
Lynnette Wofford, Ph.D.
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About
Professor of English.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim was trying to explain the social function of deviance. Rather than think of deviance as some objective absolute, he correctly identified the concept as part of the way societies... -
Answered a Question in Literature
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is a nonfiction book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway published in 2010. Its... -
Answered a Question in The Playboy of the Western World
The term "modern" can refer to the period in western civilization from the Renaissance onward, marked by the rise of the use of the vernacular or to the "modernist" period of the early twentieth... -
Answered a Question in A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Evaluating the mood of a story is somewhat subjective. One can, however, look closely at specific language to analyze the way it might influence readers' emotions. The first sentence of the story... -
Answered a Question in Greek Drama
One of the major differences between tragedy and comedy for Aristotle was the nature of their protagonists. Tragic protagonists were people better than average and comic protagonists were people... -
Answered a Question in History (General)
Travel by land and by water developed in response to local geographic and environmental features. In ancient Greece, for example, city-states were separated by mountain ranges, making land travel... -
Answered a Question in Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire was originally published in 1970. Although it responded to the situation in Brazil at the time of publication, it has broader implications for the... -
Answered a Question in Linda Pastan
First, one should note that "deconstructing" means very specifically analyzing a text according to the literary theories set forth by Jacques Derrida and his followers rather than doing a form of... -
Answered a Question in The Metamorphosis
In The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he has been turned into a giant insect. In this way, his outward appearance has become dehumanized. Over the... -
Answered a Question in Tartuffe
Moliere's Tartuffe is written in a verse form known as the "alexandrine". This consists of twelve syllable lines with a medial caesura. The form was named in reference to medieval "Alexander"... -
Answered a Question in The Name of the Rose
The major debate during the Fifth Day in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco concerns whether Christian orders (and Christians in general) should renounce worldly possessions and live in poverty.... -
Answered a Question in History
First, one should note that the United States did not single-handedly succeed in winning a war. Instead, World War II was won by the Allied forces who were aligned against the Axis powers. A... -
Answered a Question in The Eagle
"The Eagle" by Lord Alfred Tennyson is a short poem, consisting of two three-line stanzas. It is a purely descriptive poem written in the third person. The narrator is an impersonal voice... -
Answered a Question in Bill of Rights
Both the United States Constitution and the Supreme Court create legal definitions of what police can and cannot do. While the Constitution, including amendments beginning with the Bill of Rights... -
Answered a Question in Hamlet
The first literary device used in this scene is meter. Rather than being written in prose, the speeches are written in iambic pentameter. This means that each line in the longer speeches consists... -
Answered a Question in Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
This is one of several poems by Margaret Atwood which attempt to re-imagine Homeric stories from the point of view of female characters. In this way, she is echoing Tennyson's poems that also use... -
Answered a Question in Michel de Montaigne
In his essay “On Cannibals”, Michel de Montaigne was reacting in part to the great age of European exploration, which introduced Europeans to many exotic ideas and cultures. It was a period of... -
Answered a Question in Dante's Inferno
The first circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno is described in canto 4. It is called Limbo. The people in this circle are not suffering in the manner of other denizens of Hell, because they are not... -
Answered a Question in Major Barbara
Shaw's Major Barbara is a play of social satire that abounds in situational irony, using surprising plot twists and outcomes to make serious points about how conventional thinking fails to address... -
Answered a Question in "I Have a Dream" Speech
It is important here to think about the nature of moral exhortation. Philosophers distinguish "is" or factual statements from "ought" or moral statements. If one says "it is raining today," one is... -
Answered a Question in Rules of the Road
The phrase "the rules of the road" refers to rules used on roads to regulate flow of traffic. These rules predate the invention of the automobile. The reason for their existence is a combination of... -
Answered a Question in The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is a light comedy in which the conflicts or obstacles to the characters achieving their goals are relatively minor and intended to form the basis for... -
Answered a Question in A Midsummer Night's Dream
The degree to which a character engages in deception shows us the character's moral nature. For example, Puck is a major agent of deception in the play and also associated with the world of folk... -
Answered a Question in The Glass Menagerie
The answer depends to a large degree on how one uses the term "modern tragedy." In one way, the term can be considered an oxymoron as a tragedy is a genre of ancient Greek drama. According to... -
Answered a Question in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was written in 1922 by Robert Frost. It was included in his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes in... -
Answered a Question in The Oedipus Trilogy
There are two plays by Sophocles in which Oedipus appears as a main character, namely Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. A third play by Sophocles, Antigone, deals with Oedipus's daughters and... -
Answered a Question in The Leap
"The Leap" is a short story by Louise Erdrich. The story is narrated by the daughter of Anna, a former trapeze artist, and portrays the complex feelings of the daughter for her mother by recounting... -
Answered a Question in Oedipus Rex
Sophocles's Oedipus the King is sometimes described as the first detective story. The murder of King Laius has occurred before the opening of the play, and in retribution for that murder, Apollo... -
Answered a Question in Hedda Gabler
There are several reasons why Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen is considered a realistic play. Most importantly, it contains no supernatural elements but only events that could occur to ordinary... -
Answered a Question in Antigone
Eurydice is the wife of Creon and the mother of Haemon, Antigone's fiance. She appears only briefly, near the end of the play. She has a short dialogue with a messenger and demands to hear a full... -
Answered a Question in Symposium
The speech of Phaedrus in Plato's Symposium praises Eros, the god of love. In the speech, Phaedrus refers to many important earlier works by poets and philosophers in support of the importance of... -
Answered a Question in Medea
The term "revenge tragedy" refers to a genre developed in England in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, that is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD. Medea and Phaedra are works from... -
Answered a Question in To Sir, with Love
To Sir, With Love is an autobiographical novel by E. R. Braithwaite written in 1959 describing his experiences as a teacher in London. The main characters are: Ricky Braithwaite: The author was an... -
Answered a Question in Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a work written by the English poet and artist William Blake. It was published in two phases, with the Songs of Innocence appearing first in 1789. This... -
Answered a Question in Dover Beach
"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold is somewhat typical of a popular genre of poetry in the nineteenth century know as the "ode." Based on the choral odes of Greek tragedy and public poetry (such as... -
Answered a Question in Beowulf
Beowulf and Jesus are very different types of character, one belonging to a religious and the other to an heroic tradition. Although Jesus of the New Testament is the Son of God, he is also in his... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
The most important issue here is that Romeo and Juliet is a play in which different characters define love in different ways. There is no narrator who provides some generally accepted definition by... -
Answered a Question in Shakespeare's Sonnets
The main theme of the sonnet is love or longing for the presence of one physically absent. The sonnet begins with a description of the hard physical labor of travelling during the day. It describes... -
Answered a Question in Plato's Republic
First, note that in many translations the term "music" is used to translate "mousike" , the arts governed by the Muses, which can include poetry, literature, and other arts as well as what English... -
Answered a Question in The Old Man and the Sea
Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is a complexly constructed story that gradually develops to a climax. The tension starts to build at the very beginning of the story when the reader is... -
Answered a Question in The Scarlet Letter
First, it is important to distinguish between the narrator of The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne. A narrator of a novel is just as much a construct as any of the characters and one cannot always... -
Answered a Question in There Will Come Soft Rains
"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury is a story set in Allendale, California, which has been destroyed by nuclear war. The story begins on August 4, 2026, and ends on August 5, 2026. It... -
Answered a Question in Daisy Miller
Henry James is often considered a master of nuance in fiction. He rarely shows readers just one side of a question, but rather displays fully rounded characters in all their complexity. Thus, the... -
Answered a Question in History
The major issue here is precisely what is considered Byzantine and what is considered Roman. If one dates "Byzantine" to Constantine, one could point to the Christianization of the Roman Empire as... -
Answered a Question in The Hobbit
There is a clear indication, after Balin arrives, when the narrator states of Bilbo that "He liked visitors." When Bilbo first encounters Gandalf, he invites him to sit down and smoke a pipe. Since... -
Answered a Question in Guns, Germs, and Steel
The terms ultimate and proximate causes actually date back to Aristotle's distinction between efficient and final causes. Essentially, proximate or efficient causes are intermediary steps between... -
Answered a Question in The Cask of Amontillado
First, many critics presume that Montresor is speaking a deathbed confession to a priest. This would account for his finally revealing the murder which he had kept successfully concealed. Assuming... -
Answered a Question in Antigone
In a sense, the answer to the question can be found in unpacking the meaning of the phrase "broke the law." A crucial issue in Antigone is that there are many different types of law. Laws can be... -
Answered a Question in Brown v. Board of Education
In 1954, Brown versus the Board of Education transformed the United States educational system by outlawing racial segregation. For many students, this meant a more racially diverse classroom. As a... -
Answered a Question in Poetry
The term elegy derives from Greek word elegos (Latin: elegus) which means a song of bereavement. It was typically accompanied by the music of a flute (aulos) in antiquity. The adjectival form of...
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