game. Unfortunately they are losing. There‚ Leo makes an interesting observation. “A kid names Ron Kovac. He stood six-foot-eight and averaged thirty points per game. Our players looked like five Davids flailing against Goliath” (69). This quote relates to the biblical story about David and Goliath. In the story‚ Goliath
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Dante’s Inferno which is about Dante going to Hell and asking a question to a false counselor‚ Guido da Montefeltro. The false counselor decides to answer Dante’s question because the answer will be kept in Hell with Dante. This epigraph makes an allusion to what happens in the poem‚ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock‚ the speaker of this poem‚ wants to ask fundamental questions of people; yet‚ if
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In the critical analysis of William Blake’s The Tyger‚ Thomas M. Curley explains how Blake uses allusion to the Bible and metaphor of God’s creatures to describe the divine paradox between innocence and experience that humans cannot grasp.(-but not for an all-powerful God to create) He describes that The Tyger is composed of questions from a child’s curiosity about how an all-powerful being could create both the good and evil that exist in the world‚ which furthers his theme that human aspect is
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