Literary criticism over madness and symbols in Edgar Allan Poe short Essay

Literary criticism over madness and symbols in Edgar Allan Poe short stories - Essay Example As he tells his frequently bizarre and frightening tales, Poe presents his readers with symbol-rich imagery and descriptions based on binary oppositions to help build the suspense and horror of his tale. As Mowery explains, binary oppositions are things such as hot and cold, male and female, dark and light. â€Å"It is in the subtle shifts in our expectations of the character that tension and conflict are developed† (1997). This concept is frequently illustrated in terms of the madness that comes upon characters as they experience deep feelings that had potential to overwhelm. In â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart,† â€Å"The Black Cat† and â€Å"Ligeia,† Edgar Allan Poe uses madness and symbolism to convey love and hate. Poe employs two primary objects in â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart† to illustrate the cause of his narrator’s madness. The old man’s eye is the first of these symbols to appear within the text of the story. As the narrator attempts to explain why he felt led to murder, he says, It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. (156). Basic medical knowledge to the modern reader quickly identifies this condition as symptoms of a cataract, a film that gradually creeps over the eye of an elderly person, eventually rendering him or her blind while also changing the color of the eye to a pale bluish color. It is this encroachment that seems to so bother the narrator,

White Collar Crime Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

White Collar Crime - Essay Example This paper is a review of white collar crimes in an Australian context and will specifically address the collapse of the HIH Insurance Group, considered to be one the biggest corporate failures ever in the country. The study will cover the crime/ misbehaviour, regulatory failure, the existing literature relevant to the area of crime and regulation, and provide a case analysis, explaining how and why the failure of regulation occurred. According to Sutherland, â€Å"white collar crime may be defined approximately as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation† (The evolution of white-collar crime, n.d.). The book, Encyclopedia of white-collar & corporate crime states that Sutherland implicitly makes it clear that crime results not just out of poverty, but due to other reasons as well. Sutherland developed the theory of differential association primarily to state that criminality includes â€Å"the social and business influences that caused persons of high status to violate the law through occupation† (Salinger, 2005, p. 775) One of the earliest among similar researchers was Edward Alsworth Ross, who coined the term criminals, intentionally done to sound familiar with words like an asteroid, crystalloid or anthropoid. Ross feels that such acts were not seen as serious by the general public and the perpetrators themselves. (Geis, 2006, p. 26). Ross adds that there is a ‘shocking leniency’ by the public towards such crimes and the people who perpetrate or are a part of the crime. What is interesting is that the article which originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly was written in 1907. Over the years, the term white-collar crime has come to be primarily associated with business alone. Hartung undertook a study on violations in price control of wholesale meat in Detroit in 1950. According to him white collar crimes are those committed by a firm or its agent by the violation of statutes and regulations.