the horror
a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.
Sonnet
" . . . I always do everything to the best of my ability sir but God is my Witness I never find a night watchman work like this so much writing I dont have time to do anything else, I dont have four hands and six eyes and I want extra assistance with Mr Wills and party sir"
VS Naipaul "The Night Watchmen's Occurrence Book" (1967)
"This book is to be known in future as 'The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book.' In it, I shall expect to find a detailed account o everything that happens"
VS Naipaul "The Night Watchmen's Occurrence Book" (1967)
"You are not to decide what is necessary to mention in this night watchman's occurrence book. Since when have you become sole owner of the hotel as to determine what is necessary to mention?"
VS Naipaul "The Night Watchmen's Occurrence Book" (1967)
"Your interest in the morals of our guests seems to be distracting your attention from your duties. Save your preaching for your roadside prayer meetings"
VS Naipaul "The Night Watchmen's Occurrence Book" (1967)
" . . . in all the hat shops and tailors' shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
" . . . on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
a form of expression in literature in which the author refers to things in nature or art that affect the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power.
sublime
GLOBALIZATION
the act or process of globalizing : the state of being globalized; especially : the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets
The cane appears in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming. And we lie down. For every drop of blood there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp the cane appears.
Rita Dove, "Parsley" (1983)
There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down.
Rita Dove, "Parsley" (1983)
___________ was not overtly political, but it participated in the protest against Impersonality as a poetic value by reinstating an insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform.
Confessional poetry
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Irish Free State Proclaimed Easter Rising Bloody Sunday
Easter Rising (1916) Irish Free State Proclaimed (1922) Bloody Sunday (1972)
"I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both'"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
So among the rising democratic millons we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very pressure of the present to be come the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all
Arther Schomburg "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (1925)
An' when de pinch o' time you feel A 'pur you a you' chigger heel, You lef' you' district, big an' coarse, An' come join buccra Police Force.
"A Midnight Woman to the Bobby" (1912) Claude McKay
I born right do'n beneat' de clack (You ugly brute, you tu'n you' back?) Don' t'ink dat I'm a come-aroun' , I born right 'way in 'panish Town. Care how you try, you caan' do mo' Dan many dat was hyah befo'; Yet whe' dey all o' dem te-day? De buccra dem no kick dem way? Ko 'pon you' jam samplatta nose: 'Cos you wear Mis'r Koshaw clo'es You t'ink say you's de only man, Yet fus' time ko how you be'n 'tan.
"A Midnight Woman to the Bobby" (1912) Claude McKay
No palm me up, you dutty brute, You' jam mount' mash like ripe bread-fruit; You fas'n now, but wait lee ya, I'll see you grunt under de law.
"A Midnight Woman to the Bobby" (1912) Claude McKay
You come from mountain naked-'kin, An' Lard a mussy! you be'n thin, For all de bread-fruit dem be'n done, Bein' 'poil' up by tearin' sun:
"A Midnight Woman to the Bobby" (1912) Claude McKay
Hybridity
"One of the most widely employed and most disputed terms in postcolonial theory, hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonisation."
a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modern artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self-consciously 'depthless' works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory disconnections.
"Postmodernism
Years of Women's struggle for the vote in the US
1848-1920
a feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century and had a profound influence on feminism well into the twentieth.
"The New Woman"
What year was the Jamaica rebellion suppressed by Governor Eyre?
1865
What Year was the Nigerian revolution?
1960
What year was Nelson Mandela elected president?
1994
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep.
"War is Kind" by Stephen Crane (1899)
Swift, blazing flag of the regiment, Eagle with crest of red and gold, These men were born to drill and die. Point for them the virtue of slaughter, Make plain to them the excellence of killing And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
"War is Kind" by Stephen Crane (1899)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER:
...
3 main impositions carried out by the English during the conquest of Ireland
1) imposed economic and political rule 2) imposed Protestantism 3) imposed English language (instead of Irish language)
when was the Louisiana Purchase purchased?
1803
What year did India gain independance from Britain
5 August 1947
White men will be finished within my lifetime. There are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they're up to--the radio never talks about them. My humble prediction: in twenty years' time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we'll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else.
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)
"The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future"
Arther Schomburg "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (1925)
"It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially changer her first name from Grace to Afamefuna"
Adiche "The Headstrong Historian" (2008)
"Nwamgba had no desire to speak such a thing herself [English], but she was suddenly determined that Anikwenwa would speak it well enough to go the white men's court with Obierika's cousins and defeat them and take control of what was his"
Adiche "The Headstrong Historian" (2008)
"She complained to the Women's Council, and twenty women went at night to Okafo and Okoye's home, brandishing pestles, warning them to leave Nwamgba alone"
Adiche "The Headstrong Historian" (2008)
"The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture"
Arther Schomburg "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (1925)
"Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a great man indeed"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
"She felt her son slipping away from her, and yet she was proud that he was learning so much, that he could become a court interpreter or letter writer, and that with Father Lutz's help he had brought home some papers that showed that their lands belonged to him and his mother. Her proudest moment was when he went to his father's cousins Okafo and Okoye and asked for his father's ivory tusk back. And they gave it to him"
Adiche "The Headstrong Historian" (2008)
"But what the Negro artist of to-day has most to gain from the arts of the forefathers is perhaps not cultural inspiration or technical innovations, but the lesson of a classical background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery"
Alain Locke, "The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts" (1925)
"This artistic discovery of African art come at a time when there was a marked decadence and sterility in certain forms of European plastic art and expression, due to generations of the inbreeding of style and idiom"
Alain Locke, "The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts" (1925)
"Our greatest rehabilitation may possibly come through such channels, but for the present, more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective"
Alain Locke, Introduction to The New Negro (1925)
"In these pages, without ignoring either the fact that there are important interactions between the national and the race life, or that the attitude of American towards the Negro is as important a factor as the attitude of the Negro towards America, we have nevertheless concentrated upon self-expression and the forces and motives of self-determination. So far as he is culturally articulate, we shall let the Negro speak for himself"
Alain Locke, Introduction to the New Negro (1925)
"Of all the voluminous literature on the Negro, so much is the external view and commentary that we may warrantably say that nine-tenths of it is about the Negro rather than of him, so that it is the Negro problem rather than the Negro that is known and mooted in the general mind"
Alaine Locke "Foreword to The New Negro" (1925)
Her clothes were old Accented, in a language whose spine had been snapped, she whispered the words of a city witch, and made me happy, alive like a man: the future will make you tall.
Alberto Rios "Madre Sofia" (1982)
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. I can't stand my own mind.
Allen Ginsberg, "America" (1956)
I'm addressing you. Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.
Allen Ginsberg, "America" (1956)
say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
Allen Ginsberg, "America" (1956)
Andrew Jackson was president when? and what act is associated with him?
Andrew Jackson was President of the US 1829-1837 Indian Removal Act of 1830
I feed the world in here too, offering the desk puppy biscuits. However, nothing is just what it seems to be. My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.
Anne Sexton, "The Room of My Life" (1975)
a conversation of heels and toes, the fireplace a knife waiting for someone to pick it up, the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a *****,
Anne Sexton, "The Room of My Life" (1975)
Policy of institutionalized segregation in South Africa that lasted from 1948 until 1994.
Apartheid
That's my caste-my destiny. everyone in the Darkness who hears that name knows all about me at once.
Aravind Adiga, "The White Tiger" (2008)
Those that were most ferocious, the hugriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly. It didn't matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up.
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)
"my brothers - the what was called 'the Haitian Refugees" "& i do not know why i was there - how i came to be on board that ship - that navel of my past w/ my nerves as I say comin & goin & my head soffly spinnin &"
Brathwaite "Dream Haiti" (1994)
"Accustomed as is squalid adversity to reign unchallenged in these quarters, yet in this room is was more than usually triumphant, sitting, as it were, high on a throne of regal estate, so depressed was the woman and so depressing her surroundings"
CLR James "Triumph" (1965)
"Sunday morning in barrack-yards is pot-parade. Of the sixteen tenants in the yard twelve had their pots out, and they lifted the meat with long iron forks to turn it, or threw water into the pot so that it steamed to the heavens and every woman could tell what her neighbour was cooking --- beef, pork, or chicken. It didn't matter what you cooked in the week, if you didn't cook at all. But to cook salt fish, or hog-head, or pig-tail on a Sunday morning was a disgrace. You put your pot inside your house and cooked it there"
CLR James "Triumph" (1965)
"Where people in England and America say slums, Trinidadians said barracks-yards. Probably the word is a relic of the days when England relied as much on garrisons of soldiers as on her fleet to protect her valuable sugar-producing colonies"
CLR James "Triumph" (1965)
"Yet Celestine was grieved that she could do nothing to help Mamitz in her trouble, which she attributed to the evil and supernatural machinations of Irene, their common enemy"
CLR James "Triumph" (1965)
an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
Capitalism
Stephen Gwynn (Irish member of British parliament) wrote his diary: "The effect of ___________ on me was that I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot."
Cathleen Ní Houlihan
In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress.
Chinua Achebe "An Image of Africa" (1925)
"In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress."
Chinua Achebe "An Image of Africa" (1975)
"As she [Ekwefi] stood gazing at the circular darkness which had swallowed them, tears gushed from her eyes, and she swore within her that if she heard Ezinma cry she would rush into the cave and defend her against all the gods in the world. She would die with her"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
"It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of even and capricious gods of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
"It's true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother's hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is here to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
"Looking at a king's mouth," said an old man, "one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
"The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
"The night was very quiet. It was always quiet except on moonlight nights. Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
"The old man bore no ill will towards Okonkwo. Indeed he respected him for his industry and success. But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo's brusqueness in dealing with less successful men. Only a week ago a man had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they held to discuss the next ancestral feast. Without looking at the man Okonkwo had said: "This meeting is for men." The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man's spirit. Everybody at the kindred meeting took sides with Osugo when Okonkwo called him a woman"
Chinua Achebe "Things Fall Apart" (1958)
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Claude McKay "America (1921)
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
Claude McKay "America (1921)
If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Claude McKay "If We Must Die" (1919)
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay "If We Must Die" (1919)
Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit, Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,
Claude McKay "The Tropics of New York" (1920)
My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; A wave of longing through my body swept, And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
Claude McKay "The Tropics of New York" (1920)
Set in the window, bringing memories Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies In benediction over nun-like hills.
Claude McKay "The Tropics of New York" (1920)
I see the mighty city through a mist— The strident trains that speed the goaded mass, The poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed, The fortressed port through which the great ships pass, The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate, Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate.
Claude McKay "The White City" (1921)
I will not toy with it nor bend an inch. Deep in the secret chambers of my heart I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch I bear it nobly as I live my part. My being would be a skeleton, a shell, If this dark Passion that fills my every mood, And makes my heaven in the white world's hell, Did not forever feed me vital blood.
Claude McKay "The White City" (1921)
Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, And tangerines and mangoes and grape-fruit Fit for the highest prized at parish fairs.
Claude McKay "Tropics in New York" (1920)
the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
Colonialism
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: The Blackstone Rangers An Image of Africa Colonization in Reverse Caribbean Chameleon To Da-duh in Memoriam Jamaican Language
Colonization in Reverse (1957) The Blackstone Rangers (1968) An Image of Africa (1975) To Da-duh in Memoriam (1985) Jamaican Language (1993) Caribbean Chameleon (1994)
--->[treated as singular] land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community. -->historical the common people regarded as a part of a political system, especially in Britain. 4 archaic provisions shared in common; rations.
Commons
"Must we, nilly-willy, be forced into writing of nothing...but the more savage and none too beautiful aspects of our lives? May we not chant a hymn to the Sun God if we will, create a bit of phantasy in which not a spiritual or a blues appears...?"
Countee Cullen
"a geometric structure of overlapping, shifting, tilted cubes that seem to project out of and into the picture plane, as though we were watching a 3-D movie. The effect that is created is not that of a single-point linear perspective, [but], rather, that of a scene changing as it is observed from various positions. In other words, Braque was trying to record the process of seeing, and, in order to do so, he has constructed a composite of several different simultaneous views of the objects to be viewed in one synthetic moment."
Cubism
an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage.
Cubism
" . . . I had been born on the night that El Generalissimo, Dios Trujillo, the honorable chief of state, had ordered the massacre of all Haitians living there"
Danticat "1937" (1996)
"The women would all dress in white. My mother would hold my hand tightly as we walked toward the water. We were all daughters of that river, which had taken our mothers from us. Our mothers were the ashes and we were the light. Our mothers were the embers and we were the sparks. Our mothers were the flames and we were the blaze"
Danticat "1937" (1996)
I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?
Derek Walcott "A Far Cry from Africa" (1956)
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization's dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
Derek Walcott "A Far Cry from Africa" (1956)
We left somewhere a life we never found, customs and gods that are not born again, some crib, some grille of light clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld us from waht the world below us and beyond and in its swaddling cerements we're still bound.
Derek Walcott "Laventille" (1965)
Fete start! erzulie rattling her ra-ra; Ogun, the blacksmith, felling No pain; Damballa winding lke a zandoli lizard, as their huge feet thudded on the ceiling, as the sea-god, drunk, lurched from wall to wall, saying: "Mama, this music so loud, I going in seine"
Derek Walcott "Omeros" (1990)
Describe the type of narration in Things Fall Apart
Distanced narrative stance
a poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events.
Dramatic Monologue
Most men would agree that our present problem of problems was not the Color Problem, but what we call Labor, the problem of allocating work and income in the tremendous and increasingly intricate world-embracing industrial machine that our civilization has built.
DuBois "The Negro Mind Reaches Out" (1925)
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other. -
Dylan Thomas "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" (1946)
Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
Dylan Thomas "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" (1946)
The majesty and burning of the child's death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.
Dylan Thomas "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" (1946)
I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I--we--were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918.
Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room" (1971)
I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world. into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too?
Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room" (1971)
Then I was back in it. The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918.
Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room" (1971)
Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities-- boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts-- held us all together or made us all just one?
Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room" (1971)
Everything only connected by "and" and "and." Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.) Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? --the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, --and looked and looked our infant sight away.
Elizabeth Bishop, "Over 2000 Illustrations and a complete concordance" (1948)
Granted a page alone or a page made up of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles or circles set on stippled gray, granted a grim lunette, caught in the toils of an initial letter, when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves.
Elizabeth Bishop, "Over 2000 Illustrations and a complete concordance" (1948)
The eye drops, weighted, through the lines the burin made, the lines that move apart like ripples above sand, dispersing storms, God's spreading fingerprint, and painfully, finally, that ignite in watery prismatic white-and-blue.
Elizabeth Bishop, "Over 2000 Illustrations and a complete concordance" (1948)
Thus should have been our travels: serious, engravable. The seven wonders of the WOrld are tired and a touch familiar, but the other scenes, innumerable, though equally sad and still, are foreign.
Elizabeth Bishop, "Over 2000 Illustrations and a complete concordance" (1948)
a brief bit of text, usually borrowed from another writer, found before a poem, but after the title. (You may also find one at the start of a book, before the poems, but after the title page.) It gives a reader, or listener, something else to hold in mind as the poem is read.
Epigraph
"Bright wood; bright mahogany wood, expertly shellacked and laid out in the sun to dry, not unlike it. Beryl's stomach, a light brown tint, grew bit by bit shiny"
Eric Walrond "Drought" (1925)
"Crawling along the road to the gap, Coggins gasped at the consequences of the sun's wretched fury. There, where canes spread over with their dark rich foliage into the dust-laden road, the village dogs, hunting for eggs to suck, fowls to kill, paused amidst the stalks of cork-dry canes to pant, or drop, exhausted, sun-smitten"
Eric Walrond "Drought" (1925)
"Mahogany bed . . . West Indian peasants sporting a mahogany bed"
Eric Walrond "Drought" (1925)
"No sooner had they reached home than Sissie began, 'Eatin' marl again, like yo' is starved out,' she landed a clout on Beryl's uncombed head. 'Go under de bed an' lay down befo' I crack yo' cocoanut . . . Running a house on dry-rot herring bone, a pint of stale, yellowless corn meal, a few spuds, yet proud, thumping the children around for eating scraps, for eating food cooked by other hands than her . . . Sissie"
Eric Walrond "Drought" (1925)
"Once a day the Rums ate. At dusk, curve of crimson gold in the sensuous tropic sky, they had tea. English to a degree, it was a rite absurdly regal. Pauperized native blacks clung to the utmost vestiges of the Crown. Too, it was more than a notion for a black cane hole digger to face the turmoil of a hoe or fork or 'bill' - zigaboo word for cutlass—on a bare cup of molasses coffee"
Eric Walrond "Drought" (1925)
"Still, one was not sure of that, either,; for a house, assuredly, is a place where people live"
Eric Walrond "The Palm Porch" (1925
"On the bare floor, dismal gore spots on various parts of their crash and crocus bag - eyes watering at them - were men, white men. In the dead of night, chased by the crimson glow of dawn, intense white faces, streaming red in the burning tropics, few madly, fiercely across the icy-flows of the Zone to the luxurious solitude of the Palm Porch"
Eric Walrond "The Palm Porch" (1925)
Before the Revolution it was a black, evil forest-swamp. Deer, lions, mongooses and tiger cats went prowling through it. Then the Americans came...came with saw and spear, tar and lysol. About to rid it...molten city...of its cancer, fire swept it up on the bosom of the lagoon. Naked virgin trees; limbless. Gaunt, hollow stalks. Huge shadows falling. Dredges in the golden mist; dredges on the lagoon. Horny iron pipes sprouted over the fetid swamp.
Eric Walrond "The Palm Porch" (1925)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry Ballad for the New World Evolution The Headstrong Historian The White Tiger Nineteen Thirty-Seven
Evolution (1991) Ballad for the New World (1994) Nineteen Thirty-Seven (1996) Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry (1999) The White Tiger (2008) The Headstrong Historian (2008)
All men, in law, are equals. Free of Peisistratus, We choose a knave or an eunuch To rule over us.
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
All things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness Shall reign throughout our days.
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
Beside this thoroughfare The sale of half-hose has Long since superseded the cultivation Of Pierian roses.
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime" In the old sense. Wrong from the start i
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
I walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy;
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me: Don't kick against the pricks, Accept opinion. The "Nineties" tried your game And died, there's nothing in it.
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
Nature receives him, With a placid and uneducated mistress He exercises his talents And the soil meets his distress.
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
Poetry, her border of ideas, The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending With other strata Where the lower and higher have ending;
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)
"Another white man has come among us, to hunt in peace we thought, since God's forest and the deer which He put in it belong to all"
Faulkner "Lo!" (1934)
"This man, Weddel, Vidal - whatever his name is - he and his family or clan or whatever they are - claim to own the entire part of Mississippi which lies on the west side of this river in question. Oh, the grant is in order: that French father of his from New Orleans saw to that"
Faulkner "Lo!" (1934)
"not out of any desire for usufruct"
Faulkner "Lo!" (1934)
--"Can I do that?" "I'm afraid not, Your Excellency," the Secretary said. The President mused swiftly, "Damn," he said. "Strike out United States, then."—
Faulkner "Lo!" (1934)
"...when the Government first begun to interfere with how a man farmed his own land and raised cotton. Stabilizing the price, using up the surplus, they called it, giving a man advice and help, whether he wanted it or not."
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
"And sitting in the lamplit hall beside the old marshal, the bedroom door closed now, he heard to truck start up and back and turn and go down the road, the sound of it dying away, ceasing, leaving the still, hot night—the Mississippi Indian summer, which ahd already outlasted half of November—filled with the loud last shrilling of the summer's cicadas, as though they, too, were aware of the imminent season of cold weather and death."
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
"Growned men kissing one another without hiding and without shame."
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
"He had been right. The doddering old officer was not only at bottom one of these people, he had been corrupted anew to his old, inherent, shiftless sloth and unreliability merely by entering the house."
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
"I been trying to tell you something for you not to forget. But I reckon it will take these McCallums to impress it upon you."
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
"Take yourself, now," he said, in that same kindly tone, chatty and easy; "you mean all right. You just got yourself all fogged up with rules and regulations. That's our trouble. We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we can't see anything else can't be fitted to an alphabet or a rule, we are lost. We have come to be like critters doctor folks might have created in laboratories that have learned to slip off their bones and guts and still live, still be kept alive indefinite and forever maybe even without even knowing the bones and the guts are gone. We have slipped our backbone; we have about decided a man don't need a backbone any more; to have one is old-fashioned. But the groove where the backbone used to be is still there, and the backbone has kept alive, too, and someday we're going to slip back into it...."
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
"Yes, sir. A man gets around and he sees a heap; a heap of folks in a heap of situations. The trouble is, we done got into the habit of confusing the situations with the folks."
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
"a fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA and a dozen other three-letter reasons for a man not to work"
Faulkner "The Tall Men" (1941)
a diversity of voices, styles of discourse, or points of view in a literary work and especially a novel."
Heteroglossia
A style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech
Free Indirect Discourse
structures and conceits are built upon grand, illogical, intuitive associations. The 'symbols' for which they are named are emblems of the actual world-as opposed to the purely emotional world which dominates their work -- that accumulates supernatural significance in the absence of a clear narrative or location
French Symbolism
"a kind of writing ...in which symbols lacking apparent logical relation are put together in a pattern, one of whose characteristics is an indefiniteness as great as the indefiniteness of the experience itself and another of whose characteristics is the conscious effort to use words for their musical effect, without very much attention to precise meaning."
French Symbolist Writers
"A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say."
From Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"
And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.
Gary Snyder "Axe Handles" (1983)
One afternoon the last week in April Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet One-half turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
Gary Snyder "Axe Handles" (1983)
and working hatchet, to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle With the hatchet, and the phrase First learned from Ezra Pound Rings in my ears! "When making an axe handle the pattem is not far off."
Gary Snyder "Axe Handles" (1983)
Who was this said about: "For ________ verbal configurations are set up precisely to manifest the arbitrariness of discourse, the impossibility of arriving at 'the meaning' even as countless possible meanings present themselves to our attention."
Gertrude Stien
"'Where have you been? 'Where have you been?' 'How long was your stay?' 'Purpose of your visit?' Tourist, white, safe every time, unless foolish to take a little collie weed, a little spliff"
Silvera "Caribbean Chameleon" (1994)
What are the three major ethnic groups of Nigeria?
Hausa & Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo
"Ah, a well-spent vacation. Why do they want to leave?" tourist wonders.
Silvera "Caribbean Chameleon" (1994)
The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book together. If I eliminate them what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to maintain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country.
Joyce to Richards, May 20, 1906
I am the stone that kills me
Kamau Brathwaite "Stone" (1986)
lawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwd
Kamau Brathwaite "Stone" (1986)
who coined the term "new women"
Henry James
" . . . the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent for imitation"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"'Now the drawings you make from us, they look exactly like us,' she reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognized that this was indeed their defect. When I drew the Monarchs I couldn't, somehow, get away from them - get into the character I wanted to represent; and I had not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"'Oh, you think she's shabby, but you must allow for the alchemy of art'"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
". . . they surely could have been turned to better account for advertising purposes. . . . There was something in them for a waistcoat-maker, an hotel-keeper, or a soap-vender. I could imagine 'We always use it' pinned to their bosoms with the greatest effect; I had a vision of the promptitude with which they would launch a table d'hôte"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"But after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression - she herself had no sense of variety. You may say that this was my business, was only a question of placing her. I placed her in every conceivable position, but she managed to obliterate their differences. She was always a lady certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"She was like a singularly bad illustration"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"She would accuse me at such moments of taking away her 'reputytion'"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"Their good looks had been their capital, and they had good-humoredly made the most of the career that this resource had marked out for them. It was in their faces, the blankness, the deep intellectual repose of twenty years of country-house visiting which had given them pleasant intonations. I could see the drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn't read, in which Mrs. Monarch had continuously sat . . ."
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"There was something about them that represented credit - their clothes, their manners, their type; but if credit is a large empty pocket in which an occasional chink reverberates, the chink at least must be audible"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
"When the porter's wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced "A gentleman - with a lady, sir," I had, as I often had in those days, for the wish was the father to the thought - an immediate vision of sitters"
Henry James "The Real Thing" (1892)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: If We Must Die Harlem Renaissance The Negro Speaks of Rivers Drought Harlem
If We Must Die (1919) Harlem Renaissance (1920) The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921) Drought (1926) Harlem (1955)
"Mr. Pontellier's two children were there - sturdy little fellows of four and five. A quadroon nurse followed them about with a faraway meditative air"
Kate Chopin "The Awakening" (1899)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Treaty of Versailles Irish failed rebellion The Second Coming Cathleen Ni Houlihan The Dead
Irish failed rebellion (1798) Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902) The Dead (1914) Treaty of Versailles (1919) The Second Coming (1920)
"She began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked. She completely abandoned her Tuesdays at home . . ."
Kate Chopin "The Awakening" (1899)
"The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels"
Kate Chopin "The Awakening" (1899)
"'You are burnt beyond recognition,' he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property that has suffered some damage"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
"As she swam, she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see."
J. Conrad
what author that we read wrote in the realist form?
James Joyce
It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce "The Dead" (1914)
"What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor."
James Weldon Johnson "Introduction to God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse" (1927)
Then God reached out and took the light in His hands, And God rolled the light around in His hands Until He made the sun; And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens. And the light that was left from making the sun God gathered it up in a shining ball And flung it against the darkness, Spangling the night with the moon and stars. Then down between The darkness and the light He hurled the world; And God said, "That's good!"
James Weldon Johnson "The Creation" (1918) (A Negro Sermon)
Then God walked around, And God looked around On all that He had made. He looked at His sun, And He looked at His moon, And He looked at His little stars; He looked on His world With all its living things, And God said, "I'm lonely still."
James Weldon Johnson "The Creation" (1918) (A Negro Sermon)
Then He stopped and looked and saw That the earth was hot and barren. So God stepped over to the edge of the world And He spat out the seven seas; He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed; He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled; And the waters above the earth came down, The cooling waters came down.
James Weldon Johnson "The Creation" (1918) (A Negro Sermon)
Up from the bed of the river God scooped the clay; And by the bank of the river He kneeled Him down; And there the great God Almighty Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky, Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night, Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand; This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image;
James Weldon Johnson "The Creation" (1918) (A Negro Sermon)
"Her voice is loud. Echoes, like rain, sweep the valley"
Jean Toomer "Carma" (1925)
"The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa"
Jean Toomer "Carma" (1925)
"Working for a contractor, he was away most of the time"
Jean Toomer "Carma" (1925)
Hair--braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher's rope, Eyes--fagots, Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath--the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame.
Jean Toomer, "Portrait in Georgia" (1923)
An everlasting song, a singing tree, Caroling softly souls of slavery, What they were, and what they are to me, Caroling softly souls of slavery.
Jean Toomer, "Song of the Son" (1922)
In time, for though the sun is setting on A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set; Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone, Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.
Jean Toomer, "Song of the Son" (1922)
O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, Now just before an epoch's sun declines Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee, Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.
Jean Toomer, "Song of the Son" (1922)
...and when "the future" is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese. After all these years it hardly matters who or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes, and your mind resounds not with a seraphic "doh", only their rustle. Life, that no one dares to appraise, like that gift horse's mouth, bares its teeth in a grin at each encounter. What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.
Joseph Brodsky "A Part of Speech" (1980)
"I was looking down at the sounding-pole , and feeling much annoyed to see at each try a little more of it stick out of that river, when I saw my poleman give up the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in."
Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness" (1899)
"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see."
Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness" (1899)
"If one of the little Pontellier boys took a tumble whilst at play, he was not apt to rush crying to his mother's arms for comfort; he would more likely pick himself up, wipe the water out of his eyes and the sand out of his mouth, and go on playing. Tots as they were, they pulled together and stood their ground in childish battles with doubled fists and uplifted voices, which usually prevailed against the other mother-tots"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
"It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
"On Tuesday afternoons - Tuesday being Mrs. Pontellier's reception day - there was a constant stream of callers - women who came in carriage or in the street cars, or walked when the air was soft and distance permitted. A light-colored mulatto boy, in dress coat and bearing a diminutive silver tray for the reception cards, admitted them. A maid, in white fluted cap, offered the callers liqueur, coffee, or chocolate, as they might desire. Mrs. Pontellier, attired in a handsome reception gown, remained in the drawing-room the entire afternoon receiving her visitors"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
"The action was at first a little confusing to Edna, but she soon leant herself readily to the Creole's gentle caress" " . . . the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
"The youngsters came tumbling up the steps, the quadroon following at the respectful distance they required her to observe"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
• "She could only realize that she herself—her present self - was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect"
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
What king of what country colonized the Congo in what year?
King Leopold of Belgium 1876
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes "Harlem" (1951)
My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
Langston Hughes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921)
When Susanna Jones wears red her face is like an ancient cameo Turned brown by the ages. Come with a blast of trumphets, Jesus! When Susanna Jones wears red A queen from some time-dead Egyptian night Walks once again. Blow trumphets, Jesus! And the beauty of Susanna Jones in red Burns in my heart a love-fire sharp like a pain. Sweet silver trumphets, Jesus!
Langston Hughes, "When Sue Wears Red" (1923)
"But we African ancestors-dem pop we English forefahders-dem. Yes! Pop dem an disguise up de English language fi project fi-dem African Language in such a way dat we English forefahders-dem still couldn understand what we African ancestors-dem wasa talk bout when dama wasa talk to dem one anodder!"
Louise Bennett, "Jamacian Language"
"Broad shouldered, his stare holds Baboolal: the white French creole with the Indian boy"
Lawrence Scott "Ballad for the New World" (1994)
The hyena-faced monster jumps starts, runs, chases his own yelps back to the wilderness. The black body clothed in moonlight Raises up its head, Holding a face dancing with delight. Terror reigns like a new crowned king.
Lewis Alexander "The Enchantment" (1925)
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.
Li-Young Lee "Persimmons" (1986)
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.
Li-Young Lee "Persimmons" (1986)
This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle. He's so happy that I've come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. All gone, he answers.
Li-Young Lee "Persimmons" (1986)
She was the repository of 400 years of resentment for being uprooted and transplanted, condemned to being a stranger on this side of a world where most words would not obey her tongue.
Lorna Goodison "Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry" (1999)
Who said pussbrukokonatinnadalikklegalnanayeye.
Lorna Goodison "Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry" (1999)
becoming her true self in that ritual bathing, that song. African bush healing woman
Lorna Goodison "Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry" (1999)
"Listen, na! My Aunty Roachy seh dat it bwile her temper an really bex her fi true anytime she hear anybody a style we Jamaican dialec as 'corruption of the English language.' For if dat be de case, den dem shoulda call English language corruption of Norman French an Latin an all dem tarra language what dem she dat English is derived from."
Louise Bennett, "Jamacian Language"
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Spanish Flu Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock The Wasteland Mrs. Dalloway Susie Asado
Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (1915) Spanish Flu (1918) Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) The Wasteland (1922) Susie Asado (1922) Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole.
Marilyn Chin "How I got That Name" (1994)
She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered , mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!
Marilyn Chin "How I got That Name" (1994)
My sound world was a vassal state, a tightly bonded lattice of water sealed with cunning to rear the bridge of breathing.
Medbh McGuckian "Mantilla" (1998)
and my raw mouth a non-key of spring, a cousin sometimes source, my signature vibrational as parish flowers
Medbh McGuckian "Mantilla" (1998)
"...applied to writing marked by a strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression. It employs a distinctive kind of imagination that insists on having its general frame of reference within itself....It believes that we create the world in the act of perceiving it.
Modernist
[_____________ ] implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss, and despair. It rejects not only history but also the society of whose fabrication history is a record. It rejects traditional values and assumptions.... It elevates the individual and the inward over the social and the outward."
Modernist
The Great Migration
Movement beginning 1910; blacks going north
"But the writer knows something no one else knows; the sea-change of the imagination"
Nadine Gordimer "Loot" (2003)
"His name is well known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among the survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the ancient pirates and fisherman, there are those dropped from planes during the dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would never be found. Who recognized them that day, where they lie?"
Nadine Gordimer "Loot" (2003)
"The most secret level of our world lay revealed . . . The saliva of the sea glistened upon these objects; it is given that time does not, never did, exist down here where the materiality of the past and the present as they lie has no chronological order, all is one, all is nothing - or all is possible at once"
Nadine Gordimer "Loot" (2003)
"It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of the walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs. There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh"
Nadine Gordimer "Once Upon A Time" (1991)
"The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock . . . The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chop and Tsonga migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. . . . Men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs"
Nadine Gordimer "Once Upon A Time" (1991)
"But as the policeman came to her, and she spelled out her name for him, she looked up and saw the faces of the African onlookers who stood nearest to her. . . When she looked back, they met her gaze. And she felt, suddenly, not nothing but what they were feeling, at the sight of a white girl, taken - incomprehensibly, as they themselves were used to being taken - under the force of the white men's wills, which dispensed and withdrew life, which imprisoned and set free, fed or starved, like God himself"
Nadine Gordimer "The Smell of Death and Flowers" (1956)
"She felt neither pity nor distaste at the sight. It was as if, dating from this day, her involvement in action against social injustice had purged her of sentimentality; she did not have to avert her gaze"
Nadine Gordimer "The Smell of Death and Flowers" (1956)
"'It's a ghastly place. How in God's name did you survive living their. I don't think I can last out more than another few months, and I've always got my flat in Cape Town to escape to on Sundays, and so on'"
Nadine Gordimer "Which New Era Would That Be?" (1956)
"'Oh, I don't know. Because I don't see why anyone else - any one of the people who live there - should have to, I suppose.' She laughed before anyone else could at the feebleness, the philanthropic uselessness of what she was saying. 'Guilt, what-have-you . . .'"
Nadine Gordimer "Which New Era Would That Be?" (1956)
"Jennifer said closely, biting her lower lip, as if this were a problem to be solved psychologically"
Nadine Gordimer "Which New Era Would That Be?" (1956)
"There was absolutely no limit to which that understanding would not go"
Nadine Gordimer "Which New Era Would That Be?" (1956)
"There was no escaping their understanding. They even insisted on feeling the resentment you must feel at their identifying themselves with your feelings"
Nadine Gordimer "Which New Era Would That Be?" (1956)
"These were white women who, Jake knew, persisted in regarding themselves as your equal. That was even worse, he thought, than the parsons who persisted in regarding you as their equal. The parsons had ten years at school and seven years at a university and theological school; you had carried sacks of vegetables from the market to white people's cars from the time you were eight years old until you were apprenticed to be a printer . . . Yet the good parson insisted that your picture of life was exactly the same as his own: you felt as he did. But these women - oh, Christ! - these women felt as you did"
Nadine Gordimer "Which New Era Would That Be?" (1956)
"It was a perfectly calm and reasonable and factual letter saying that he would not return, but she saw that it was indeed a love letter, a love letter about someone else, a love letter such as he had never written to her. She put it back in the creased and stained envelope and tore it up, and then she went out to the gate and wandered down to the bus stop, where there was a lamp-post bin, and dropped the bits of paper into its square mouth among the used tickets"
Nadine Gordimer "Why haven't You Written?" (1970)
"Sometimes the idea of it came to him as a wild hope, like the sound of her voice suddenly in the room, from Florida. Sometimes it was a dry anxiety: what a childish, idiotic thing to have done, how insane to risk throwing everything away when, as the Professor's wife often said, nobody was being hurt: Professor Malcolm, the children, Willa - none of them. Resentment flowed into him like unreasonable strength - I am being hurt!"
Nadine Gordimer "Why haven't You Written?" (1970)
"Yet, of course, he was afraid of Willa, ranged there with two pretty children and a third with glasses blacked out all over one eye to cure a squint. What could you do with that unreasonable, life-saving strength? - Against that family group?"
Nadine Gordimer "Why haven't You Written?" (1970)
"nothing could bear down against resistance without being worn away in the process?"
Nadine Gordimer "Why haven't You Written?" (1970)
According to Benedict Andersons, a nation is an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nations will never know their fellow members; yet, in their anonymous neighbors, they see the very portrait of community. It is limited because it is inevitably finite, bound in by other nations; and it is sovereign because the concept of a "nation" originated in an age in which the idea of divine right to rule was delegitimized by a variety of forces.
Nation
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Never Again Would Brids' Song Be the Same Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance The Night Watchmen's Occurence Book Diving into the Wreck The Sea is History
Never Again Would Brids' Song Be the Same (1942) Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance (1948) The Night Watchmen's Occurence Book (1967) Diving into the Wreck (1973) The Sea is History (1979)
Literary form that, according to Nancy Armstrong, carries a formation of subjectivity specific to 18th-century Britain. According to this notion, the novel, wherever it appears, whomever it is read by, reproduces the modern individualistic subjectivity. Basically: the novel is an agent of universality, by adopting the novel, foreign writers import a historical project in the universalization of the individual conflict, of raising the particular out of its own particularity.
Novel
in Zulu, "she who comes with her own things" and "she who walks like a lion"
Ntozake Shange
"She who comes with her own things and she who walks like a lion"
Ntozake Shange "For Colored Girls" (1975/7)
I usedta live in the world now i live in harlem & my universe is six blocks a tunnel with a train i can ride anywhere remaining a stranger
Ntozake Shange "For Colored Girls" (1975/7)
I want my stuff back
Ntozake Shange "For Colored Girls" (1975/7)
everything African, everything halfway colloquial, a grimace, a strut, an arched back over a yawn waz mine"
Ntozake Shange "For Colored Girls" (1975/7)
unearthing the mislaid, forgotten &/or misunderstood women writers, painters, mothers, cowgirls, & union leaders of our pasts..."
Ntozake Shange "For Colored Girls" (1975/7)
What classic story is Omeros based off of?
Omeros is the ancient Greek for Homer
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: America (Ginsburg) Paterson, I Happy Days In the Waiting Room Daddy Skunk Hour
Paterson, I (1946) America (Ginsburg) (1956) Skunk Hour (1959) Happy Days (1961) Daddy (1966) In the Waiting Room (1971)
And were Yeats living at this hour it should be in some ruined tower not malchited Balylee where he paid out to those below one gilt-edged scroll from his pencil as though he were part-Rapunzel and partly Delphic oracle
Paul Muldoon "7, Middagh Street: Wystan"
For history's a twisted root with art is small, traslucent fruit and never the other way round.
Paul Muldoon "7, Middagh Street: Wystan" (1987)
The answer is 'Certainly not.'
Paul Muldoon "7, Middagh Street: Wystan" (1987)
the sound of two streams coming together (both were frozen over) and, no less strange, myself calling out in French across that forest- clearing.
Paul Muldoon "Meeting the British" (1987)
She. Mine once controlled the sugar trade from the islets of Langerhans and were granted the deed to Charlottesville
Paul Muldoon "The Grand Conversation" (2002)
"All the fight went out of her at that. The hand poised to strike me fell limp to her side, and as she stared at me, seeing not me but the building that was taller than the highest hill she knew, the small stubborn light in her eyes (it was the same amber as the flame in the kerosene lamp she lit at dusk) began to fail"
Paule Marshall "To Da-duh In Memoriam" (1985)
"By the time I mailed her the large colored picture postcard of the Empire State building, she was dead"
Paule Marshall "To Da-duh In Memoriam" (1985)
"Following her apprehensively down the incline amid a stand of banana plants whose leaves flapped like elephants ears in the wind, I found myself in the middle of a small tropical wood - a place dense and damp and gloomy and tremulous with the fitful play of light and shadow as the leaves high above moved against the sun that was almost hidden from view. It was a violent place, the tangled foliage fighting each other for a chance at the sunlight, the branches of the trees locked in what seemed an immemorial struggle, one both necessary and inevitable. But despite the violence, it was pleasant, almost peaceful in the gully, and beneath the thick undergrowth the earth smelled like spring"
Paule Marshall "To Da-duh In Memoriam" (1985)
"She died and I lived, but always, to this day even, within the shadow of her death. For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugar-cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly-plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts"
Paule Marshall "To Da-duh In Memoriam" (1985)
"She died during the famous '37 strike which began shortly after we left. On the day of her death England sent planes flying low over the island as a show of force - so low, according to my aunt's letter, that the downdraft from them shook the ripened mangoes from the trees in Da-duh's orchard. Frightened, everyone in the village fled into the canes. Except Da-duh"
Paule Marshall "To Da-duh In Memoriam" (1985)
"She remained in the house at the window so my aunt said, watching as the planes came swooping and screaming like monstrous birds down over the village, over her house, rattling her trees and flattening the young canes in the field. It must have seemed to her lying there that they did not intend pulling out of their dive, but like the hard-back beetles which hurled themselves with suicidal force against the walls of the house at night, those menacing silver shapes would hurl themselves in an ecstasy of self-immolation onto the land, destroying it utterly"
Paule Marshall "To Da-duh In Memoriam" (1985)
"Some huge monolithic shape had imposed itself, it seemed, between her and the land, obstructing her vision"
Paule Marshall "To Da-duh In Memoriam" (1985)
The knot in his throat starts to twitch; he sees his boots the first day in battle splashed with mud and urine as a soldier falls at his feet amazed— how stupid he looked!— at the sound of artillery. I never thought it would sing the soldier said, and died.
Rita Dove, "Parsley" (1983)
: A disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture since the 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20th-century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high modernism . . . . More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles - most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. . . .
Postmodernism
Someone calls out his name in a voice so like his mother's, a startled tear splashes the tip of his right boot. My mother, my love in death. The general remembers the tiny green sprigs men of his village wore in their capes to honor the birth of a son. He will order many, this time, to be killed for a single, beautiful word.
Rita Dove, "Parsley" (1983)
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it never would be lost. Never again would birds' song be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came.
Robert Frost "Never Again Would Birds' Song be the Same" (1942)
The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.
Robert Frost "The Gift Outright" (1942)
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it never would be lost. Never again would birds' song be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came.
Robert Frost, "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same" (1942)
She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Robert Frost, opening of "The Gift Outright," 1942
A car radio bleats, "Love, careless Love. . . ." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody's here—
Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour" (1959)
Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage.
Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour" (1959)
One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right.
Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour" (1959)
The season's ill— we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour" (1959)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Byzantium Lightenings Vii Gifts of Rain Man in the Echo Sailing to Byzantium
Sailing to Byzantium (1927) Byzantium (1932) Man in the Echo (1939) Gifts of Rain (1972) Lightenings Vii (1991)
It wears away. What are those exquisite lines? Go forget why should something o'er that something shadow fling... One loses one's classics. Oh not all. A part. A part remains. That is what I find so wonderful.
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1961)
Just to feel you there within earshot and conceivably on the qui vive is all I ask, not to say anything I would not wish you to hear or liable to cause you pain, not to be just babbling away on trust as it is were not knowing and something gnawing at me
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1961)
Thats is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by to speak in the old style, hardly a day, without some addition to one's knowledge however trifling
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1961)
What would I do without them? What would I do without them, when words fail?
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1961)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Nigerian Independence Indian Independence San Dominican (Haitian) Revolution End of Apartheid Irish Independence
San Dominican (Haitian) Revolution (1804) Irish Independence (1922) Indian Independence (1947) Nigerian Independence (1960) End of Apartheid (1994)
A man wading lost fields breaks the pane of flood: a flower of mud - water blooms up to his reflection
Seamus Heaney, "Gifts of Rain"
The tawny guttural water spells itself: Moyola is its own score and consort, bedding the locale in the utterance, reed music, an old chanter breathing its mists through vowels and history. A swollen river, a mating call of sound rises to pleasure me, Dives, hoarder of common ground.
Seamus Heaney, "Gifts of Rain"
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. 'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,' The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvelous as he had known it.
Seamus Heaney, "Lightenings, " VIII
The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
Seamus Heaney, "Lightenings, " VIII
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air.
Seamus Heaney, "Lightenings, " VIII
The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ' as she points out the window past me
Sherman Alexie "On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" (1993)
another little piece of her country's history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.
Sherman Alexie "On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" (1993)
"'How long were you out of the country?' 'Two weeks.' 'Purpose?' 'Vacation, mam.' 'Where did you stay?' 'Kingston, mam.' 'Did you stay with family?' 'No mam, I visit dem, but I stay in a hotel.' Suspicion. 'Hotel?' 'Yes mam.' 'Take off your glasses please.'"
Silvera "Caribbean Chameleon" (1994)
what author we read was described by Conrad as "THE impressionist"?
Stephen Crane
"The babe came often to this corner. He hovered about the stand and watched each detail of the business. He was fascinated by the tranquility of the vendor, the majesty of power and possession"
Stephen Crane "A Great Mistake" (1898)
"And above all, why was he impressed, awed, overcome by a mass of materials, a collection of trophies of wealth, when he knew that to him their dominant meaning was that they represented a lavish expenditure?"
Stephen Crane "An Experiment in Luxury" (1894)
"A few were parading in unconcerned nakedness. Here and there were men of brawn, whose skins shone clear and ruddy. They took splendid poses, standing massively, like chiefs. When they had dressed in their ungainly garments there was an extraordinary change. They showed bumps and deficiencies of all kinds"
Stephen Crane "An Experiment in Misery" (1894)
"He was going forth to eat as the wanderer may eat, and sleep as the homeless sleep. By the time he had reached City Hall Park he was so completely plastered with yells of 'bum' and 'hobo,' and with various unholy epithets that small boys applied to him at intervals that he was in a state of the most profound dejection"
Stephen Crane "An Experiment in Misery" (1894)
"There was a long counter, dimly lighted from hidden sources. Two or three men in soiled white aprons rushed here and there."
Stephen Crane "An Experiment in Misery" (1894)
Frame Narrative
Story in a story, used in HOD
a person's thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow. The term was introduced by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890).
Stream of Conciousness
And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window panes; 25 There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30 Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. And indeed there will be time To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40 (They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!") My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— (They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!") Do I dare 45 Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T.S. Eliot "The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all."
T.S. Eliot "The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S. Eliot "The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?... I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . . . . .
T.S. Eliot "The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think."
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)
After the torch-light red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and place and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)
Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)
"Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his"
TS Eliot "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921)
--"O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag - It's so elegant So intelligent "What shall I do now? What shall I do?" I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street "With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? "What shall we ever do?" The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door"—
TS Eliot "The Wasteland" (1922)
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking. They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects. Every one manages a plume of blood.
Ted Hughes "Thistles" (1967)
Then they grow grey, like men Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear, Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
Ted Hughes "Thistles" (1967)
And picking bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it me and doing that have coincided very queerly But what shall I be called am I the first have I an owner what shape am I what shape am I am I huge if I go to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees till I get tired that's touching one wall of me for the moment if I sit still how everything stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre but there's all this what is it roots roots roots roots and here's the water again very queer but I'll go on looking
Ted Hughes "Wodwo" (1967)
Informal group of English intellectuals that were unified in their abiding belief in the importance and endurance of the arts. Virginia Woolf is the most important member of this group, for us.
The Bloomsbury Group
a war memorial situated on Whitehall in London. It began as a temporary structure erected for a peace parade following the end of the First World War but following an outpouring of national sentiment it was replaced in 1920 by a permanent structure and designated the United Kingdom's primary national war memorial. (In Mrs. Dalloway)
The Cenotaph
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: The Gift Outright Things Fall Apart We Real Cool Come Thunder Tollund Man
The Gift Outright (1942) Things Fall Apart (1958) We Real Cool (1960) Come Thunder (1967) Tollund Man (1972)
the cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s in which African American writers, artists, and scholars maintained a vibrant intellectual community centered in Harlem and promoted African American and Pan-African literature, arts, and culture.
The Harlem Renaissance (1925)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Axe Handles Thistles Omeros The Red Wheelbarrow Stone
The Red Wheelbarrow (1923) Thistles (1967) Axe Handles (1983) Stone (1986) Omeros (1990)
What laws of marriage did the characters in "The Awakening" follow?
The Napoleonic Code of Marriage
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: A Far Cry From Africa The Smell of Death and Flowers Loot Once Upon a Time Why Haven't you Written? Nelson Mandela Elected
The Smell of Death and Flowers (1954) A Far Cry From Africa (1956) Why Haven't you Written? (1971) Once Upon a Time (1989) Nelson Mandela Elected (1994) Loot (2003)
What historical event does "The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution" (1938) reference?
The haitian revolution from 1791-1804
"They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
" . . .when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
". . . one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evenings after a day's work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilisation. Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian family which fro at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent (it's strange, he thought, what a sentiment I have about that, disliking India, and empire, and army as he did), there were moments when civilisation, even of this sort, seemed dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England; in butlers; chow dogs; girls in their security. Ridiculous enough, still there it is, he thought"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like he letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting through the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Dr. Holmes came again . . . he brushed it all aside - headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams - nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said. If Dr. Holmes found himself even a half a pound below eleven stone six, he asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast . . But, he continued, health is largely a matter in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some hobby"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favorite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the palace"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her. If he were with me now what would he say?"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage - forcing your soul, that was it - if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally Stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it . . ."
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right - and she had too - not to marry him"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Still the future of civilization lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of men like that, he thought"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"The table drawer was full of those writings; about war; about Shakespeare; about great discoveries; how there is no death . . . He knew everything! That man, his friend who was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing behind the screen"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see him. Did he indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly push before he could get past her into her husband's bedroom"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him and his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties"
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"it was as if the five acts of a play had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and no it was over."
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
--"It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping) that the great revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The dead were with him. "'Evans, Evans!' he cried"—
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
--"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. "For Lucy had her work cut out for her"—
Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway" (1922)
"Almost unobserved, America plays her usual role in the meeting mixing and welding of the colored peoples of the earth"
W.A Domingo "The Gift of the Black Tropics" (1925)
"Once upon a time in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line"
W.E.B Dubois "The Negro Mind Reaches Out" (1925)
Most men would agree that our present problem of problems was not the Color Problem, but what we call Labor, the problem of allocating work and income in the tremendous and increasingly intricate world-embracing industrial machine that our civilization has built"
W.E.B Dubois "The Negro Mind Reaches Out" (1925)
It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . . The sun was coming from outside.
Wallace Stevens, "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself" (1954)
That scrawny cry—it was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like
Wallace Stevens, "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself" (1954)
PUT IN CORRECT ORDER: Wodwo Gifts of Rain How I Got That Name Do Angels Wear Brassieres? For Colored Girls
Wodwo (1967) Gifts of Rain (1972) For Colored Girls (1975/7) Do Angels Wear Brassieres? (1986) How I Got That Name (1994)
"The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect..."
Wordsworth, "Lyrical Ballads"
the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects,[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads.
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Yeats "Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1890)
"Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot?"
Yeats "The Man and the Echo" (1939)
The center cannot hold.
Yeats "The Second Coming" (1920)
I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
Yeats and Gregory "Cathleen Ni Houlihan" (1902)
Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yeats, "September 1913"
Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were In all their loneliness and pain, You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair Has maddened every mother's son': They weighed so lightly what they gave. But let them be, they're dead and gone, They're with O'Leary in the grave.
Yeats, "September 1913"
"Call her and see if she'll come. A woman knows her boss an' she answers when he calls"
Zora Neale Hurston "Spunk" (1925)
"He could work again, ride the dangerous log-carriage that fed the singing, snarling, biting circle saw . . ."
Zora Neale Hurston "Spunk" (1925)
"Lena, youse mine. From now on Ah works for you an' fights for you an' Ah never wants you to look to nobody for a crumb of bread, a stitch of close or a shingle to go over yo' head, but me as long as Ah live. Ah'll git the lumber for owah house tomorrow. Go home an' git yo' things together"
Zora Neale Hurston "Spunk" (1925)
"Thass mah house,' Lena speaks up. 'Papa gimme that"
Zora Neale Hurston "Spunk" (1925)
contains a first-person speaker, 'I,' and always seems to refer to a real person in whose actual life real episodes have occurred that cause actual pain, all represented in the poem.
confessional poem
buying things so everyone can see how big and fancy they are
conspicuous consumption (Veblen Theory of the Leisure Class)
a way of showing that you have so many resources that you don't have to do any work
conspicuous leisure (Veblen Theory of the Leisure Class)
a poem that shares many features with a speech from a play: one person speaks, and in that speech there are clues to his/her character, the character of the implied person or people that s/he is speaking to, the situation in which it is spoken and the story that has led to this situation.
dramatic monologue
a power relation in which one nation or another political unit rules another domain and extracts its resources
empire/Imperialism
a rather vague term applied to works or passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an observer, rather than on the explanation of their external causes. Neither a school nor a movement but a kind of subjective tendency manifested in descriptive techniques.
impressionism
a writing marked by a strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression. Employs a distinctive kind of imagination that insists on having its general frame of reference within itself. Believes that we create the world in the act of perceiving it.
modernism
a literary mode usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment
naturalism
a movement in literature that is concerned with the every day elements of life. A particular philosophy that's not only about fiction and art but about the knowledge of the world.
realism
What Pandemic occurred in 1918 and what text was it referenced in?
the spanish flu; mrs. dalloway
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.... No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.
this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
the ______________ need not be 'good'...But it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his error and fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human nature.... He may be wretched and he may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending and mysterious, but it is not contemptible....Th[e] central feeling is the impression of waste...the pity and fear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. 'What a piece of work is man,' we cry; 'so much more beautiful and so much more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?'
tragic hero
phrase related in Conrad lecture attributed to A.C. Bradley, relating to how tragedy has its foundations in what is sacrificed or lost by the otherwise noble protagonist
tragic waste
New Negro Movement
what harlem renaissance was called then
What is "The Woman Movement"?
women should have equality with men (contraception, education, vote, dress reform, changes in marriage law, greater access to public space)