Harry Runte
eNotes Educator
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416
Answers Posted
154
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About
I have been teaching English as a Foreign language for the past nine years in Bologna, Italy. Before that, I earned a PhD in American Studies at Nottingham University, UK, where I also taught courses in American Studies and Fim.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in The Pinballs
As with most "coming of age" novels, the theme of The Pinballs is growing up and developing as an adult and taking responsibilities for our own lives. In the course of the novel, the three foster... -
Answered a Question in Maya Angelou
The language and the structure that Angelou adopts in her poem “Woman Work” reinforce the theme of the weight that Black women have to carry and, at the same time, celebrate Black women’s strength... -
Answered a Question in Buried Onions
The themes of the widespread sorrow that the characters in the novel experience and the determinism that marks their fates link the title Buried Onions to its narrative. Significantly, Buried... -
Answered a Question in Literature
The influential and long-lasting reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) gives its name also to the literary production of the period which was characterized by important economic and social changes.... -
Answered a Question in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
In the title of the novel, Changez is characterized as a "reluctant fundamentalist" because he believed in American society and even in its exploitative corporate values for a certain amount of... -
Answered a Question in Paulo Freire
The Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire began to challenge his country's educational system in the late 1950s when he started to work for the Department of Education and Culture of the state of... -
Answered a Question in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Jim is a managing director at Underwood Samson and is the first contact Changez has with the valuation firm as he is the person who gives him the job. The scene of the job interview is the first... -
Answered a Question in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Jean-Bautista is fundamental in bringing about Changez's decision to resign his job within corporate America and become, although reluctantly, an Islamic fundamentalist. As Changez says:... -
Answered a Question in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The technique of the dramatic monologue used by Hamid in the novel strongly implicates the reader in the story as Changez speaks directly to us and we find ourselves in the position of the American... -
Answered a Question in A Dry White Season
The title itself, A Dry White Season, is symbolic of the general state of apathy that Brink found pervasive in apartheid South Africa. It is against this generalized lack of concern for the... -
Answered a Question in Family Matters
The novel deals with the different attitudes that the members of a family show towards the aging patriarch, Nariman Vakeel, a kind, retired English professor. He lives with his stepchildren, Coomy... -
Answered a Question in Their Eyes Were Watching God
The novel makes references to important historical institutions and events. In Chapter 2, for example, it makes reference to slavery as Nanny tells Janie that as she was born into slavery she had... -
Answered a Question in United Nations Organization
The Security Council is the UN organ which is responsible for resolutions on peace and security and for investigating possible threats to the world order. It is granted judiciary, legislative and... -
Answered a Question in William Cullen Bryant
The poem central theme is expressed through the final metaphor, elaborated in the last two stanzas, which likens the late blossoming of the fringed gentian towards the end of the year, a concept... -
Answered a Question in American Realism
The horrors of the First World War had a deep impact on literature both in terms of themes and literary techniques. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic remarked that the old world had finished... -
Answered a Question in History
Both the Indian Congress Party and the African National Congress are mass parties and are currently in a position of political hegemony in their respective countries. The Indian Congress has... -
Answered a Question in Clear Light of Day
On the surface Tara is the opposite of her elder sister Bim: she has married a diplomat and moves into the circles of India's up and coming elite. While her sister Bim has remained confined in the... -
Answered a Question in Filippo Brunelleschi
The dome of Florence Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore had been designed by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. The planned octagonal dome was the biggest both in terms of length and width of its kind and... -
Answered a Question in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
The two books, though belonging to different genres and literary periods, the colonial era for Rowlandson's captivity narrative, the nineteenth century on the eve of the American civil... -
Answered a Question in Tamburlaine the Great
In some ways, the association of Tamburlaine with the Renaissance and humanism seems daring. The Renaissance emphasized moderation and harmony, while Tamburlaine is ambitious and excessive. Yet, on... -
Answered a Question in Felix Randal
Although written in 1880, the poem, like the rest of Hopkins's poetic production was not published until the late 1910s, becoming an important influence for Modernist poetry. Hopkins was much more... -
Answered a Question in Cloud Nine
The play shows the process through which the colonized internalise so much the values of colonial domination as to give up their own distinct cultural identity and take on the colonisers'. This... -
Answered a Question in The House on Mango Street
Esperanza, the narrator of The House on Mango Street, explains in the sketch "Boys & Girls" that Nenny is too young to be my friend. She's just my sister and that was not my fault. You... -
Answered a Question in The Interpretation of Cultures
In part 3 of the book Geertz defines religion as "a cultural system", calling for a wider approach to the study of religion that incorporates modern theory alongside the works of Durkheim, Veber,... -
Answered a Question in The Country Wife
Wlliam Wycherly's Restoration comedy The Country Wife (1675) satirizes social manners and habits without trying to propose right moral models for the audience to follow. The one-liner technique... -
Answered a Question in American Dervish
Hailed as the novel that could bring Muslim-American fiction into the mainstream, The American Dervish is about the coming of age of Hayat Shah, a young Pakistani-American who lives in Milwaukee... -
Answered a Question in Sizwe Banzi Is Dead
The play, which premiered in 1972, revolves around the theme of identity as its protagonist, Sizwe Banzi, ultimately decides to relinquish his true identity and assume that of a dead man (Robert... -
Answered a Question in Dylan Thomas
Both the Romantic and Victorian periods had finished by the 1930s, the time Thomas began to publish his poetry collections. However, Thomas is generally perceived as reacting against the... -
Answered a Question in The Handmaid's Tale
An epigraph is a sentence, usually a quotation from another literary work or a passage from a famous speech, that is set at the beginning of a novel or a document. The function of the epigraph is... -
Answered a Question in A Passage to India
The narrative of the novel unfolds according to the different seasons and their corresponding weather conditions. The first section of the novel, "Mosque", is dominated by cool weather and its... -
Answered a Question in A Far Cry from Africa
Seeing the tags you had indicated for your question, I have edited it to include the titles of the two literary pieces you tagged. The two works belong to different literary genres (novel/poetry)... -
Answered a Question in A Raisin in the Sun
The title itself is metaphorical and allusive. It refers to Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem" in which the poet asked whether a dream that is continuously put off, like the dreams of the characters... -
Answered a Question in A Far Cry from Africa
The reference is to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) between the Republican forces, which defended the country's democratically-elected socialist government, and the right-wing Fascist Falange... -
Answered a Question in Nathaniel Hawthorne
As the Enotes study guide on Romanticism points out, the literary movement (which in America is more commonly referred to as American Transcendentalism) stressed the importance of personal... -
Answered a Question in James Baldwin
I have edited your question as I found that the sentence you quote is in the essay called "They can't Turn Back" (1960), originally printed in Mademoiselle and collected only many years later in... -
Answered a Question in Fasting, Feasting
As in other novels and short stories by Desai, the focus of Fasting, Feasting is on family relationships and how these determine the fate of the characters, particularly the female ones. The title... -
Answered a Question in History
I think it is always difficult to find a "ism" that characterizes a historical epoch as usually different "isms" battle to become the dominant one and therefore often co-exist at a given time. Your... -
Answered a Question in Fontamara
Fontamara focuses on the exploitation of Italian peasants (referred to as "cafoni" in the novel) during the Fascist dictatorship. Set in the Southern region of Abruzzi in the fictional town of... -
Answered a Question in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
The fity-year-old spy Alec Leamas is the central character in John Le Carre's second novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. As the novel opens Leamas is shown as beginning to lack... -
Answered a Question in The House on Mango Street
I would say that Cisneros does not claim her Chicano culture to be wholly unique and separated from other ethnic cultures in the United States or from the American mainstream. As the narrator of... -
Answered a Question in The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus
Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories are usually placed under the category of regional realism or local color (other writers in the group may include Sara Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin and, to... -
Answered a Question in And Death Shall Have No Dominion
In this poem, Thomas uses, from the very title, religious imagery from the Bible combined with natural and bodily imagery. This combination shifts the central theme of resurrection from a religious... -
Answered a Question in And Death Shall Have No Dominion
The poem is made up of three stanzas each beginning and ending with the title line. Each stanza reinforces the underlying theme of the poem which is the transformation of life and material bodies... -
Answered a Question in And Death Shall Have No Dominion
As emphasized by the title line which is adapted from Romans 6:9 and opens and closes each of the three stanzas of the poem, Thomas's central theme here is resurrection. Starting from the very... -
Answered a Question in Six Characters in Search of an Author
Pirandello's play was first published in 1921, while Barthes's influential essay on the death of the author first appeared after more than forty years, in 1967. In spite of the differences in the... -
Answered a Question in The House on Mango Street
Cultures do not exist in a void and are always in relation and dialogue with one another. In the case of Cisneros, we can find the interplay between the author's descent (the cultural tradition of... -
Answered a Question in Look Back in Anger
Literature can never be a mere mirror on reality and, therefore, does not simply copy from it, but reinvents it. Yet, it is fair to say that Look Back in Anger as well as other works of literature... -
Answered a Question in Half of a Yellow Sun
The reason for this division and for the different titles is that the narrative of the book does not follow a chronological order but moves backwards and forwards in time. Thus, it moves from the... -
Answered a Question in Sister Carrie
When the sociologists of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology started to study the American city and the phenomenon of urbanisation at the beginning of the twentieth century, they also analysed... -
Answered a Question in The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett's novel and the John Houston's 1941 film adaptation starring Bogart, Mary Astor and Peter Lorre had a crucial influence to establish the conventions of the noir/detective story...
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