Modern literature is frequently criticized for creating an unrealistic ideal of love and life goals. Temptation and death ooze out of these popular novels, most of which are written by women for a female audience, but their anchor is always love and the stories seem rather prescribed. It is with great pleasure that Germanna Community College will be hosting a resurrection panel of three amazing authors that have shaped literature around the world. These three men not only created stories that remain relevant today but stories that teach readers that despite using familiar themes a wider spectrum of love and relationships exists and is achievable in a believable story. The works of Voltaire, John Keats, and Jorge Luis Borges can portray themes…show more content… Just over one hundred years later, in 1795, the celebrated but distinctively poor Romantic poet John Keats would be born in London (Puchner, “John Keats”). Jumping another hundred years to 1899, Jorge Luis Borges would be born in Buenos Aires to an educated middleclass family and grow up to be the founder of magic realism (Puchner, “Jorge Luis Borges”). While all three of these authors are taught in colleges around the world and some of their themes overlap they are very different. Voltaire’s praise began in his lifetime and for more than just his stories. However, Candide discusses subjects that would have been taboo and required the readers to think critically throughout the work, something that is arguably missing in modern literature. Keats’ fame for perfectly expressing the rollercoaster of emotions and layers in relationships came after his death and he died believing his work would amount to nothing to the point that his epitaph to himself reads, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” (Hirst, 15). Meanwhile, Borges’ fame as the founder of magical realism has since been forgotten and is frequently attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez with popular news outlets wrongfully saying things such as, “Jorge Luis Borges… had experimented with the style before him, but Gabriel…show more content… These values would shape the themes of temptation and death in Candide, which criticized slavery, blind optimism, and life’s value with satire. One critic of the work states it “embraces everything that has occurred in the life of Voltaire as well as everything that had occurred in the eighteenth century” (Wade). In this work, temptation and death take many forms. Cunégonde is the most obvious personification of temptation and for the main character for which the story is named, the infatuation she seeded in Candide results in the death of several characters including her own brother. However, in his naivety, Candide misses other signs of temptation and death. Candide as a whole is about a lower class optimist that has been tempted by wealth and the blindly optimistic philosophy of his tutor, Pangloss. In these temptations, Candide will standby Pangloss’ philosophy that love is “the consolation of the human race, the preservative of the universe…” (Voltaire, 360) and blow off natural disasters, the devastation of slavery, and the injustice of caste system. Even upon leaving the utopia of Eldorado and coming across a dying man, seeing Cunégonde again and keeping his promise to wed her despite there no longer being an attraction, and more horror stories, any wavering in his faith in humanity and temptations were challenged by Voltaire. The readers had to ask whether this
