Canterbury Tales :: essays research papers

Canterbury Tales Character Analysis   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Chaucer’s greatest work came after everything else. Canterbury tales was the last of his literary works. It followed such stories as Troilus and Creseyde. It is considered as one of the greatest works of literature during the English Middle Age. The ironic thing is that it wasn’t even finished the way Chaucer had intended it to. He had planned to have over a hundred tales, four for each pilgrim. He ended up with twenty-four, less than one for each pilgrim. One wonders if he had finished how much better would it have been.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The story is a unique one, especially during the time in which it was written. Rather than a traditional author story format, Chaucer uses a different method to spin a number of different types of stories. By telling different stories through different pilgrims Chaucer uses their attitudes and characteristics so that he may tell tales of many different varieties and styles. This shows the many different creative sides and motives of the great author. He was not the first to use such a method, but he may be one of the most famous, earliest of its users.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Among the number of characters and different storytellers you come across a character by the name of Robin. His standing among the company was the Miller, so that was what he would be more commonly known. Immediately following the Knight the Miller had a pretty tough act to follow. The Knight was obviously of high standing, and would previously tell a noble tale with a moralistic flavor to it. It would leave the crowd in state of appreciation for someone of his stature. When his tale was done the people knew why it was that he was Knight. Although, when the Miller was done the people did also realize why he was the Miller.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  When the Knight’s tale had finished the Miller decided it was his turn for the spotlight. Chaucer makes it quite easy to understand the contrast in the characters. Especially making the claims one right after the other. The comparison is easily made. The drunken boisterous Miller pipes up claiming to have a tale that would contend with the Knight’s for being noble and attractive. Sensing the drunkenness, the host speaks up telling the Miller to save his tale for another time knowing of what was to come. The loud and cocky Miller overpowers him.

History of Optometry

The history of optometry can be traced back to the early studies on optics and image formation by the eye. The origins of optometric science (optics, as taught in a basic physics class) date back a few thousand years BC as evidence of the existence of lenses for decoration has been found. It is unknown when the first spectacles were made, but the British scientist and historian Sir Joseph Needham stated in his research that the ancient Chinese invented the earliest eyeglasses 1000 years ago and were also mentioned by the Venetian Marco Polo in his account of his travels in ancient China.Alternatively, research by David A. Goss in the United States, shows they may have originated independently in the late 13th century in Italy as stated in a manuscript from 1305 where a monk from Pisa named Rivalto stated â€Å"It is not yet 20 years since there was discovered the art of making eyeglasses†. Spectacles were manufactured in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands by 1300. Benito Daza de Valdes published the third book on optometry in 1623, where he mentioned the use and fitting of eyeglasses.In 1692, William Molyneux wrote a book on optics and lenses where he stated his ideas on myopia and problems related to close-up vision. The scientists Claudius Ptolemy and Johannes Kepler also contributed to the creation of optometry. Kepler discovered how the retina in the eye creates vision. From 1773 until around 1829, Thomas Young discovered the disability of astigmatism and it was George Biddell Airy who designed glasses to correct that problem that included spherocylindrical lens.Although the term optometry appeared in the 1759 book A Treatise on the Eye: The Manner and Phenomena of Vision by Scottish physician William Porterfield, it was not until the early twentieth century in the United States and Australia that it began to be used to describe the profession. By the late twentieth century however, marking the distinction with dispensing opticians, it had become th e internationally accepted term.

What is Nature Writing

Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrators encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject. In critical practice, says Michael P. Branch, the term nature writing has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice, and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay. Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda (Before Nature Writing, in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001). Examples of Nature Writing: At the Turn of the Year, by William SharpThe Battle of the Ants, by Henry David ThoreauHours of Spring, by Richard JefferiesThe House-Martin, by Gilbert WhiteIn Mammoth Cave, by John BurroughsAn Island Garden, by Celia ThaxterJanuary in the Sussex Woods, by Richard JefferiesThe Land of Little Rain, by Mary AustinMigration, by Barry LopezThe Passenger Pigeon, by John James AudubonRural Hours, by Susan Fenimore CooperWhere I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau Observations: Gilbert White established the pastoral dimension of nature writing in the late 18th century and remains the patron saint of English nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was an equally crucial figure in mid-19th century America . . ..The second half of the 19th century saw the origins of what we today call the environmental movement. Two of its most influential American voices were John Muir and John Burroughs, literary sons of Thoreau, though hardly twins. . . .In the early 20th century the activist voice and prophetic anger of nature writers who saw, in Muirs words, that the money changers were in the temple continued to grow. Building upon the principles of scientific ecology that were being developed in the 1930s and 1940s, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold sought to create a literature in which appreciation of natures wholeness would lead to ethical principles and social programs.Today, nature writing in America flourishes as never before. Nonfiction may well be the most vital form o f current American literature, and a notable proportion of the best writers of nonfiction practice nature writing.(J. Elder and R. Finch, Introduction, The Norton Book of Nature Writing. Norton, 2002) Human Writing . . . in Nature By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the  genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really nature writing anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreaus] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. Theres something to celebrate. (David Gessner, Sick of Nature. The Boston Globe, Aug. 1, 2004) Confessions of a Nature Writer I do not believe that the solution to the worlds ills is a return to some previous age of mankind. But I do doubt that any solution is possible unless we think of ourselves in the context of living naturePerhaps that suggests an answer to the question what a nature writer is. He is not a sentimentalist who says that nature never did betray the heart that loved her. Neither is he simply a scientist classifying animals or reporting on the behavior of birds just because certain facts can be ascertained. He is a writer whose subject is the natural context of human life, a man who tries to communicate his observations and his thoughts in the presence of nature as part of his attempt to make himself more aware of that context. Nature writing is nothing really new. It has always existed in literature. But it has tended in the course of the last century to become specialized partly because so much writing that is not specifically nature writing does not present the natural context at all; be cause so many novels and so many treatises describe man as an economic unit, a political unit, or as a member of some social class but not as a living creature surrounded by other living things.(Joseph Wood Krutch, Some Unsentimental Confessions of a Nature Writer. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 1952)