Academic Papers

Attached below are a few examples of Corleone's academic writing style. 

 Poe and Melville Comparative Analysis Essay

ABSTRACT

Edgar Allen Poe is well-known in the world of literature, particularly as a renowned critic of literary form. He meticulously studied the relationship between form and effectiveness, believing that even “the minutest detail of style and subject [should] be the result of rational deliberation” by the author. Poe experimented with many forms and is credited as the father of several, including the modern short story, science fiction, and the detective story (Poetry Foundation). However, there was one form popular during Poe’s time that he absolutely despised: exploration and voyage accounts. His feelings on the subject are best shown in his work The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is a satirized take on the genre and a mockery of its generic and limited conventions.

    Despite Poe's authority on the subject, not everyone agreed with his sharp criticisms, one notable author being his own contemporary, Herman Melville. In response to the satire found in Poe's novel, Melville crafts Moby Dick to showcase the potential depth adventure novels have to offer. Through comparing how each author treats the setting and the narrator as a function of form, we can extrapolate how Poe and Melville reached such drastically different conclusions about the effectiveness of the exploration genre as a form for complex story-telling.

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The Math of Misinformation: Analyzing TheFreeThoughtProject’s Meme

ABSTRACT

Misinformation is a delicate issue in today’s political climate, and unfortunately, memes play a large role in its dissemination. If there is a political affiliation, there is a meme group for it, and where there
are political memes, there is grossly misleading propaganda that gets shared around.

For example, consider the attached TheFreeThoughtProject meme as an example of mematic misinformation; this cyber object uses unclear math and suppressed evidence to create a false dilemma between minimum wage rates and taxation rates to ultimately persuade the audience towards the Libertarian ideal that taxation is theft and that minimum wage laws are pointless. While the correctness of a party’s political beliefs may be up for debate, the soundness of their rhetorical choices is not. This paper seeks to debunk the faulty logic used in the meme, explain why it is rhetorically effective despite being unsound, and ultimately propose a mock-up counter-meme that could be employed as a corrective tool for recirculation.

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On Renault’s The King Must Die

ABSTRACT

History is often a dry-mannered study; one can so easily get caught up in facts and dates that there remains a sociological gap between the student and the subjects. Simply put, one fails to recognize the people of the past as fully human, their behaviors often being so far removed from our own. One way to combat this dissonance is through use of primary texts as anthropological aids. However, for the eras that may be lacking in relevant resources, perhaps as in our case due to literary trends of the time
preferring the actions to emotions of their protagonists, creative historical fiction could prove a useful tool. For example, in The King Must Die,  Renault decodes the original myth of Theseus for historical context clues, reframes Theseus’s myth as a bildungsroman, and focuses on the pathos of his story in order to blend the cultural perspectives between that of the present reader and of the past Greek.