The Onion’s MagnaSoles: Rhetorical Analysis

The Onion’s satirical article, “Revolutionary New Insoles Combine Five Forms Of Pseudoscience”, uses several rhetorical devices to campaign its innovative, revolutionary product: MagnaSoles shoe inserts. Using the fictional MagnaSoles as a model, the article humorously mocks the strategies used by companies to market products to attract its susceptible customers. Using an exaggerated or sarcastic tone…

Ray Douglas Bradbury: Author & Views on Technology

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920.  Bradbury’s great adventures would take place behind a typewriter, in the realm of imagination. Today, as an author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, lecturer, and poet Ray Bradbury is known as one of America’s greatest creative geniuses. His books were The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451,…

Lyrical Ballads & The Byronic Hero

LYRICAL BALLADS Lyrical Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth are considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. Preface to Lyrical Ballads was written by Wordsworth and it overthrew the Neoclassical (Enlightenment) conventions. The first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798) contained just an ”Advertisement” in which Wordsworth explained Lyrical…

Charles Dickens’ Hard Times: Industrialization, Women, Utilitarianism

CHARACTERS Thomas Gradgrind – the local teacher and politician, tries hard to exert Utilitarianism and force it on everybody around him Mr. Choakumchild – teacher, teaches children facts and only facts Mr. Josiah Bounderby – rich businessman, banker, and salesman, owner of the factory, He has no moral or regard for human suffering, he exploits…

The Importance of Being Earnest: Characters, Marriage, Comedy

CHARACTERS Algernon (Algy) – a figure of dandy; careless, likes to dress nice, leads a double life, in love with Cecily Jack/John Worthing – in love with Gwendolen, leads a double life, has imaginary brother Earnest Bunbury – Algernon’s imaginary friend; Bunburying – Algernon’s term for leading a double life Lady Bracknell – Gwendolen’s mother,…