Symposium: the Great Books Symposium Journal
A Wright College Publication for Community College Students
Joi Hill My focus is on John Dryden’s representation of love and marriage. Precisely, in Marriage a la Mode, Dryden presents marriage without love. Dryden exemplifies this in three ways. First, certain characters are bored […]
Kelly Mahon In Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the themes of illusion versus reality and communication breakdown serve to demonstrate similarities between Shakespeare’s character, Hamlet, and Stoppard’s characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. […]
Nancy Wallace In Coriolanus, Shakespeare discusses the gap between how we should act and how people with their own agenda really do act. The play looks insightfully at the flaws of social classes to illustrate […]
Roxane Buss Editor’s note: The history plays and classical tragedies of William Shakespeare are of such unsurpassed insight that for at least a century prominent people like Sigmund Freud have argued that Shakespeare could not […]
Maria Villasenor Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales includes four tales that deal at length with views of marriage. In his essay, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” George Lyman Kittredge was one of the first to recognize […]
Noel Nicoletti Many of the greatest novels of all time center their themes on issues of morality and the consequences of living righteous or evil lives. The Tale of Genji is no exception. Written by […]
Jennifer Proce It has been commonly observed that during the time of the late Roman Republic, society was feeling the destructive effects of many years of civil wars. These wars were responsible for a breakdown […]
Joseph J. Mauro This essay will argue that Cato the Younger’s constant and unbending opposition to The First Triumvirate, specifically Pompey, caused the Roman democracy to crumble and Caesar to emerge as dictator. First, I […]
Walter Trentadue What is love? One of the problems with trying to define love is that we often end up using the word love itself in the definition. This is a fundamental problem. According to […]
Paul Otake Socrates, through Diotima, says that every soul is pregnant and the ultimate end every person seeks is immortality. The pursuit of knowledge cannot go on forever because the knowledge we obtain is soon […]