Study guides: popular books, letter o
The story of Oedipus is one of the most famous in the European literature. There are few people who haven’t heard of it or of a well-known Oedipus complex. Sometimes it seems that the plot of the story is so preeminent that it’s not worth spending the time to read it. But a very familiar story opens up with fascinating details, additional plot lines, rich characters and many more...
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a painfully accurate depiction of the day of Soviet labor camp prisoner. Ivan Denisovich is an intelligent and strong-willed man, whose main task is not only survival but preserving his morals and identity intact. Unfortunately, the camp is specifically designed to strip the prisoners of their free will, any hopes and desires...
If there’s a book that has managed to portray the reality of American Great depression times, that is for sure “Of Mice And Men”. When making through another day is a victory, when a friendship is broken and a man’s life is lost, when the superior’s family is causing trouble but there’s no way to stop it without putting yourself in danger... The life...
“Oliver Twist” is no Tom Sawyer, but the idea is the same. It is a novel written by Charles Dickens at the end of the 19th century with a similar plot that has its unique particularities. The novel avoids romanticizing the life and motifs of criminal gangs in London, but it also highlights the cruelty in which the orphans lived in England. That’s why the novel’s second...
Every piece William Shakespeare created is doomed to be a success. “Othello” is one of his later works and this is a culmination of all the mastery and creativity the writer possessed. This particular piece is a mix of an Italian prose written by Cinthio and Knolles narrative on the history of the Turks. Shakespeare borrowed the events and added his style and magnificent literary...
During his life Ken Kesey has been very interested in alternative perception, altered states of human mind and mental disorders. He based a lot of his works on it. Throughout his life he’s made himself a rebellious reputation of avid drug experimenter and wrote a couple of texts on that. One of them, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”, was written right after the...
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It represents a typical Latin text with all its colors, passions, brightness and grotesque. The events of the book take place in Colombia and are centered around one family of Buendias. They founded a separate city Macondo that is isolated from the outside world. A patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, who is a...
The play by Thornton Wilder is very interesting because it is literally a play within a play. The events of the book are happening on stage in a theater of the small town of Grover’s Corners. The best way to get acquainted to this play is to actually watch it in the theater - this will give you the authentic feeling of presence inside the plot and completely break the fourth wall between...