Friday 29 January 2016

Break of Day in the Trenches

BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border - by Alootook Ipellie

It was in the guise of the Holy Spirit
That they swooped down on the tundra
Single-minded and determined
To change forever the face
Of ancient Spirituals

These lawless missionaries from places unknown
Became part of the landscape
Which was once the most sacred tomb
Of lives lived long ago

The last connection to the ancient Spirits
Of the most sacred land
Would be slowly severed
Never again to be sensed
Never again to be felt
Never again to be seen
Never again to be heard
Never again to be experienced
Sadness supreme for the ancient culture
Jubilation in the hearts of the converters

Where was justice to be found

They said it was in salvation
From eternal fire
In life after death
And unto everlasting life in Heaven

A simple life lived
On the sacred land was no more

The psalm book now replaced
The sacred songs of shamans

The Lord's Prayer now ruled
Over the haunting chant of revival

It was not 'Jajai-ja-jiijaaa' anymore

But-

'Amen'

Schools of Thought

Literary history breaks down the historical flow of literature into distinct periods arranged in chronological order and classifies literature on the basis of the assumption that the literary texts written in a given time span have certain characteristic features, norms, assumptions in common, while they differ in these features, norms, assumptions from works written in another time span.

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.

New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to analysis of the texts, they aimed to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. These goals were articulated in Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and Allen Tate's "Miss Emily and the Bibliographers."
Close reading (or explication de texte) was a staple of French literary studies, but in the United States, aesthetic concerns, and the study of modern poets was the province of non-academic essayists and book reviewers rather than serious scholars. But the New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual study initially met with resistance from older scholars, the methods of the New Critics rapidly predominated in American universities until challenged by Feminism and structuralism in the 1970s. Other schools of critical theory, including, post-structuralism, and deconstructionist theory, the New Historicism, and Receptions studies followed.

New Historicism is a school of literary theory which first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic and Harvard English Professor Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.

that every human action is actually the effect of a network of material practices;
that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
that literary and non-literary "texts" are equally valuable;
that no discourse (imaginative, scientific, or archival) gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses unalterable human nature;
that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.

Camille Paglia likewise cites "the New Historicism coming out of Berkeley" as an "issue where the PC academy thinks it's going to reform the old bad path, I have been there before they have been, and I'm there to punish and expose and to say what they are doing...a piece of crap."^[5] Elsewhere, Paglia has suggested that New Historicism is "a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense."^[6]

Focalization is a term coined by the French narrative theorist Gerard Genette. It refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. For example, a narrative where all information presented reflects the subjective perception of a certain character is said to be internally focalized. An omniscient narrator corresponds to zero focalization. External focalization - camera eye. A novel in which no simple rules restrict the transition between different focalizations could be said to be unfocalized, but specific relationships between basic types of focalization constitute more complex focalization strategies; for example, a novel could provide external focalization alternating with internal focalizations through three different characters, where the second character is never focalized except after the first, and three other characters are never focalized at all.
The specific domain of literary theory which deals with focalization is narratology, and it concerns not only distinctions between subjective and objective focalizations but various gradations between them, such as free indirect discourse, style indirect libre, or quasi-direct discourse. Narratologists tend to have a difficult time agreeing on the exact definitions of categories in their field; hence its dynamic nature.

Close Reading is a central focus of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). It requires students to get truly involved with the text they are reading. The purpose is to teach them to notice features and language used by the author.

Close reading site sample"

http://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading

"3. Ask questions about the patterns you've noticed—especially how and why.
To answer some of our own questions, we have to look back at the text and see what else is going on. For instance, when Eiseley touches the web with his pencil point—an event "for which no precedent existed"—the spider, naturally, can make no sense of the pencil phenomenon: "Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas." Of course, spiders don't have ideas, but we do. And if we start seeing this passage in human terms, seeing the spider's situation in "her universe" as analogous to our situation in our universe (which we think of as the universe), then we may decide that Eiseley is suggesting that our universe (the universe) is also finite, that our ideas are circumscribed, and that beyond the limits of our universe there might be phenomena as fully beyond our ken as Eiseley himself—that "vast impossible shadow"—was beyond the understanding of the spider.
But why vast and impossible, why a shadow? Does Eiseley mean God, extra-terrestrials? Or something else, something we cannot name or even imagine? Is this the lesson? Now we see that the sense of tale telling or myth at the start of the passage, plus this reference to something vast and unseen, weighs against a simple E.T. sort of interpretation. And though the spider can't explain, or even apprehend, Eiseley's pencil point, that pencil point is explainable—rational after all. So maybe not God. We need more evidence, so we go back to the text—the whole essay now, not just this one passage—and look for additional clues. And as we proceed in this way, paying close attention to the evidence, asking questions, formulating interpretations, we engage in a process that is central to essay writing and to the whole academic enterprise: in other words, we reason toward our own ideas."
-Copyright 1998, Patricia Kain, for the Writing Center at Harvard Universit

Random qustion

'And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain' is an example of

assonance
consonance
repetition
consonance and rhyme

http://www.theperfectmanmovie.com/index.php

Thursday 28 January 2016

University of Toronto Practice Quiz

These are the terms to focus on:

and parallelism

consonance
enjambment, end-stopped lines
focalization
imagery
Literary History
New Criticism
New Historicism
Short story
Simple poetry (Rosenberg),
symbolism
Verisimilitude

Quiz Format:

What is Literary History?

What is New Criticism ?

What is New Historicism?

What is Verisimilitude? How does it differ from truth?

What is focalization?

These are the terms to focus on:

- 7 marks for straight definitions

- 8 marks for application of key terms through close reading of a passage that has been covered from weeks 1-4

- alootook ipellie "walking both sides of an invisible border"

- isaac rosenberg "Break of Day in the Trenches"

- Chimamanda Negozi Adichie "from half of a yellow sun" (the short story)

- Gertrude Stein "Picasso"

- Wilkie Collins "the moonstone (the prologue and first period)

Rebekah Emmanuel Quiz

Explain/apply focalization in the Break of the Daiy in the Trenches?

1 . What is enjambment?

a.a type of end-stopped line
b.a line that does not end with punctuation or a natural pause
c.a rare type of lineation
d.none of the above

2. What can enjambment do?

a.provide lines with rhythm
b.allow an idea to flow from one line to the next
c.give a poem a certain mood from anxious to calm
d.all of the above

3. Which of the following lines is enjambed?

a.He told me a secret,
b.something I would not tell others.
c.I swore to him I would never, never
d.tell a living soul.

1. The placement of caesura is critical in:

a.Greek verse
b.Latin verse
c.Anglo-Saxon verse
d.All of the above

2. The placement of caesura is not important in:

a.Greek Verse
b.Latin Verse
c.Modern verse
d.Anglo-Saxon Verse

3. Caesura is a feature of how the line is...

a.Written
b.Read/sung
c.Intended
d.Structured syntactically

4. "The microphone explodes, || shattering the mold. "

This is an example of…

a.Medial caesura
b.Terminal caesura
c.Initial caesura
d.None of the above

1. When is assonance used?

a.Poetry
b.Prose
c.Music
d.All of the above

2. How does assonance differ from alliteration?

a.They are the same
b.Assonance is repetition of both vowel and consonant sounds
c.Assonance is vowel repetition, whereas alliteration is consonant repetition
d.Alliteration is vowel repetition, whereas assonance is consonant repetition

3. Why isn’t assonance rhyme?

a.Assonance is only consonant repetition
b.Assonance is only vowel repetition
c.Rhyme and assonance have nothing in common

4. What is an example of assonance in the passage below?

See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees Laughing as it passes through the endless summer

a.Kingfisher flashing
b.River of green
c.Unseen beneath the trees

1. What is anaphora?

a.repetition of a phrase at the end of sentences
b.repetition of a phrase at the beginning of sentences
c.repetition of a phrase in the middle of sentences
d.repetition of a phrase in a direct row

2. How is anaphora different from epistrophe?

a.epistrophe is less compelling
b.anaphora is typically more serious
c.epistrophe is at the end of sentences
d.epistrophe is in the middle of sentences

3. When can anaphora NOT be used?

a.in poetry
b.in prose
c.in technical writing
d.in advertisements

4. Which phrases are examples of anaphora in the following passage?

Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

a.let us fight
b.to do away with
c.all men’s happiness
d.both a and b

Make one comment on the below:

We were dancing—it must have

been a foxtrot or a waltz,

something romantic but

requiring restraint,

Tuesday 26 January 2016

Brave New World Quotations Worksheet

Brave New World Quotations Worksheet

1. "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny." -Director of Hatcheries(16)