Poetry that creates a very specific sense of place through the all senses has always attracted me, especially if the poems also have a strong rhythmical and musical quality.  Two poems that are particularly evocative in this respect are Dylan Thomas’ prologue to Under Milk Wood and Inversnaid by Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Under Milk Wood opens in a ( Read more... )

[‘The Canterbury Tales consistently present natural energies escaping socially-constructed order.’  Substantiate, modify or refute this view.]

The common themes of love, lust, sex and jealousy in The Canterbury Tales certainly suggest a trend towards natural anarchy over social order, yet the idea of there being any true consistency within the tales ( Read more... )

The most striking thing about A Room with a View is the way in which the novel shifts so dramatically in tone between Italy and England, to the extent that the beginning and end feel like two separate novels. Forster’s treatment of his characters shifts from bitter satire, to forgiveness and sympathy, to glowing romance. Whether we see this as ( Read more... )

[What lessons should we learn from what Parfit calls the non-reversibility objection?]

The non-reversibility objection draws attention to the limitations of Kant’s (first) formulation of the Categorical Imperative.  Though seemingly unlimited in the way in which it is universally binding, ruling out maxims that cannot be universally accepted rather ( Read more... )

[Discuss the ways in which modernist writers developed new conceptions of subjectivity and language ]

Modernist writers were particularly preoccupied with conceptions of subjectivity; different ways of seeing the world and interpreting meaning.  Rhys and MacDiarmid may not strike a reader as similar enough for comparison, yet both play with language ( Read more... )

Discuss the role that pragmatism plays in the work of writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century.

Virtually since its publication in 1878, there has been fierce debate amongst critics and readers alike over just what kind of girl Daisy Miller is:  Is she a flirt, a coquette, even a sly manipulator of others, or is she in fact ( Read more... )

Can Kant’s argument for the second formulation of the categorical imperative be understood as establishing that there is a categorical imperative without appeal to the existence of free will?

The relationship between Kant’s argument for his second formulation of the categorical imperative and free will is tricky because though the maxim’s very ( Read more... )

(the original version of this had footnotes but LJ won't let me transfer them.  I've done my best to re-incorporate refs where possible but apologies for any that're missing)

不是我不明白
         这世界变化快
“It’s not that I don’t understand, the world is changing fast ”
- Cui Jian

The history of China is one of flux: revolution and reaction, demolition, ( Read more... )

No assessment of the treatment of nature and ‘the human’ in enlightenment literature would be complete without looking at the works of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Indeed, it is not uncommon for the two writers to be mentioned in the same breath; Emerson’s Nature naturally seeming to flow out of the same love of the natural world ( Read more... )

[Critically discuss Plato's view of  the educational role of the arts in The Republic.]

Plato takes an increasingly hard-line view towards the arts throughout the Republic.  To him, the moral influence and practical purpose of the arts outweighs the aesthetic, to the extent that by book X he is proposing the banishment of poets from the city.  Yet ( Read more... )