EVOLUTE99's Common Place

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs history by showing the reader the reciprocal effect history and literature has on each other. Greenblatt re-imagines a time when human civilization was emerging from the darkness by reaching back to the past and uncovering the creation of the Renaissance and the Humanist’s movement. What Greenblatt initially reveals is the beginning of the Early Modern Period through ancient text. This book strikes a chord for book lovers, scholars; classicist, early modernist, and even modern scholars. It conjures up a late medieval romance of digging through monasteries and hidden chambers of West’s past. This book works as a retelling of an archeological process illuminating a story that has shaped the way our modern minds think. The struggle of a secular society versus a religious society. It explores atheism, Christianity, Paganism. Blending per-Christian ideas with a dominating Roman Catholic i...

 I n Walter Sullivan’s 1965 review of Cormac McCarthy’s first novel The Orchard Keeper, Sullivan claims McCarthy’s novel takes shape in “the middle of the agrarian influence” (721). This quote sends up a flare within the McCarthy community of scholars, who continue to debate Sullivan’s claims. Sullivan also acknowledges that McCarthy can be read as an author who has “had enough sense to see in the land a source of human salvation. [McCarthy] is a kind of anachronism who celebrates the traditional values in the traditional way” (721). However, many recent scholars disagree with Sullivan’s claims about the “land as a source of human salvation.” In her book Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, Dianne Luce states that, “[i]t is a mistake either to confuse East Tennessee with the plantation South or to label McCarthy a latter-day Agrarian” (271). In making this comment, she also argues that The Orchard Keeper can be read “in the context of the classic Southern A...

Since I plan on spending the better part of this summer and semester researching and writing about this classic piece of American literature. I figured I could document my progress and for those interested in seeing a developing thesis process. Here ya go.  To begin things I will include an interview of myself by myself conducted on the 10th of June 2012. RP: Why did you choose Blood Meridian as the main focus for you Senior Thesis? RP: Hm. good question. Well, I have always been fascinated with the human species's ability to commit acts of violence when we are constantly conditioned to be good humans. However, to make it even more interesting lets include American humans--or better yet American humans in the 19th century. A lot of what is American today is based out of the 19th century and most philosophical American ideas stem from the American Romantic period and definitions of what it means to be American are defined as well by the likes of Walt Whitman, Henry ...

Transitions are words and phrases that help explain relationships between sentences; they help make a paragraph coherent. While transitions can help clarify the relationships between ideas, they cannot create those relationships. In other words, the logic of the paragraph must already exist in order for transitions to do their job. There are different ways of making an effective transition: 1) Place a strong sentence at the end of the preceding paragraph. The last sentence of some paragraphs in a critical essay or paper may act as a mini-conclusion to the paragraph. It may wrap up the thought or tie the information presented to your thesis. It may also act as a bridge to your next paragraph. Consider this example, from a paper in which a writer compares Americans' reactions to traveling to other parts of the country: Many Westerners don't like rivers in the East. They are alarmed by the muddy water, the overhanging trees, and the snakes. Some Easterners aren't to...

General Principles When integrating direct quotations into a paper it is important to move smoothly from the source information to your own thoughts. If quotations are simply dropped into a paper without significant warning, a reader may become confused as to the appropriateness and relevance of that particular quotation. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce the quotation, usually with its author's name or the source from which it came, to give the reader adequate notice of the relevance and importance of the quotation. Here's a passage from an essay written to analyze five of Stephen Crane's short stories in relation to a uniting theme. The quotation lacks adequate introduction: The men in Stephen Crane's short story, "The Open Boat," are courageous; they want to live. "The idealistic virtues of bravery, fortitude, and integrity possess no meaning in a universe that denies the importance of man" (Stein 151). The ideals of their native envi...

As we reach the end of the semester that means final papers and all the luggage that we must drag along with it. A annotated bibliography are one of the tools your professor will probably assign you before you begin drafting. This is a very important tool but also a very time consuming project. Depending upon how long your assigned paper is depends on how many annotations you will do. but before we get to all the good stuff on how to write and annotated bib, we must first learn how to read scholarly articles and take notes so we can compose a proper annotation. I found a couple of outlets that may be helpful in completing the process. From the  pasadena.edu website. How to Read and Take Notes on a Scholarly Journal Article How to Understand the Author The first thing you need to do in order to read and summarize a scholarly journal article is understand the author.  To understand the author, keep in mind the following: Authors of journal articles always ha...

Okay another punctuation mark that I continually botch is the comma.  So now I meditate on MLA's use of the comma. 3.2.2. Commas a. Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction ( and , but , for , nor , or , so , or yet ) joining independent clauses in a sentence.  Congress passed the bill, and the president signed it into law. The poem is ironic, for the poet’s meaning contrasts with her words. But the comma may be omitted when the sentence is short and the connection between the clauses is not open to misreading if unpunctuated.  Wallace sings and Armstrong plays cornet. b. Use commas to separate words, phrases, and clauses in a series. Words Boccaccio’s tales have inspired plays, films, operas, and paintings. Phrases Alfred the Great established a system of fortified towns, reorganized the military forces, and built a fleet of warships. Clauses In the Great Depression, millions lost their jobs, businesses fail...