Essays on Escapism

O’Brien says that stories can make the dead come back to life through remembering. O’Brien explains a story of about the first dead body he witnessed in Vietnam of an old Vietnamese man. Other people in the platoon to the dead man in a mocking manner: One man proposed a slice of bread to the corpse, but O’Brien would not participate. O’Brien says that the corpse reminded him of Linda, a girl she used to know, then O’Brien all over sudden segues into the story about Linda. Despite the fact that O’Brien was ...

Kamal Hussein’s Thartharah fawqa al-Nil (Adrift on the Nile, 1971) is the film adaptation of the 1966 novel by Naguib Mahfouz. The film was released in 1971, four years after the Six-day War and a year after the death of Gamel Abdel Nasser, the second president of Egypt and the man behind the Revolution of 1952. The movie stars some of the most iconic actors of the time including Emad Hamdy, Ahmed Ramz and Adel Adham. The film focusses primarily on the protagonist Anis, a civil servant, and his experiences with a group of men who have created ...

Literature has always worked as the quintessential reflection of life and existence in the mortal world. The authors find their liberty as they engage in the portrayal of the fictional character as expressions of their creative zeal. Fiction goes on to get meshed with the elements of reality, thereby portraying the true picture of life in the literary works by the stalwart authors. A close introspection of one such work, The Moviegoer, by the acclaimed writer, Walker Percy would let one develop a perfect understanding of how literature can explore the true meaning of life in this temporal world ...

Communication Theory

Nowadays, the audience actively participates in the media message processing and influences the content that is channeled. Cognitive capacities of humans allow them to perceive and analyze the information presented in media and position it with the help of previous knowledge, scripts, expectations and attitudes. Facebook is one of the most popular social network sites that channels huge amount of information that is processed by the wide range of audience every minute. The two theories are applied to analyze Facebook as a form of media communication: a uses and gratification theory and schema theory. The way the audience approaches ...

“Music is a world within itself with a language we all understand.” These are the words of the legendary musician, Stevie Wonder. It goes to show the extent of the impact of music not only regarding entertainment but also regarding its psychological effects. Music has the power to stir the deepest of emotions and thoughts. In the recent past, the study of music psychology has increasingly become the focus of psychologists and other researchers who opine that there is a positive co-relation between the functioning of the psychological processes and singing, composing or merely listening to music (Zbikowski, 77). ...

It is life’s obvious fact that each of us has our own way facing our emotions, particularly those that are deemed better off forgotten and erased. Perhaps this is because of the human need to always be at a safety zone, where nothing can be harmful for the person, regardless if these are physical dangers, psychological and mental, or even emotional in nature. As such, this human tendency to escape from emotional and psychological burden is very apparent in the 1980 film, Ordinary People, which was directed by Robert Redford and starred Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and ...

Many of the works we have studied this term derive from a cultural context where social imbalances are reflected in the texts (i.e., class, race, colonialism, etc.). Consider one or more texts by taking into account how they respond to their cultural and historical circumstances.

Introduction

The purpose of literary texts is to highlight the human condition. Since time immemorial, literature has recorded and brought to light several incidents of social imbalance and disparity. American literary texts are replete with colonial and feminist literature and works on racial prejudices and authoritarianism. Such texts explore and guide the various ways in which ...

Feminism in Movies: Just Wright

Introduction

Decades after Mary Wollstonecraft began the suffrage movement, women’s liberation is in its third wave and has changed its style with feminists shedding the image of bra-burning activists to one of “the woman on the top” (Britannica Encyclopedia). According to prolific feminist studies writer Susan J. Douglas, as advocated by the British female pop group, Spice Girls, feminism has become a dirty word, and girl power has become the acceptable way to think and speak of strong women (2010). Feminists are no longer women clad in baggy clothes striving for better recognition and respect for their gender. In the ...