Reality and Superstition in Silas Marner

Despite the scientific advancements that have made the twenty-first century's technological marvels and unprecedented understanding of natural forces commonplace, debates still rage between empirical reason and unprovable faith or superstition.  Debates such as these are not new.  Nearly two hundred years ago, new theories about geological time and the evolution of all species challenged long-established religious beliefs.  The ensuing debate broke free of the rarefied confines of theological discourse and made its way into larger society, appearing in the literature of the times.  In the novel Silas Marner, Victorian intellectual and novelist George Eliot explores empirical reason and irrational faith, ultimately bringing them together in a philosophy with room for aspects of both.  With the title character's tale, Eliot argues that while there may indeed be supernatural or divine forces at work in the world, those forces can achieve no good without human reason and choice.

The Emptiness of J. Alfred Prufrock

The early twentieth century marked a significant change in American life, forcing upon the American people an urbanized, industrialized modernity, which not everyone embraced.  The intellectuals of the day devoted their creativity to responding to the rapid changes in their society, producing a body of work now known as "American literary modernism" ("Introduction" 1178).  Foremost among the Modernists was the conservative poet T. S. Eliot.  His 1918 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," makes clear with every line his discontent with what he perceived as the emptiness and meaningless of modern life, especially as compared to the richness and beauty of the past.

Class, Money, and Women in The Great Gatsby

In the decades leading up to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, American social mores underwent momentous changes.  A new ruling class emerged, one whose status and power derived not from respectable ancestry, but from enormous wealth and its display.  Conspicuous consumption, the accumulation of goods to flaunt the fortunes of the purchasers, was born.  So was a new American dream, which promised that anyone, from any background, could achieve status and wealth, either through industry or marriage.  By Fitzgerald's time, this new American dream had produced Astors, Carnegies, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and a host of pampered, bejeweled wives and mistresses.  The new American dream, however, had a brutal dark side.  Fitzgerald explores that dark side in his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, in which he exposes the ugly truth beneath the gilded surface of society:  the desire for money and social status has the power to destroy personal authenticity, particularly the personal authenticity of women.

From Beowulf to Chaucer: The Struggle to Impose Order on the British World

Since the emergence of the human race, people have struggled to impose order on their world.  Homo sapiens is spectacularly unfit for life in the wild:  physically slower and weaker, with more limited senses and less innate protection against the elements, than many other species.  Only mankind's creative intelligence, which gives us the ability to impose order on our world according to our needs, allows us to survive in an otherwise hostile and dangerous world.  It is not surprising, therefore, to find an obsession with order in the recorded thought and literature of any civilization.  Perhaps due to unique geographical and political conditions, however, this obsession with order is particularly prominent in British literature.  A constant preoccupation with the definition and imposition of order-in times of war and uncertainty, upon the outside world, and, once the culture had achieved adequate levels of stability and sophistication, upon society and the self-unifies early British literature and ties its development inextricably to the early history of the British Isles.

America's Role in the Struggle for Control of Taiwan

In the decades since the 1949 establishment of the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan, ROC leadership and the communist government of the People's Republic of China on the mainland have engaged in a struggle for the future of Taiwan.  This struggle has often involved the United States.  Although Taiwan's democratic, capitalist society aligns more closely with American ideology than the PRC's single-party, communist autocracy, United States economic and strategic interests complicate the question of which side to support.  The question of Taiwanese independence, and the United States's role in helping to secure or hinder it, has become more urgent in the wake of the 2008 Taiwanese presidential elections.  In 2008, the pro-independence Democratic People's Party leadership lost to the historically more pro-China Nationalist Party, or KMT.  The KMT, Winberg Chai writes in “Taiwan’s 2008 Elections and Their Impact on U.S.-China-Taiwan Relations,” “is expected to retreat from the DPP’s 'Taiwanese identity' policy in favor of an eventual reunification with the Chinese mainland” (83-84).  If this happens, China, already “the second-largest economy in the world after the US” (“China”), will gain an additional twenty-three million citizens and an additional $4 billion GDP (“Taiwan”).  Meanwhile, Asia will lose a vibrant democracy economy with, according to the U.S. State Department, a human rights record especially commendable for its ban on compulsory and child labor and its absence of political prisoners (“China (Taiwan Only)”).  On November 16, 2009, President Barack Obama declared continuing United States support for China's one-China policy (“Obama”), tipping the scales even further in favor of reunification.  It is now critical that the United States reexamine its commitment to the balance of power in Asia, and decide whether its strategic and economic interests merit the annexation of a free and democratic nation by a communist state.

More Fun with Basic French

Answer to an essay question on our French 101 final exam.  We were given a picture of four people sitting at a café, and asked to describe it.


Ils sont au café.  Ils sont quatre:  deux filles et deux hommes.  Ils sont jeunes.  Aujourd'hui, il fait beau.  Ces étudiants parlent et dejeunent ensemble.  Ces deux filles ont l'intention de faire du shopping après.  Un jeune homme a besoin de préparer ses cours.  L'autre homme va faire les courses pour sa mère après.  Ce soir, ils vont sortir.  Ils ont l'intention de dîner au restaurant.

Final Exam: Globalism's True Impact

Written in class as a final exam.  Last few paragraphs are less developed because I was running out of time.


The privileges and products of economic globalization saturate everyday American life.  From automobiles to underwear, bananas to backpacks, nearly everything most Americans purchase, use, or consume owes at least a part of its production to foreign labor or other international manufacturing processes.  This pervasiveness can make it easy to take globalism for granted as a benign or at least neutral process with a relatively positive outcome.  As authors Corey Mattson, Meredith Throop, and Barbara Ehrenreich show, however, globalization often enriches the few--businesspeople and transnational corporations--at the expense of many disadvantaged or disenfranchised workers and innocent bystanders in nations exploited by globalism.  Only by addressing the inequities exposed or exacerbated by globalism can citizens of the world help to create a more just and less harmful global economic paradigm.