Essays on Banach

Understanding oneself is the way to happiness. Philosophy as taught by Socrates helps people turn inwards and in the process better themselves. Socrates apology is an account of the speech he made in a trial when he was being charged with not recognizing the gods that the state recognized. Instead, according to his accusers, he invented new gods and corrupted the youth in Athens. This speech is, however, not an apology as the modern meaning of the word suggests. The word apology in the speech is derived from the Greek word apologia that means a speech made in defense of, therefore, ...

12 Years a Slave tells about the life of Solomon Northup during the pre-Civil War United States. He was a free black man who lived in upstate New York who became famous locally for playing the fiddle well. His wife, Ann Hampton, was a woman of mixed ancestry. Together they had three children. One day, two men apporached him and asked him to join a traveling musical show, with a promise of generous wages. After he accepted, he was druged and sold to slavery. He was treated brutally as he continued to insist that he was a freeman. Left with no choice, he accepted his ...

Modern Life

The release of The Sun Also Rises in 1926 heralded a new era in American literature. Ernest Hemingway parlayed a background in journalism and a talent for tight, compelling writing into a a style that made him one of the most unique stylists in the history of American letters. Hemingway worked closely with the poet Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald in developing the modernist prose style that made The Sun Also Rises one of the 20th century’s most notable literary debuts. Critics have accused Hemingway of self-indulgence, even shallowness of vision. Yet he crafted a remarkably impactful method for conveying a deeper meaning through ...

In 1941, the influential critic and academic Oscar Cargill wrote what may be one of the most misleading analyses of The Sun Also Rises. While praising what he considered a remarkably symbiotic achievement in style and content, Cargill concluded that Hemingway’s initial entry into the literary milieu was limited in meaning and philosophical depth (Hays, 19). The Sun Also Rises was conceived as a modernistic contemplation of the post-war generation, yet many have criticized it as nihilistic; a self-indulgent, anti-intellectual response to the post-war generation and to the more elaborate style of writing that characterized the Gilded Age and the post-war ...