How is the human propensity to seek pain exemplified in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem "The Raven"?

This poem is a fascinating example of first-person narration, as well as  powerful exploration of the human capacity for self-induced suffering. The narrator is grieving a lost love, Lenore, and believes the raven who has come to visit may hold answers to his questions about death and the afterlife. We know that the narrator is somewhat indulgent in his grief, as he tries to use books to distract himself ("vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorry") but his first reaction when confronted with the tapping noise outside, after realizing it is not a human visitor, is to whisper "Lenore" as if perhaps her ghost may be there. He is haunted by her memory.

He wishes to be reunited with Lenore, who he assumes is in heaven (as suggested by the line "for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angles name Lenore"). Since the raven never gives any answer but "nevermore," the protagonist does have it in his power to craft his questions so that this answer is a positive, rather than a negative, option. But his questions invariably lead to the answer "nevermore" being a response full of finality, sadness and loss of hope.

He asks the raven, as some kind of psychopomp or spiritual messenger, to help him forget Lenore, but is told this will never happen. He asks if he will be reunited with her, and is given the same answer. He then requests that the bird leave him alone, and the response "nevermore" indicates the bird still sits there above his door, a content reminder of his own mortality, and the lonely death that awaits.

In The Lovely Bones, what is George Harvey thinking and why might he pursue those actions?

In Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, the character George Harvey is the antagonist in the story. He is a 36-year-old sexual predator, a serial killer, and a rapist. He has raped and murdered Susie Salmon not far from her home. It is difficult to say for certain what George would be thinking because the psychology of a criminal and a pedophile is a complicated one. However, Susie gives information on George’s past that may help the reader understand what might have shaped him into the person he became. His mother taught him to shoplift and commit petty crimes at a young age and his father wasn’t typical but taught him how to build things. The family was always on the move, so young George had little security. George missed having a steady and safe home life, and this can be seen in his job of building dollhouses. Therefore, his actions of building and killing women come in part from his unhappy childhood and his lack of control over his own world.

Why red colour is used as danger signal

Where human intent is involved, red is used to indicate (potential) dangers because it is relatively easier to see or distinguish compared to other colors. Red light, which is what our eye detects as the color red, is scattered the least by air molecules. Red light has the largest wavelength and so is more easily perceptible even through harsh weather, low lighting or overcast skies, and across distance. This means that even if it's very rainy or dark out, you'll have an easier time seeing a red object than one of another color to indicate danger.

Humans have also evolved to associate the color red as danger, though the origins of this are difficult to determine. Many plants and animals in nature use bright coloring as a means of warding off predators by either intimidation or indicating a poisonous quality. For example, poison dart frogs come in a variety of colors, all quite bold. This sends a signal to other animals that they are not good for eating. Many poisonous berries are of a bright red color, and this association lead to the myth that tomato fruits were poisonous.

Based on cultural associations with color, red may not be the color of choice for signalling danger. Alternately, the color red may have meanings that seem to contrast with the idea of danger. In the United States, red indicates both love and danger. 

What are some reliable sources that can be used to back up statements in a research paper dealing with identity stereotypes and racism? Books and...

Great topic. I can help give you a great source on identity stereotypes.  I have been teaching gender stereotypes in my media class for about ten years now.  I feel that the best current source for information on and examples of gender stereotyping is "The Representation Project."  I'll post the link below. 

The site has a lot of great stats and infographics.  The project's two big endeavors have been two award winning documentaries.  The first was the MissRepresentation film.  It focused squarely on female gender stereotypes, sexual objectification of women, and the consequences of both.  This past year, the Representation Project released the same kind of documentary about men and boys.  It is called The Mask You Live In.  It focuses on how the media typically sends boys and men the message that they have to be hyper masculine, violent, and emotionless voids.  

Adding on to my previous post, I can recommend a fairly solid website that focuses on racial, ethnic, and gender stereotyping in the media.  The website organization is "The Critical Media Project."  What's good about this site is that it doesn't focus only on a single type of stereotyping.  It has information and related links about gender stereotyping, racial stereotyping, and ethnic stereotyping.  It's a credible resource as well, because it is associated with the University of Southern California.  

In "The Most Dangerous Game", what roles do chance and coincidence play in the story?

Chance or coincidence plays a large role in that Rainsford happened to fall of his boat, and happened to be a famous hunter.

Chance or coincidence do seem to play a role in this story.  The first coincidence is that Rainsford, a renowned hunter, happened to fall off his yacht close enough to swim to the island, after dropping his pipe.  That is definitely odd!  Rainsford would happen to fall of near and island, and that island.  He knew the island was there because he had been warned that it was dangerous, although the only source of the danger was vague sailors’ rumors.

He leaped upon the rail and balanced himself there, to get greater elevation; his pipe, striking a rope, was knocked from his mouth. He lunged for it; a short, hoarse cry came from his lips as he realized he had reached too far and had lost his balance. 

The sailors likely fear the island because their fellows keep ending up disappearing near there.  Once Rainsford washed up on the island, another coincidence is that the island’s only inhabitant is an avid hunter.  Rainsford is not just a famous hunter; he is a writer of several hunting books.  When he runs into Zaroff, the general knows exactly who he is.  If Zaroff hadn’t been a hunter, or if Rainsford hadn’t been either, or if Rainsford had not written books on the subject, Zaroff would not have known who Rainsford was.

"It is a very great pleasure and honor to welcome Mr. Sanger Rainsford, the celebrated hunter, to my home." …

"I've read your book about hunting snow leopards in Tibet, you see," explained the man. "I am General Zaroff."

Zaroff was bored, and desperate to find better game.  Hunting animals was nothing to him anymore.  Hunting ordinary humans was getting dull. What he needed was an expert hunter, trained in evasion and traps, to make the game interesting.  Rainsford fit the bill perfectly, and Zaroff was practically salivating at the prospect of hunting him.  If Rainsford had not called Zaroff a murderer, he might have hunted with him instead of being his prey, but we will never know.  Rainsford was the perfect prize, after all.

What do you like about this poem?

This question is asking for an opinion about Maya Angelou’s poem “Caged Bird.” This means you have to assess and analyze the poem to determine what you find appealing about it.

Personally, I enjoy Angelou’s use of vivid imagery when describing the free bird and the caged bird. When I read her descriptions of the birds, I can feel the carefree freedom of the free bird as it soars through the air. On the other hand, I can feel the desperation of the caged bird as it paces with clipped wings in its cage. Because Maya Angelou is so masterful in her descriptions, I experience the breeze as the free bird “leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream.” When the caged bird sings,in spite of its circumstances, I identify with its song, “for the caged bird sings of freedom.” The imagery evokes emotions within me.

Others might like the lyrical writing, or the message of the poem. Even though the question asks for an opinion, it is important to use the text to validate your choice.

In linguistics, what is Constraint-based Grammar? Why is it identified with the feature of reversibility?

Linguistic knowledge is innate, implicit, and shared by every member of our species. Moreover, any language in the world is acquired rapidly and effortlessly in a comparatively short period of time by a human child, after he or she is exposed to an environment in which that language is spoken. Within less than three years of time after birth, the child begins to infer, deduce and generalize language-specific rules from a very limited language input. Noam Chomsky calls this the problem of “poverty of stimulus”. It is limited as there is an absence of negative and positive feedback for a lot of linguistic rules. Yet, the child never makes structure independent errors ever (Chomsky, 1971). Acquisition of language, thus, is not much of a problem for a child even at the age of 2-3 years. However, it is quite a task for the language researcher, who already knows so much about the structure of a given language, to decode the rules of this complex system and explicitly define it to make machines learn the human language.

Constraint-based grammars or constraint-based theories of grammars express this implicit linguistic knowledge in the form of well-defined, explicit mathematical rules or algorithms. They have gained popularity in the field of Computational Linguistics and more so in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Constraint-based grammars are developed for languages other than English also. The formal, uniform, context-dependent rules written in clear linguistic terminology are used to analyze given text of a language. Constraints are introduced at different grammatical levels (word, phrases, sentences, etc.) and tags are applied to tokens (of a particular type) in the text before parsing and semantic interpretation take place.

Constraint-based grammar formalisms used to have one major drawback earlier. Although they could help in language analysis using computational and mathematical models of grammar, they failed to accommodate the learnability theories of language. Lexicalized, Well-Founded Grammars (LWFG) are an improvement over the traditional Constraint-based Grammars, which take into account the learnability factor and, thus, aid in understanding a language system deeply. Constraints are introduced at the semantic level, which allow interpretation of a text during syntactic parsing.

An important feature of the Constraint-based grammars is that they take information from different levels of linguistic analysis. Complex language structures are described and built one by one from smaller structures at various steps. Such a description is uniform and the resulting structure is consistent and independent of the order of the steps. In other words, these grammar formalisms use a linguistic base system in which the type of constraints that are applied are important and not the order in which they are applied. In this way, Constraint-based Grammars are reversible.