Fables and Parables

X Marks the Chosen Ones The exploration of personal identity and the provocative secret escapades that adolescents experience are revealed in Joyce Carol Oates' bone-chilling parable, Where are you? Where have you Been? Our protagonist Connie, a vain fifteen-year-old, is forever day dreaming and boy hunting at the local mall. Her true escape, rock and roll, floats above every scene providing the reader with a musical montage. Connie meets her demise when "marked" by the alluring thirty-year-old

Truly, when Aeschylus commences the wretched tale of Prometheus, one whose cruel providence commands him to be torn per diem, one is bestowed a variation to the common theological account of a shrewd individual desiring to conquer the will of the gods. Moreover, Prometheus Bound transpires within the initial stages of the Epic Cycle, as Zeus has ultimately established his hegemony quite recently, and his decree is established to be absolute. It commences immediately when Prometheus has been charged

Radio Host: Hello and welcome. I’m your host Sara Clare, and this is Modern Literature Review on BBC 85.4. Our topic for discussion this week is The Theme of Integrity. Integrity is an admirable quality for a person to have. It encompasses many things, but at its core, honesty and the soundness of moral character. In literature it is a recurring pattern that the most outstanding characters are ones with enduring integrity. The novel featured has made a unique mark on modern literature. Its author

Stories of love and sacrifice abound in literature. Perhaps one of the most well known stories among teens and adults is the tale of a poor, young couple struggling to find the perfect Christmas gifts for each other using their very limited means. They each manage to get what they think is the perfect gift for the other, but only accomplish this by selling a prized possession which effectively makes the new gifts impractical. This bittersweet narrative, “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, illustrates

"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens up between its origins in the kabuki style and its subject of starvation in a mountain village! The village enforces a tradition of carrying those who have reached the age of 70 up the side of mountain and abandoning them there to die of exposure. Keisuke Kinoshita's 1958 film tells its story with deliberate artifice, using an elaborate set with a path beside

A Subject of Pride and Fate Although they are vastly different in their respective time periods and thus, culture, the stories of Oedipus Rex and Monkey: Story of the West have managed to capture an aspect of the human condition that has not changed over the millennia: the excess of pride. Humanity has also questioned the impact and control over their lives, wondering if some omniscient, higher power influences their lives or if man is truly in charge of paving their own destiny. Such philosophical

means of transcribing values, and past events. Written down in approximately 1,500 A.D. by an unknown author, Beowulf was originally a pagan fable that became a Christian allegory upon its transcription by Christian monks. However, as scholars have debated over the religious context in Beowulf, the attempts by the monks to turn the epic poem into a Christian parable ended merged, including both pagan and Christian aspects. The epic poem Beowulf encompasses Christianity and paganism through the trust

George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm can be perceived as a fable or as a more complex story. The novel can be viewed as a warning and outlines the specific dangers that come with the rise of a corrupt government, and also draws sympathy from the readers towards the working class who blindly follow the orders of the regime and rely on the unethical leaders for everything. Orwell strategically draws attention to how most political parties who promise to be better leaders than the previous

young, naïve girl who is easily and illogically swayed by the good looks and charm of the handsome man, the same heterosexual and misogynistic fairy tale that is constantly recreated in each of Disney’s movies. The same company that retold classic fables like Cinderella, Pocahontas, and Sleeping Beauty, notoriously exploits, objectifies, and hypersexualizes women’s bodies and femininity and has created a multibillion dollar industry that profits from its demeaning ideals that negatively categorizes

with a god, who created the heavens, the earth, the inferno and all that abides within these three realms. The stories go on to glorify their respective god, through tales of their heroic acts or sublime sermons. These stories exemplify not just a fable of the past, but a promise for the future. For Christianity and Islam, the two most popular religions in the world, these stories are similar in that many of them involve the same characters (Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Moses, Jesus, etc.). In fact, Islam