Bücher von Mark Costello

It's winter in New Hampshire, the economy is booming, the vice president is running for president, and his Secret Service people are very, very tense.Meet Vi Asplund, a young Secret Service agent mourning her dead father. She goes home to New Hampshire to see her brother Jens, a computer genius who just might be going mad-and is poised to make a fortune on Big If, a viciously nihilistic computer game aimed at teenagers. Vi's America, as she sees it in the crowds, in her brother, and in her fellow agents, is affluent, anxious, and abuzz with vague fantasies of violence.Through a gallery of vivid characters-heroic, ignoble, or desperate-Mark Costello's hilarious novel limns the strategies, both sound and absurd, that we conjure to survive in daily life.

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 70, Trinity College Dublin (The School of English), course: TSM English, language: English, abstract: William Trevor¿s acclaimed short fiction is deeply concerned with the social dynamic of rural Ireland. He describes an Ireland that Stinson notes, is heavily laden ¿with an oppressive atmosphere¿. Such an evocation, when considered alongside Trevor¿s focus on familial social ties, suggests that the oppressive climate in Ireland is grounded in family relationships that are characterised by notions of inheritance and legacy. This reveals how Trevor¿s imagined parent-child relationships serve as valuable literary devices contributing to an overall portrayal of a culturally stagnant Ireland. In this paper, I will firstly show how Trevor links societal oppression to his characters¿ misguided loyalties to outdated social frameworks and conventions. This loyalty is depicted by Trevor, as passed down from parent to child, in a society in which parents control every aspect of their children¿s lives. Parents are depicted by Trevor as constantly encouraging their children to adhere to their own outdated social traditions. It is this that elucidates the importance of parent-child relationships in Trevor¿s stories. The relationships themselves perform as the vehicles through which social oppressiveness and entrapment is sustained in rural Irish society, themes not only central to Trevor¿s work but the whole canon of Irish short fiction with which Trevor is in discourse. I will also look at briefly, the child-parent relationship from the psychoanalytical perspective of Freud, describing how through parental encouragement of their children to internalize their values, they initiate a psychological regression in their child. I will further argue that this regression to immaturity mirrors the repetitive and repressive social cycle that is further depicted by Trevor. He seems to be suggesting that rural Ireland is mired in a debilitating timelessness which is consolidated by the reoccurring motifs of children characters being killed. This leads to a lasting impression of a stagnant and deteriorating nation, that is reflected in its characters as a result of influential parental relationships.

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 70, Trinity College Dublin (School of English), course: English Literature, language: English, abstract: A university essay exploring literary notions of boyhood, psychological maturity and the internalization of parental values all in the context of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the school story genre. The essay argues that the rule-breaking culture inherent in Hogwarts lends itself to an overall empowering portrayal of the school. "In J.K. Rowling¿s third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the school experience is represented as an overall empowering one. I propose to argue against the approaches of Roberta Trites and Mathew Grenby in their respective papers of The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature and The School Story. By evoking the power mechanism of the Foucauldian Panopticon they depict the Hogwarts school experience as one of complete authoritarianism. I will outline how Foucault¿s ¿Panopticism¿ is entirely inappropriate and unsustainable in the school of Hogwarts due to the impossibility of surveillance in its enchanted halls and the fallibility of its headmaster. Through its rule-breaking culture I will show how the Hogwarts school experience instead celebrates and encourages the independent questioning of existing dysfunctional power structures. I will explore the school experience of Hogwarts with regard to the themes of authority, power and tribal exclusivity, arguing that the overall portrayal of Hogwarts is an empowering one that inspires in its students independent thought and action against existing authority."

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: 71, Trinity College Dublin (The Department of Philosophy), course: TSM Philosophy, language: English, abstract: This paper will aim to outline G. E. Moore¿s defence in "Principia Ethica" of the view that goodness and consequently moral truth is indefinable. This paper will firstly outline a picture of the autonomous indefinable nature of goodness through Moore¿s open-question argument and naturalistic fallacy and will then proceed to critique this characterisation by highlighting the subsequent problematic consequences that accompany the proposed indefinability. The paper will then detail Moore¿s ensuing intuitive meta-ethical theory after which I will argue that the meta-ethical picture that Moore constructs is entirely implausible due to the proposed self-evident nature of moral truths and the vague faculty of intuition that it implies.