Pride and Prejudice:

• Subjects: family, pride, prejudice, class, reputation, behavior, love

• Themes: reputation is very important for your social class, class is the structure of society, your relationship to others determines your class, family connections determine one determine one decisions and perspectives

Wuthering Heights (charlotte Bronte)

• subjects- love, manipulation, social class, revenge

• themes- love that never changes is destructive, precariousness of social classes, futility of revenge

Hamlet(Shakespeare)

• Subjects- death, language, perspective, identity, relationships

• Themes- death is inevitable, language can be used to alter peoples (and our own) perpsectives, separation between language and action (saying your going to do something vs actually doing it), separation between natural world and unknown

Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

• Subjects- fate, religion, limits of knowledge, nature and man, duty

• Themes-

  • Limits of knowledge- neither nature nor human life can be perfectly understood

  • Fate and free will- ishmael and other characters spend their time trying to interpret the signs of the world around them to determine their fates

  • Nature and man- man’s multi-faceted interaction with nature, whether by trying to control it, tame it, understand it, profit form it, or defeat it

  • Race and friendship- Ishmaels contrasting first impression of Queequeg and his ultimate friendship with him

  • Madness- two contrasting depictions with Ahab and Pip, Ahab’s madness pushed him to action while Pip’s madness leads to his insanity

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

• subjects- imperealism, hypocricy, madness, evil, ambivalence, hollowness

• themes- imperealism is hypocritical, imperealism leads to madness, absurdity of evil, contradiction and ambivalence, hollowness of civilizers

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

• subjects- pride, alienation, poverty, crime, punishment, suffering, nihlism

• themes- alienation from society makes it difficult to live, punishment through mind games and psychology carries more weight than prison, his love for sonya signifying his surrender as “superman”, pushing family away bc of crime

Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)

• subjects- identity, racism, ideology, stereotypes

• themes- racism and stereotypes create obstacles for forming individual identity, ideology is limited, you can’t ight stereotypes with stereotypes, promise of freedom as an illusion, power is self-interested in nature

The Crucible

• subjects- intolerance, hysteria, reputation, goodness, judgement, social status, ownership, justice, consequences

• themes- not having separation between church and state creates an intollerant society, hysteria quickly tears apart communities, reputation is important whe public and private moralities are one, subjectivity of goodness, judging others is dangerous, we’re defined by what we own

Beowulf

• subjects- fate, god, physical strength, bravery, loyalty, sacrifice, legend, story, memory, identity

• themes- anything worthy of rememberance (forming an identity) requires ability, bravry, loyalty, and risk or sacrifice

  • steadfastness will always bring success (If you refuse to give up, how can you lose)

  • it is possibble to lead people even after death

  • stories are the way to make sense of the world: everyone is part of a story

Animal Farm

• subjects- exploitation, corruption, totalitarianism, knowledge, class structures

• themes- corruption of socialist ideals in the soviet union, societal tendency toward class stratification, danger of a naive working class, abuse of language as an instrument to the abuse of power, power will always corrupt,

1984

• subjects- totalitarianism, propaganda, social class, language, independance, identity,

• themes- the dangers of totalitarianism, psychological manipulation, physical control

a little life

Their eyes were watching god

• subjects- traditional gender roles, relationship between men and women

• themes- importance of language, power and conquest as means for fulfilment, love and relationships vs independance, humanity vs nature,

lolita

The scarlet Letter