James Kelley
eNotes Educator
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10
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685
Answers Posted
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Answers Bonused
About
I'm an associate professor of English and teach literature, theory, and writing at the junior, senior, and graduate level. I'm also a firm believer in helping to develop good online resources for students at all levels.
Earned Badges
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eNotes Educator
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in 1984
In our world, gin and cigarettes are luxury items that many people consume for pure enjoyment and that many people consume out of necessity, if an addiction develops in the person using them. In... -
Answered a Question in The Outsiders
bullgator's answer is very good, but there's always more to say about how a written work such as The Outsiders has been adapted into film. I would encourage you to think about how there is more to... -
Answered a Question in Film and Television
Here are the definitions of the three terms, taken word-for-word from Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film (W.W. Norton & Co, 2006;... -
Answered a Question in Essays
Here's another possible ending that builds on the comments in this thread: The goal of education should to be to sharpen important skills and to increase knowledge, not to produce mounds of used... -
Answered a Question in The Hunger Games
As I was reading the first novel in the triology, I kept thinking about Survivor, Big Brother, and any number of other hugely popular televised series from the last couple of decades. Any number of... -
Answered a Question in Elizabeth Bishop
As general words of advice, I would recommend that you be prepared to discuss Elizabeth Bishop’s poems in terms of two critical approaches, the New Critical and the biographical. The New Critical... -
Answered a Question in History
The two previous answers are very good, but there's always more to say about the Beats, who including some of my favorite American poets. For one, the term "Beat generation" was probably in use... -
Answered a Question in Claude McKay
Langston Hughes and Claude McKay were male African American poets who were highly productive during the period known today as the Harlem Renaissance. Both poets were pulled from elsewhere to... -
Answered a Question in Salvation
Langston Hughes’ short piece “Salvation” is part of his book-length autobiography The Big Sea (1940), but it is often reprinted alone in literature and writing textbooks as an example of a sketch,... -
Answered a Question in The Crucible
One possible reason might be the New Englanders did not always view the Native Americans as legitimate candidates for conversion. There certainly were missionaries in New England who converted... -
Answered a Question in Harlem
Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” (it appears under a number of other titles, too) was indeed written a couple of decades after the Harlem Renaissance had ended and quite rightly might be taken, in... -
Answered a Question in Literature
thanatassa's discussion of New Criticism is very good, but the final item may need to be revisited. Reader response theory is indeed connected to the concept of "emasculation" -- or, more... -
Answered a Question in The Cold War
The posts up to this point are good, but I've always wondered, when looking at a simple timeline of history, if the US didn't play a leading role in the intensification of the Cold War. When the... -
Answered a Question in Literature
The exact meaning of a “book review” may differ based on the level of audience for which it is written. A middle school book review will probably look a little different from a book review that a... -
Answered a Question in To an Athlete Dying Young
The closest to personification that first jumps out to me in A.E. Houseman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young” is in the fourth stanza: Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And... -
Answered a Question in Young Goodman Brown
To analyze Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story from a psychoanalytic perspective, I would recommend that you focus on three key terms and concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis --repression, projection,... -
Answered a Question in Their Eyes Were Watching God
This topic is very good, and I enjoyed reading the replies. My view mostly echoes that of a number of the previous posters, but at the end of my post I give a bulleted list of items that have not... -
Answered a Question in Essays
Like pohnpei397, I'm skeptical of the claim that different people have radically different learning styles and that different learners can be classified as belonging to entirely separate groups. If... -
Answered a Question in The Awakening
If you see Edna as the protagonist and her attempts to define herself independently of husband and children as the mian conflict, it would make sense to me to call her husband, Léonce Pontellier,... -
Answered a Question in Michel Foucault
Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” might be seen as an example of (post)structuralism, if not of the post-human. Foucault is not interested in the author as a person. That view of the author as... -
Answered a Question in Picnic
Because you’re working at the level of a graduate student, I would encourage you to develop a thesis statement that allows for the application of one or more critical theories and for at least some... -
Answered a Question in The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos William’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” disobeys at least one rule of good writing: it uses a vague subject (“so much”) and never tells us what that subject is. What, example, depends... -
Answered a Question in Essays
The previous poster's comments are very good, but nothing so far seems to have really focused on the assigned topic, which is "Rite of Passage." An argumentative essay can be about anything, of... -
Answered a Question in David Ignatow
Poems can mean any number of things, of course, and I'm a skeptic when it comes to us trying to say with any certainty what an author intends for us to understand. Yet, still, I'll gladly try my... -
Answered a Question in Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser’s Sonnet 34 is indeed full of navigational imagery. We can even see all of the imagery in this poem adding up to form an analogy (an extended and non-literal comparison between two... -
Answered a Question in Literature
pohnpei397’s answer is right on the money, I think. The huge influx of new words, mostly from Latin and Greek, in the Early Modern period enriched the English language immensely, but this influx... -
Answered a Question in Literary Terms
You seem to have a very solid understanding of the terms “form,” “structure,” and “language.” When talking about the general type or tradition of writing that a particular work belongs to (novel,... -
Answered a Question in Kubla Khan
I memorized Coleridge’s poem “Kublai Khan” for a 9th grade English course; some 25 years later, I can still recite it, even if I occasionally miss a line or two. I still don’t fully understand how... -
Answered a Question in Mythologies
One of the most basic points made by Roland Barthes, strongly implied in the series of short essays in the first section of Mythologies, is that anything produced in our culture -- including soap... -
Answered a Question in Literary Terms
These terms, as you know, are all from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. As I understand it, enotes editors aren’t supposed to answer a string of questions, so I’ll give examples of... -
Answered a Question in Ode on a Grecian Urn
The previous poster is correct, of course, about the meter. The overall meter is iambic pentameter. “Pentameter” means that there are five metric feet per line (“penta-“ means five, as in pentagram... -
Answered a Question in The Story of an Hour
One item that the two characters in Kate Chopin's short story "The Story of an Hour" -- Josephine and Richards -- literally have in common is that both are present at the story's beginning. At this... -
Answered a Question in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
One possible significance of the line "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is that it is very possibly an allusion (or... -
Answered a Question in Literature
I do not suggest we guess what an author "might" have intended, but when an author includes strong language in a published text, there was a reason. With published work an author revises so much,... -
Answered a Question in Literature
I agree with the posters who write that they read aloud what's on the page. My first thought is that to do anything less would be to bowlderize the text. I'm not sure I'm entirely consistent in... -
Answered a Question in José García Villa
Your initial question asking about “formalism” in Villa’s poem didn’t really make sense to me, so I changed the question to read “What are the formal elements in ‘Lyric 17’ (‘First, a poem... -
Answered a Question in Peter Pan
You can probably go in all sorts of directions with this interesting topic. I recommend that you first use library databases as well as general internet searches to get as many leads as you want... -
Answered a Question in Leda and the Swan
There may be a number of reasons for which William Butler Yeats’ poem “Leda and the Swan” could be considered part of modern poetry. One clear reason could be that “Leda and the Swan” follows one... -
Answered a Question in Leda and the Swan
There may be a number of reasons for which William Butler Yeats’ poem “Leda and the Swan” could be considered part of modern poetry. One clear reason could be that “Leda and the Swan” follows one... -
Answered a Question in Damballah
John Edgar Wideman's short story "Damballah" (it’s also a chapter from a book-length collection, of course) is one of my favorite pieces in African American literature, even though (or perhaps... -
Answered a Question in Goblin Market
Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" is a wonderful poem that can be approached through a variety of critical perspectives. The wikipedia link given below briefly discusses several approaches (see... -
Answered a Question in Transcendentalism
I love this question! I've seen the movie Avatar, but I don't know it well enough to refer to specific scenes. Still, I think that I can offer enough of an answer here to get you started. Here are... -
Answered a Question in the mother
Thanks for the clarification! What I mean here when I talk about structuralism is an approach that looks at a large number of stories (or other short pieces) and seeks to identify the... -
Answered a Question in the mother
Gwendolyn Brooks is a highly accomplished poet, and her poem "The Mother" reflects her ability to work with language on a number of levels. The poem uses a variety of elements to give it structure,... -
Answered a Question in To Kill a Mockingbird
You'll find at least at least two answers to very similar questions at enotes. See the links provided below. I want to add a detal that doesn't seem to discussed in those answers. The... -
Answered a Question in To Kill a Mockingbird
I like the detailed answer by the previous poster, but I still have to disagree with the idea that the black community is depicted realistically -- in the widest sense of the term "realistic" -- in... -
Answered a Question in To Kill a Mockingbird
mwestwood's reply is very good. I want to add that this quotation from Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird helps me, as a reader, make sense of the scene involving the rabid dog toward the end... -
Answered a Question in Literature
Some pronunciations and spellings are also different. For example color= colour Favorite= favourite theater=theatre I'm not sure why these things are spelled differently, but there are many words... -
Answered a Question in Lady Lazarus
The clearest parallel that is drawn in Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" is between the speaker and a Jew experiencing any number of atrocities in a Nazi contentration camp. Parts of the poem that... -
Answered a Question in On Being Brought from Africa to America
Two things that both poems have in common, of course, are that they are both written by African American writers and that they both address the place of black people in America in...
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