Carrie Dixon

In chapter two of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, “Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion,” Foster argues that, in fiction, passages about eating are often symbolic of communion. Sharing...

Near the end of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lennie kills Curley’s wife. Lennie did not mean to kill her. Lennie, despite his great size and strength, is meek and kind. But when he gets scared or...

In act 1, scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth uses metaphors and motifs, alliteration, and apostrophes to create her transformation from a nurturing woman into a murdering weapon. She...

Jem and Scout have never seen snow, so when it snows in Maycomb, Alabama, it is an awe-inspiring and shocking event for the two children, evident from Jem’s exclamation, “It’s beautiful.” Of...

“The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant,” a short story by W. D. Wetherell, opens with a description of the setting. The story is set along the Connecticut river in New Hampshire near Dartmouth...

The Ewells live in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, “behind the town garbage dump in what was once a Negro cabin.” The Ewell family go through the dump regularly, picking through it for what...

In Juliet’s soliloquy from act 3 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is eagerly awaiting Romeo’s arrival. She married Romeo in secret earlier that day, and they will spend the night together....

In the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius wants to control Brutus. In act 1, he effectively persuades Brutus to recognize Caesar’s growing power by appealing to Brutus’s patriotism...

It’s easy to hate Abigail Williams. Her flaws are blatant to the reader. She will do anything she can in order to avoid trouble. In act 1 of The Crucible, when she sees an opportunity to blame...

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to Abraham Lincoln as the “great American.” Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today,...

Jem and Scout have never seen snow before, so when it finally snows in Maycomb County, they want to make a snowman. They don’t have enough snow, so they use snow from Miss Maudie’s yard. When their...

In the Rumpelstiltskin story, a girl must turn straw into gold or be executed. This seemingly impossible task is achieved with the help of a creature named Rumpelstiltskin. In Sandra Cisneros’s...

Louise Gluck’s poem “The Mountain” begins, ”My students look at me expectantly.” Of course, this creates expectation in the reader. What do the students (and reader) expect? The next line...

A, the protagonist of the novel Every Day, lives every day in the body of a new person. When A “possesses” someone for the day, he (or "she" when A is a girl) is careful to act “in character.” That...

The story “The Lady with a Dog” by Anton Chekhov opens in the summer resort at Yalta where the main character, Dmitri Gurov, starts an affair with “the lady with a dog,” Anna Sergeyevna, even...

Food is an important symbol in Ishiguro’s short story, “A Family Supper.” In the beginning of the story, the narrator explains that his mother was killed when she ate fugu. Fugu, or blowfish, is a...

In her short story "Shopping," Joyce Carol Oates uses the mundane act of shopping to illustrate the theme of unconditional love that a mother has for her daughter. Mrs Dietrich loves Nola with a...

Virginia Woolf offers a variety of answers to her opening question, “How should one read a book?” First she urges us to have faith in our ability to read and form judgments. She knows it’s tempting...

The villanelle is a highly structured form utilizing much repetition that can easily lead to contrived, formulaic poetry. If not used carefully, the villanelle will call too much attention to the...

Traditionally sung, ballads focus on narrating the dramatic moment of a story in meter and rhyme. The ballad is not too concerned with the heightened use of language, often repeating language not...

Although Homer does not use personification often in the Cyclops section of The Odyssey, there is a striking use of personification that can be seen when the men are escaping. The Cyclops, who has...

Act 1, scene 2, develops the conflicts in the Younger family established in the opening scene. It is Saturday, the day that the check for $10,000 arrives, a check that the Youngers have long waited...

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth can be acted as a fierce and intimidating presence who uses her power to drive her husband to murder the king. But Roman Polanski chose a different interpretation....

The four stanzas of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost revolve around the central extended metaphor of a fork in the road, which is compared to the choices that one must make in life. The speaker...

When Romeo sees Juliet for the first time, he is stunned by her beauty, describing her in rhymed couplets, . . . Forswear, it sight, For I ne’er saw true beauty until this night. Shakespeare...

The first stanza in Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death—” describes an encounter between the speaker and Death, with Death personified as a carriage driver who stops his...

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain is satirizing both the greed of the king and the duke as they come up with more and more scams to make money and the gullibility and cruelty of the...

At first glance, Robert Frost doesn’t seem to have much in common with the experimental poetry of the Modernist writers; his poetry often relies on traditional forms, rhymes, and blank verse. Frost...

The turning point in Willy’s life is at the end of the play, when he sees Biff cry, and he realizes that his son loves him. This realization causes him to act decisively. All of his life, Willy has...

The main problem for Odysseus is the question of how he will get home to Ithaca. In book 7, Odysseus has been away from home for 20 years: 10 years were spent fighting in Troy and 10 years were...

In A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry depicts an African American family struggling to make ends meet going about the mundane events of their lives—waking up, sharing a bathroom with other...

The 1961 movie version of A Raisin in the Sun is very close to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, but the main difference is that the movie allows the story to leave the confines of the dimly lit,...

Cornell notes are a simple but flexible note-taking strategy. Basically, you divide your paper into three sections; each section will have a different purpose. To create the notes, simply draw a...

Huck and Jim have no homes, and thus their journey makes them vulnerable to many things, including bad weather. There are two storms in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one at the beginning...

At the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck expresses his strong desire to escape from the confines of civilized society. The Widow Douglas has taken him into her home and is...

The fish is both a competitor and a companion for the old man, Santiago. The old man, a skilled and knowledgeable fisherman, has been competing all of his life. As a young man, he competed in a...

George Milton and Ponyboy Curtis are both outsiders. They are trapped on the outskirts of society with no clear paths to success. George is a migrant worker, living day to day, job by job, in...

Long before anyone in Salem is accused of witchcraft, conflict has developed between Reverend Samuel Parris and John Proctor, a local farmer. The central conflict between these two characters is...