Andrew B Silverman

Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" has puzzled readers for over 162 years as it explores the conflict between its narrating lawyer and his hired clerk who famously "prefers" not to do any work. The story is brilliantly written and often quite funny, but what can it mean? In "Bartleby Unravelled," ...

Several times in my career as a student I was required to write papers that were longer than the material I was writing about. This seems obvious enough; imagine how many words have been written about Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. One paper was about Blake's poem, "The Sick Rose," all 34 ...

Assigned in Graduate School to write a paper demonstrating a psychoanalytic approach, I wrote this somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Knowing that Lawrence's masterful story is really about the Oedipus Complex requires no great insight, but I found it fun to try and find quotations from a noted analyst, Mela...

During the Middle Ages, Earth is in peril. A Greek goddess, the last of her kind to inhabit the planet, has assumed the identity of The Lady of the Lake and is using her remarkable powers to control the destiny of Earth. Her goal is simple: Mankind's knowledge and technology must not develop any fur...

This 23 page essay explores in unusual detail how Shakespeare employs a pattern of antithesis or oxymoron in Macbeth to an unusual degree that is not seen in the rest of his work. The paper postulates why this might be the case. In order to prove the "unusual degree" statement above, the paper liter...