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Essay on the Tales of Thousand and One Nights
This essay will argue that the tales in 1001 Nights Tales “…are masterpieces of the art of storytelling. In inventiveness and sheer entertainment value, thy stand supreme among the short stories of all time.” I will attempt to show, through the various tales in the piece, that this holds true only through the medium of translation and the ability to adapt those values in the readers’ cultures.
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Essays on the Analects and Equiano’s Travels
- “The method used in the Analects is one of arduous [difficult] pursuit of such moral attributes as benevolence, wisdom, courage: the result is no recompense [repayment] either in this life or in the next- to follow the Way must be its own reward. A harsh philosophy, perhaps?” With specific examples from the Analects, write an essay explaining why Confucius is thought of as “one of the most reasonable and humane thinkers of all time.”
- Equiano’s Travels is a story of the fall from innocence into Western experience as a chronological account of episoidc narration, evoking emotions of senitmentality and moral duty from the reader, while evoking the universal meaning of yearning and freedom from the inhumanities of slavery.
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Summary 1
Gloria Ferrari, in her article Figures in the Text: Metaphors and Riddles in the Agamemnon, attempts to demonstrate the importance of metaphors in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. She notes that the linking of metaphors to the real world, myths and other texts needs to be understood visually first. Only then, she argues, can we understand the metaphors contextually. In so doing, she covers three metaphors: aidos (cover), ate (wind), and dike (light). And finally finishes the article with coverage of the Aeschylan “riddle” and the metaphoric imagery involved.
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Reaction 1
This essay will attempt to evaluate Gloria Ferrari’s assesment of the importance of various metaphores and riddles in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. More specifically, the importance in understanding the metaphores visually and linking them to the real world through shared cultural references.
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Summary & Reaction 2
Albert Ascoli, in his essay “Pyrrhus’ Rules: Playing with Power from Boccaccio to Machiavelli”, brings to the forefront the significance of a particular story of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The ninth story of the seventh day, told while Dioneo is king for the day, denotes the unique power struggle between males and females in a Pyrrhic manner. The importance is that this story shadows the unique balance of power between the characters in the frame story, and outside, in Boccaccio’s world.
This egalitarian society continues to exist despite the various pressures from within (the content of the stories told) and without (the context of the plague – the degradation of the social norms throughout society.) Particularly, Dioneo tells stories that usually have nothing to do with the topic set by the king or queen of the day. Further, his stories are the ones that usually strike hardest at the social mores and norms of this egalitarian societies.
Ascoli will bring to the forefront the question of implicit political and ethical values in the Decameron. By concentrating on the ninth story of day seven, and linking the story to Pyrrhus, he will show that power is actually a melange of perspective manipulation. He links this manipulation of perspective to a Machiavellian concept of power and the modernity of ideological control – reification, rather than by just force or corporeal control.
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