Symposium: the Great Books Symposium Journal
A Wright College Publication for Community College Students
Marika Malkerson Elizabeth is a strong willed, intelligent young woman in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth’s community of friends and family are obsessed with the idea of marriage. It is her mother’s greatest wish […]
Crystal Dynia Jane Austen argues in Pride and Prejudice that true happiness can be achieved but not as society defines it. Austen argues furthermore that instead an individual can only find happiness independent of society. […]
Jacqueline Barrett During the early nineteenth century most of Europe experienced a dramatic transformation. Accompanying the greater emphasis on reason during the Enlightenment was a zealous exploration of human nature. Several Europeans, such as Rousseau, […]
Cecilia Melendez The longer one lives and experiences life, the more opportunities one has to learn that there is often a gap between what people assume will make them happy and what actually will. Indeed, […]
Adriana Andrasz One of the main points of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is to describe the sexually oppressed society in which the author was living. Fielding exposes the sexually immoral society that hides behind riches […]
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 […]