Who Are You? The Question That Drives the Plot
Alice has been in Wonderland for three chapters and still doesn’t know who she is. The caterpillar is about to make that problem impossible…
Narration
How to Read a Book: What the First Page of Alice Teaches You
The first sentence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is 57 words long. Carroll never uses the word ‘bored.’ He shows it. That difference is…
Good Is Not a Feeling — It’s a Fight
This is not a story with a complicated moral ambiguity at its core. The lines are drawn clearly. And that clarity is not a…
The Language That Paints Without Brushes
This post is about language — specifically, the language of Burton Raffel's translation of Beowulf. Aristotle named diction as one of his six elements…
Nobody Reads Beowulf Anymore (And That’s the Problem)
Beowulf has survived over a thousand years — and most people have never really read it. Jimmy opens a five-part analysis with translations, the…
The Only Witness Who Cannot Lie: Narration in The Piece of String
Maitre Hauchecorne of Breauté picks up a piece of string. He did not steal a wallet. He was not duplicitous in this particular instance.…
Experience Is the Authority
The Wife of Bath opens with one word: experience. Jimmy's analysis unpacks her empiricist philosophy, the rubber band theory of power, and how she…
Why the Translator Matters
Why the translator you choose changes everything you read — and what that tells us about so-called "editing" of classic literature.
Hamlet Is Not About a Man Who Can’t Make Up His Mind — It’s About a Man Who Won’t Act on Unverified Truth
There is a moment in Act Two where Hamlet has everything he needs to act. The ghost has told him the truth. Claudius is…
The Art of War Is Not Written by Sun Tzu — And That’s the Point
This first essay argues that The Art of War is not simply a military manual attributed to a famous general. It is a text…
A&P — The World of A&P: The Middle
In Blog #2, we’ll examine the world of A&P – the middle ground, the center, the balance. Where behavior is structured, expectations are enforced,…
The Narrator Slips — And Why That One Word Matters in A Duel
A Duel: A Reading with Jimmy Series In this three-part blog series, Jimmy examines A Duel not as a patriotic story or a simple…
