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About
Ian Clark is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
For being such a slim novel, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is open to a wide variety of interpretations. I think it's helpful to approach it from a broad perspective to... -
Answered a Question in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Ichabod Crane borrows the horse known as Gunpowder from Hans Van Ripper, a farmer he is boarding with at the time. This situation is particularly humorous because, though Ichabod wants to appear... -
Answered a Question in Julius Caesar
This is a great question, particularly because rhetoric was historically relied on by Roman politicians like Marc Antony. Before you can understand how Antony uses the modes of rhetoric, however,... -
Answered a Question in To Kill a Mockingbird
The scene in which Atticus waits outside the jailhouse is an important window into the racist undertones of Southern culture in the 1930s. Furthermore, the scene is a potentially confusing one,... -
Answered a Question in To Kill a Mockingbird
Contrary to what you might expect, Miss Maudie seems relatively unfazed when her house burns down. In fact, she seems almost glad that it collapses in a fiery inferno. This unconventional reaction... -
Answered a Question in Julius Caesar
The funeral speeches of Act 3, Scene 2 mark a turning point in the play, as they effectively launch the civil war that rages for the rest of production. As such, they're worth paying attention to.... -
Answered a Question in Heart of Darkness
This scene takes place during the night before Marlow and his men evacuate Kurtz from his hellish station in the heart of the jungle. While it's difficult to know exactly what's going through... -
Answered a Question in A Walk in the Woods
The general theme of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is the beauty of nature and the necessity of protecting it. This is not the only theme, of course, but it is one of the most... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
Jay Gatsby is neither noble or a villain; rather, he is complicated. As a man who, for better or for worse, bought into the lie of the American Dream, Jay Gatsby is simply a man who tried to do his... -
Answered a Question in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream can be thought of as one of the quintessential comedies of error, as it involves hilarious love quarrels brought on by both mistaken identities and pure... -
Answered a Question in Fern Hill
Generally, the tone of a speaker is found by closely examining the diction and syntax in a piece of writing. In Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill," studying the diction in the poem (the word choice, in... -
Answered a Question in Dubliners
When I first read James Joyce's Dubliners, I found the short story "After the Race" to be the most difficult to understand. Indeed, I actually found it boring, initially. However, after... -
Answered a Question in William Shakespeare
This question likely has an infinite number of answers, as Shakespeare's plays propose a variety of different interpretations of the world. Some plays (the comedies) are more uplifting, while... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
In this quote, the Friar asserts that vice and virtue are not necessarily black and white concepts, and something that is a vice in one circumstance might turn out to be a virtue in another. This... -
Answered a Question in William Wordsworth
If you're asking whether you can use the theme of nature to describe one of William Worsworth's poems, then the answer is a resounding YES. Wordsworth was the quintessential Romantic writer, and... -
Answered a Question in The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope's satire in "The Rape of the Lock" differs from Jonathan Swift's satire in Gulliver's Travels mainly in the scope of its ferocity. While Pope teases the upper class, chiding... -
Answered a Question in East of Eden
Since John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden is a massive book, it's difficult to come up with any general statements that incorporate its entire meaning. However, the novel is a... -
Answered a Question in Heart of Darkness
This is a great question because one of the primary themes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness is that, for all their supposed strength, the European powers in Africa, especially the Belgian Congo,... -
Answered a Question in Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
First, it's necessary to understand the meanings of denotation and connotation. Denotation refers to a word or phrase's literal meaning; in this case, the denotation of "good night" would be... -
Answered a Question in Beowulf
Herot (or Heorot, in some versions) is the name Hrothgar's mead hall in the epic poem Beowulf. It is the main fortress for the Danes and a major symbol of wealth, power, and control. Before... -
Answered a Question in Macbeth
The witches (commonly referred to as the Weird Sisters) prophesy that Macbeth will be king of Scotland in the first few scenes of the play. The play itself begins at the end of a battle in which... -
Answered a Question in Ulysses
The short answer to this question is that Tennyson's Ulysses doesn't like his wife at all. A more specific answer would be that, for Ulysses, Penelope is a personification of everything that he... -
Answered a Question in Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a classic satire. One of its most famous satirical sequences occurs during Gulliver's first journey to the land of Lilliput. By chronicling... -
Answered a Question in The Prince
Always a controversial figure, Machiavelli is perhaps at his most polarizing in his account of human nature. In general, Machiavelli argues that human nature is primarily based upon self-interest.... -
Answered a Question in Dante's Inferno
Though it is obviously a work of fiction, Dante's Divine Comedy contains many autobiographic elements. In particular, Dante the pilgrim has many similarities with Dante Alighieri, the... -
Answered a Question in The Canterbury Tales
In addition to being an invaluable part of the English literary canon, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales offer an incomparable account of an important historical era. Chaucer's epic poem is... -
Answered a Question in Moby-Dick
Often, readers of Melville's Moby Dick focus on the relationship between Ahab and Moby Dick, as the entire novel arguably revolves around this relationship. However, it's worth... -
Answered a Question in Araby
The overarching theme in "Araby" is stagnation, and this theme is a particularly important one for James Joyce. As a boy, Joyce watched as his family disintegrated, brought down by his father's... -
Answered a Question in The Odyssey
Odysseus meets many individuals in the World of the Dead, including Tiresias, Agamemnon, Anticlea, Ajax, and Achilles. While the whole World of the Dead sequence is fascinating, one of the most... -
Answered a Question in The Odyssey
While Zeus certainly makes things difficult for Odysseus after the Trojan War, it might be better to consider what Poseidon, god of the sea, does to Odysseus. While Zeus is often less than fond of... -
Answered a Question in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
"Tintern Abbey" is a both a classic example of Romanticism and a classic example of Wordsworth's artistic aesthetic. It contains extensive reflections on not only the beauty of nature, but also its... -
Answered a Question in The Odyssey
One of Odysseus' most famous features is his cleverness (or guile, as you say), and he exhibits this skill at many times during both Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The most obvious (and... -
Answered a Question in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The ending of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is fairly complex, and it takes a bit of time to sift through its many layers. But, on the surface, the essential... -
Answered a Question in Moby-Dick
This is a great question, because it's easy to do all three, even during the course of a single chapter. However, I actually primarily pity Ahab, because I see him as a tragic, nearly... -
Answered a Question in Ulysses
This question, the question of confronting the process of aging, is at the heart of Tennyson's "Ulysses." The poem is essentially the soliloquy of an aging Ulysses (the Latin form of Odysseus)... -
Answered a Question in A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most famous, and funniest, plays. As the title suggests, dreams and dreaming play an important role in the narrative, and so dreams are... -
Answered a Question in Literature
Macbeth and Ulysses have more differences than similarities. Macbeth chronicles the rise and fall of a general who believes he is fated to rule Scotland. Taking matters into his own hands, Macbeth... -
Answered a Question in Dante's Inferno
The number 3 is everywhere in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. For one thing, the poem itself is structured according to the rhyme scheme terza rima, which uses stanzas of three lines that... -
Answered a Question in Peter Pan
The shadow scene in Peter Pan is a perfect example of the play's playfulness and cartoonish nature. For instance, the shadow, in contrast to the insubstantial shadows of real life, has an actual... -
Answered a Question in History
The samurai were Japanese warriors who came to true prominence in the 12th century CE. Governed by a rigid sense of honor, samurai served a master or lord (called a daimyo) and served as the elite... -
Answered a Question in Song of Myself
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. (1332-3) Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" is wild poem reveling in the exploration of the... -
Answered a Question in Julius Caesar
At the end of Act 1, Scene 3 in Julius Caesar, Cassius sends letters to Brutus by way of Cinna. Cassius forged these letters to make them seem as if they were written by Roman citizens who do not... -
Answered a Question in Ulysses
Tennyson's "Ulysses" is a wildly popular poem, and one which instigates a variety of interpretations. However, as a starting point, it helps to look at one of the poem's most prominent themes: the... -
Answered a Question in The Odyssey
This quote is a great example of the rich descriptive language in Homer's Odyssey.The poem is full of them, such as the infamous "wine-dark sea," all of which suggest the Ancient Greeks... -
Answered a Question in Postmodernism
In many respects, self-consciousness is one of the central tenets of postmodernism. Simply put, self-consciousness is the process by which a postmodernist work, whether it's a short story or novel,... -
Answered a Question in To His Coy Mistress
Both Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" are classics in their own right and have long been recognized as important contributions... -
Answered a Question in Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is a masterful work of fiction, and one that is made even more compelling once the title's literary allusion is taken into consideration. Things...
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