The novel Great Expectations Essay Example for Free

The novel Great Expectations Essay The novel Great Expectations was intended by Charles Dickens as a social commentary on the society of pre-Victorian era England. Through his use of intricate characterisation, narratorial perspectives, comprehensive descriptions and the ironic outcomes, Dickens ridicules and thus reflects many key values and attitudes of that society. He shows the importance of class and the prejudices associated with class, the values of society towards women and the attitudes of individuals, as well as the injustices and arbitrary nature of the justice system. Victorian England was a society that valued class distinctions, and this is clearly shown in Great Expectations by the variety of characters portrayed and the eventual outcomes of their actions. There were many prejudices associated with class. Upper-class people were treated with more courtesy and society had little respect for the lower classes, often treating them as criminals. This prejudice towards the lower classes is clearly evident in Great Expectations. Magwitch tells Pip about his trial with Compeyson. Magwitch had to sell all his clothes to pay for a lawyer and was still given a longer sentence because everyone saw what a gentleman he (Compeyson) looked, and what a wretch I (Magwitch) looked. While the rest of the novel is told through Pips narration, this section is told through the narration of Magwitch. This highlights the situation and arouses sympathy in the responder towards Magwitch. As well, Estellas initial treatment of Pip also shows the prejudices of class. Estella makes fun of Pips appearance; what coarse hands he has, what thick boots, simply because Pip comes from a lower working class background while she has been brought up as a lady. These instances reflect the attitudes of that society towards people of different class backgrounds. A persons class background dictated their life. Money and wealth was valued and dominated life. Yet Dickens portrays his characters to show the startling between the lives of different classes. His depiction of Joe as a man of the working class is in direct contrast with the gentleman characters such as Compeyson and Drummle. Joe is portrayed as a wholesome, hardworking man lacking in material wealth but in possession of a kind heart, Drummle is portrayed as gentleman who are cold, cruel and completely without morals who either beats or cringes. Dickens rewards his characters for their behaviour with what he believes they deserve. Joe was able to lead a comfortable and happy life with Biddy while Compeyson and Drummle met violent ends. This characterisation shows the startling differences in the moral fibre of the different classes, and discredits a popular attitude at the time that upper-class people were more gentile and moral.

Nuclear Disarmament Essay -- Essays Papers

Nuclear Disarmament Since the early 1940’s, two world powers, the U.S. and USSR (currently Russia), have been increasing their nuclear weapons arsenal. In recent years, many other countries, such as: India, Great Britain, France, China, Pakistan, and Israel have begun nuclear stockpiles. Since the Cold War has ended and the USSR collapsed, nuclear weapons have been left unguarded or missing. The effect of this lack of security has raised the world’s awareness on attempting to control nuclear stockpiles. Also, there are concerns of nuclear power plants producing uranium and plutonium as a by-product; the two fuels are used in producing nuclear devices. Although these nuclear power plants were never meant to produce uranium and plutonium, countries have left it available to civilians for research and testing.1 Nuclear bombs can be a result of this experimenting, which is why some form of disarmament and a system of verification on nuclear control needs to be implemented by government officia ls. Nuclear weapons are explosive devices designed to release nuclear energy on a large scale and are used primarily in military applications. The first atomic bomb, which was tested on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico, represented a completely new type of artificial explosives. Nuclear explosions involve energy sources within the core or nucleus, of the atom. The atomic bomb gains its power from the splitting, or fission, of all the atomic nuclei in several kilograms of plutonium. A sphere about the size of a baseball produces an explosion equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. This is a large amount of power for a nuclear weapon. The atomic bomb was developed, constructed, and tested during the Manhattan Project. This massive United States... ...be implemented in order to control the use of nuclear weapons within today’s society because the current systems have not been successful in securing nuclear devices. Until more successful regulations have been made, the problem of controlling nuclear power will not be solved. ENDNOTES 1 â€Å" The Problem.† NCI. http://www.nci.org/nci-pro.htm (1 July 1996). 2 Handbook of Nuclear Technology (New York: Nucleonics, 1980) pg. 115. 3 Handbook of Nuclear Technology, pg. 110 4 Handbook of Nuclear Technology, pg. 112-114. 5 NCI 6 NCI 7 NCI 8 â€Å"Verification.† The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. http://www.dfat.gov.au/cc/cc_report_annexa.html (Jan. 1994). 9 The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons 10 NCI 11 The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

Chinese political culture Essay

The book CHINESE POLITICAL CULTURE relates to political culture in significantly different ways from the approaches used in other books with similar content. This book touches on many aspects of Chinese political culture; as a result, reading the book gives one a better comprehension of China’s complexity. This collection of essays manages to achieve this aim without losing its unity. The first section of the book explores the modern transformation of Chinese traditional culture and its effect on contemporary political culture. It speaks to the complexity of the issue that the three essays do not agree on whether neo-Confucianism always provides the foundation on which contemporary Chinese political culture can rest. Kam Louie examines the role of Confucianism’s dichotomy between wen [man of letter] and wu [warrior] to emphasize continuities in the patriarchal nature of Chinese society. Roger Ames, from a different perspective, examines the continued relevance of Confucianism among intellectuals in his presentation of the creative use of Kant by noted scholars Mou Zongsan and Li Zehou in their effort to reassert the relevance of the Confucian heritage. Godwin Chu, however, shows that although there are striking continuities between the ways in which the concept of zhong [loyalty] was used in traditional China and during the Maoist period, the individual assertiveness he observes today marks a major break with the past. The second section of the book proceeds to socialization and observes official ideologies. The chapter on nationalism, by Edward Friedman, reminds us that despite the use of a sometimes strident nationalist rhetoric by its leaders, the existence of a Chinese â€Å"nation† protected by the Party-state remains a long way off, as evidenced by the inability of the government to establish institutions such as the welfare state. The chapter by Zhu Jianhua and Ke Huixin, which addresses the construction of Hong Kong in the minds of Chinese in Gungzhou and Shenzhen, suggests that despite greater exposure to a diversity of opinions, people living next door to Hong Kong still hold distorted views about that territory. Misra Kalpana’s chapter on the transition from neo-Maoism to neo-conservatism offers to explain this paradox. She argues that the state has successfully shed its orthodox Leninist ideology in favor of neo-conservative nationalism thanks to the recuperation of the neo-conservative discourses emerging in diverse milieus of society. Peter Moody addresses cynicism and indifference to politics in China in his chapter on anti-political tendencies. Moody also warns that the anti-political trends may end up tacitly endorsing the unjust, corrupt political system they claim to reject. The third section enriches these nuances with an additional layer of complexity, by looking into the different variants of Chinese political cultures found among different social strata and regions. Cheng Li looks at the emergence of pluralism among entrepreneurs; Alan Liu at provincial identities; Shih Chih-yu at elections in minority areas of the PRC and Taiwan; Tang Wenfang at religion in China and Taiwan; and ChuYun-han and Chang Yu-tzung at regime legitimacy in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, through the use of sophisticated survey techniques. This third part of the book may present less coherence, but the case studies succeed in illustrating the diversity of Chinese political culture. My only remark is about Liu’s assertion that Chinese on the mainland, as well as mainlanders living in Taiwan, are displaying lower levels of religiosity, and that higher degrees of modernization reduce religiosity. Not only does this conclusion contrast with most studies on religion in Taiwan, but the data contradicts this statement: Taiwan displays a higher degree of religiosity than China despite its greater degree of modernization. It is also necessary to note that the past two decades has been a period of remarkable growth in China, characterized by economic expansion and the opening of its society to the outside world. What has followed is a better life for many of its citizens. As a result, China supporters from outside its borders have become confident that economic and social progress will eventually lead to a more open political system and consequently more favourable investment conditions. Reference CHINESE POLITICAL CULTURE: 1989-2000. Edited by Shiping Hua, foreword by Andrew J. Nathan. Armonk (New York), London (England): M. E. Sharpe. 2001. xv, 370 pp.

A Treatise Of Human Nature By David Hume - 1472 Words

Up until the time when William Blake, William Wordsworth, and David Hume put pen to paper, the most revolutionary lines of thought regarding science and philosophy came from Isaac Newton and John Locke who described humans as passive receivers of a world of set laws ruling passive atoms. Hume pushes this popular understanding of the self to the brink and ends up claiming that one can never comprehend the self. Blake and Wordsworth both vehemently disagree with Hume and believe the self is knowable, however, their views on how to know the self are radically different. Blake’s idea is that the world comes alive as the mind encounters it and that the self is within, whereas Wordsworth sees the mind coming alive as it encounters nature and in this awakening, the self is found. In, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume writes, â€Å"†¦ to explain the nature of personal identity which has become so great a question in philosophy, especially of late years in England, where all the abstruser sciences are study’d with a particular ardour and application† (Hume 258). In this, Hume is beginning to show his contention with placing the branch of philosophy dealing with the ideas of the self in the same category as the complex sciences. This is also a dig at John Locke, an englishman, whose theories on the self had been greatly dominating the field up until this point. Locke’s theory is that each human is born a ‘tabula rasa’ or a blank slate upon which the self is formed solely throughShow MoreRelatedDavid Hume s A Treatise Of Human Nature907 Words   |  4 Pagesfrom David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. In Book 1, he takes a skeptic view on the philosophy of personal identity by making the claim that there is no such thing as a self. According to Hume, for there to be a self it must be constant and stable, yet all of our knowledge comes from ‘impressions’ (perceptions that come from sensory experience) that are only fleeting: â€Å"pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time,† (Hume 385)Read MoreThe Dawn Of The Enlightenment By David Hume1740 Words   |  7 Pagesconversations about the nature and purpose of humanity, Enlightenment thinkers conceived novel concepts of anti-authoritarian thinking, empiricism, and the role of reason in humanity. As the Enlightenment led to an upheaval in how intellectuals took the authority of traditional learning, new conversations about the human condition were born. Namely, an emphasis on reason and logic as the primary mechanisms of humanity was developed. Prolific Scottish philosopher David Hume, best known for his radicalRead MoreJohn Locke And David Locke : Huma n Nature Of Human Understanding1409 Words   |  6 PagesHuman nature of understanding is a widely world concept that is strangely adapted throughout the centuries. These concepts of human understanding were introduced in different by philosophers. These philosophers, John Locke and David Hume, documented in their treatises how human nature of understanding works. In many arguments of reasoning, Locke reasons that human should be on the same level of thinking and knowledge in order to argue about an idea. David Hume believes that fact is a contradictionRead MoreEssay On the Obligation to Keep One’s Promises1395 Words   |  6 Pagesdeal of effort to make progress towards an answer, and in fact, there have been volumes of philosophy written about this very subject matter. Two 18th-century moral philosophers who tackled this mammoth rather successfully are Immanuel Kant and David Hume. The backbone of Kant’s moral philosophy is what he calls the â€Å"categorical imperative.† In the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant uses the preface and the first section to introduce and develop the idea, and then inRead MoreHume and Knowledge Creation766 Words   |  3 PagesHume and knowledge creation The dominant work by Hume was his A Treatise of Human Nature, in this work he attempted to construct a science of man that contrasted with the ideas of Descartes and other enlightenment thinkers. The pillar of Humes divergence was anchoring knowledge in empiricism rather than rationality. Hume argued that desire instead of rationality was the foundation of human nature. This essential departure from his peers is important to understanding the work of Hume. In thisRead MoreDavid Hume s Bundle 1041 Words   |  5 PagesB. Introduction to David Hume’s ‘bundle’ (written as a reply to Descartes) The silhouette of a subject was drawn by a council of moments and David Hume named it an illusion, humanity named it the self. In the modern ages of philosophy while Rene Descartes’ affect still remains eminent, David Hume comes with an argument which kills the I Descartes created and lets it fly as a ghost in human perception. Not only in the case of the subject, the contrast between Hume’s and Descartes’ ideas can be seenRead MoreThis semester we have been studying various philosophers, and from those philosophers only one has1000 Words   |  4 Pagesphilosophers only one has been able to get ethics right and that would be David Hume. David Hume presents a very compelling argument to previous philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine who tie their ethics to God, and in which Hume says we don’t need God to be ethical. David Hume goes on arguing that all humans have emotions and since we have emotions we should act on them instead of suppre ssing them. Another argument Hume presents is the way we are judged by our actions and how our actionsRead More Age of reason Essay1294 Words   |  6 Pagesscience, and humanity. The people involved with the Age of Reason were convinced that human reason could discover the natural laws of the universe, the natural rights of mankind, and the progress in knowledge. Each philosopher had his own ideas and theories about the world, nature, and human beings in general, and every philosopher wrote many essays and books about their own personal ideas and opinions (Sartre4). David Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 7, 1711. Educated at home and then at theRead MoreThe Age of Reason1424 Words   |  6 PagesThesis: To discuss the philosophers who participated and had an affect in The Age of Reason. OUTLINE I. David Hume A. Contributions to the Age of Reason B. Who and what influenced him II. Jean Jacques Rousseau A. What he believed in B. Who influenced him III. Claude Adrien Helvetius A. Influences B. Reasons for contribution IV. Immanuel Kant A. How he made a difference B. Why he made a difference C. What caused him to make a difference V. Johann Fichte A. Influences Read MoreEssay on David Humes Theory of Knowledge858 Words   |  4 Pagesbelonged to David Hume, a Scottish philosopher. Hume was born on April 26, 1711, as his family’s second son. His father died when he was an infant and left his mother to care for him, his older brother, and his sister. David Hume passed through ordinary classes with great success, and found an early love for literature. He lived on his family’s estate, Ninewells, near Edinburgh. Throughout his life, literature consumed his thoughts, and his life is little more than his works. By the age of 40, David Hume