... texts written or read from an ecological perspective may well be literal (or descriptive or realistic or naturalistic) in mode but can't avoid being literary in medium. (Phillips expands this irony to ecocritical theory's absolute resistance to the absolutism of theory.) Though I share Phillips's belief that "we need to cure ecocriticism of its fundamentalist fixation on literal representation ... that contains it. Instead, when Emerson returns to the question of the surprising pleasure or charm people find naturally in symbols or tropes, he thinks of it as metonymy: "This metonomy, or ...

• Word Count: 9971
• Approx Pages: 40
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... journey is the metamorphosis of perspective and development of a traveller, which can result in dissolution, or enlightenment. At the end of journeys the traveller will emerge rebirthed for better or worse, after contact with new foreign perspectives along the way. These new aspects may contrast with their own, however ones values can be expanded and matured over these new insights. During the course of the journey towards ... his family. All he has time for are the teachings of adult responsibilities by his father. Learning to drive a car is usually a privilege only reserved for adult...

• Word Count: 904
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

German writer Franz Kafka's and American J.D. Salinger's respective masterpieces, The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Catcher in the Rye (1951), examine the universal themes of personal relationships within the context of painful change. Each did that in his own way: Kafka portrayed familial support and sympathy as necessary to the alleviation of pain, while Salinger suggested that to truly grow up is to come to terms with one's ... , however, Gregor wishes to die: "his conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's" (54). Kafka adds humor and irony wit...

• Word Count: 1076
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... scene should have been, in reality, on the scaffold themselves. Hawthorne, through this symbol, allowed the readers to realize the Puritans were punishing and humiliating Hester for something they themselves possessed in their own life: sin. Also, Hawthorne used the scarlet letter itself, the elaborate cloth "A" which Hester wore, as a symbol, for throughout the book the letter went through a metamorphosis, initially being synonymous with "adulteress" and eventually standing ... contradict the stubborn judgments of the Puritan leaders by allowing a sinner and outcast to be commended, ra...

• Word Count: 548
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... ), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein(1816), E.T.A. Hoffmann's Kater Murr(1820/21), and James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner(1824) are four novels of the earlier nineteenth century which develop their irony through varieties of structural bifurcation. All may have been available to the author of Wuthering Heights (1847), whose own richly experimental novel works with intricate permutations of multiple narrative, unreliable narration, and two-volume ... in Wuthering Heights, covet Hindley Earnshaw's weapon, reflecting how powerful I should be, possessing such n instrument? Her metamorp...

• Word Count: 2971
• Approx Pages: 12
• Grade Level: Undergraduate