Lit Terms 31-56

Dialect- the language of a particular district, class or group of persons

Dialectics- formal debates usually over the nature of truth

Dichotomy- split or break between two opposing things

Diction- the style of speaking or writing as reflected in the choice and use of words

Didactic- having to do with the transmission of information; educational

Dogmatic- rigid in beliefs and principles

Elegy- a mournful, melancholy poem. Esp. a funeral song or lament for the dead

Epic- a long narrative poem unified by a hero who reflects the customs, morals, and aspirations of his nation of race as he makes his way through legendary and historic exploits, usually over a long period of time.

Epigram- witty aphorism

Epitaph- any brief inscription in prose or verse on a tombstone; a short formal poem of commemoration often a credo written by the person who wishes it to be on his tombstone.

Epithet- a short, descriptive name or phrase that may insult someone's character, characteristics

Euphemism- the use of an indirect, mild, or vague word or expression for one thought to be coarse, offensive, or blunt

Evocative- a calling forth of memories and sensations; the suggestion or production through artistry and imagination of a sense of reality

Exposition- beginning of a story that sets forth facts, ideas, and/or characters, in a detailed explanation

Expressionism- movement in art, literature, and music consisting of unrealistic representation of an inner idea or feeling

Fable- a short, simple story, usually with animals as characters, designed to teach a moral truth

Fallacy- from Latin word "to deceive", a false or misleading notion, belief or argument.

Falling Action- part of the narrative or drama after the climax.

Farce- a boisterous comedy involving ludicrous action and dialogue

Figurative Language- apt and imaginative language characterized by figures of speech.

Flashback- a narrative device that flashes back to prior events.

Foil- a person or thing that, by contrast, makes another seems better or more prominent.

Folk Tale- a story passed on by word of mouth

Foreshadowing- in fiction and drama, a device to prepare the reader for the outcome of the action; "planning" to make the outcome convincing, through not to give it away.

Free Verse- verse without conventional metrical pattern, with irregular pattern or no rhyme

Dickens Map

Great Expectations

1. By Monday, February 4, I have to finish a book. I feel the best way I'm going to achieve that is to split the book into parts and read one part every night for the next week. Its simple, and I wouldn't feel like I would be forcing myself to read at a really fast pace.

2.

1. What is this Industrial Revolution you speak of and did it involve cool uniforms? But seriously, was the Industrial Revolution a good thing? Somebody help us.
2. Dickens wrote a lot of travel books and travel guides. Are there any points in the novel where you hear our author slipping into tour guide? What portrait of London does Charles Dickens paint?
3. It is widely said that it is far better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Discuss amongst yourselves.
4. What role do laws play in Great Expectations?
5. Dickens likes social commentary. He likes to comment on society. He comments socially. What impression do you get of London society after reading Great Expectations?
6. Why do servants run Mr. Matthew Pocket’s household?
7. What the hey is a limekiln?
8. Why do you think this novel divided into three parts?
9. When Dickens sought advice from his playwright friend about how to end the novel, his friend told him that the masses would expect and want Pip to find happiness. George Bernard Shaw, a famous Irish playwright who died in 1950, felt that the revised ending was "psychologically wrong" but "beautifully touching and exactly right." Which ending do you prefer and why do you prefer it?
10. There are lots of houses, dwellings, and apartments described in this novel. Which one would you live in and why? (You have to choose one, or else we’ll throw you in the limekiln.).
11. Why doesn’t Biddy write to Pip to tell him that he’s being a butthead?
12. If you could be any character, who would you be and why?

Once I finish the book, I will most likely make a remix of the novel including all the questions on literature analysis.

Lit Terms 6-30

Analogy: a comparison made between two things to show similarities

Analysis: a method of which a work or idea is separated into its parts, and those parts are given rigorous and detailed scrutiny.

Anaphora: a device or repetition in which a word or words are repeated at the beginning of two or more lines, phrases, clauses, or sentences.

Anecdote: a very short story used to illustrate a point

Antagonist: a person or force opposing the protagonist in a drama or narrative

Antithesis: a balancing of one term against another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness

Aphorism: a terse, pointed statement expressing some wise or clever observation about life

Apologia: a defense or justification for some doctrine, piece of writing, cause, or action

Apostrophe: a figure of speech in which an absent or dead person, an abstract quality, or something inanimate or nonhuman is addressed directly

Argument(ation): the process of convincing a reader be proving either the truth or the falsity of an idea or proposition; also, the thesis or proposition itself

Assumption: the act of supposing, or taking for granted that a thing is true

Audience: the intended listener or listeners

Characterization: the means by which a writer reveals a character's personality

Chiasmus: a reversal in the order of words so that the second half of a statement balances the first half in inverted word order

Circumlocution: a roundabout or evasive speech or writing, in which many words are used but a few would have served

Classicism: art, literature, and music reflecting the principles of ancient Greece and Rome: tradition, reason, clarity, order, and balance

Cliche: a phrase or situation overused within society

Climax: the decisive point in a narrative or drama; the pint of greatest intensity or interest at which plot question is answered or resolved

Colloquialism: folksy speech, slang words or phrases usually used in informal conversation

Comedy: originally a nondramatic literary piece of work that was marked by a happy ending; now a term to describe a ludicrous, farcical, or amusing event designed provide enjoyment or produce smiles and laughter

Conflict: struggle or problem in a story causing tension

Connotation: implicit meaning, going beyond dictionary definition

Contrast: a rhetorical device by which one element (idea or object) is thrown into opposition to another for the sake of emphasis or clarity

 Denotation: plain dictionary definition

Denouement: loose ends tied up in a story after the climax, closure, conclusion

Poem Analysis

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

•  

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

We Real Cool

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike Straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin grin. We

Jazz June. We 

Die soon.

Mending Wall 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

“I am lonely, lonely.

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!”

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

LIT TERMS 1-5

Allegory: a tale in prose or verse in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities; a story that uses symbols to make a point.

• Animal Farm

Alliteration: the repetition of similar initial sounds, usually consonants, in a group of words.

• Sally sells seashells by the seashore.

Allusion: a reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects a reader to recognize.

• A lot of stories in Harry Potter relate to those in the Bible.

Ambiguity: something uncertain as to interpretation.

Anachronism: something that shows up in the wrong place or the wrong time

•  

Spring Semester Plan 1

I can think of so many goals I want to acomplish as a young adult. My ambitions are almost endless because I find interests in many things. I have certain goals for my art, music, writing, and fashion.

As far as the spring semester goes, I was to continue my goal that I set for myself in the first semester. That is, to become a better writer with my own distinct style. I realized through my high school years that I have quite a creative imagination. Towards the end of the fall semester I began a collaborative writing group called Dead Writers Society, and through that I got a bunch of students together to write creative stories based on three items. I feel like this group will be the gateway to my goal this semester. Cumulative, I want enough stories to publish a book of our short stories. With all that experience in writing, I think I would be able to evolve my writing as well as find the style that I have forged that whole time. My deadline would be the end of this semester, but the group would live on and continue to write. I want to know where I am as a writer by the end of the semester.

AP PREP POST 1: SIDDHARTHA

Consider Siddhartha’s relationship with Govinda. How are they similar, and how are they different? What are the narrative functions of Govinda’s reappearance throughout the novel? How does their relationship impact the novel’s ending?

• I would consider the two as opposites. When Govinda thinks something he makes Siddhartha question himself on what he truly believes which adds strength to the journeys of both characters. Because of Govinda, Siddhartha turns out the way he is at the end of the novel.

What purpose does self-denial serve in Siddhartha? What about self-indulgence?

•  In order to reach enlightenment, Siddhartha was taught by the Semana's to basically destroy one's self and all the emotions and feelings. After that has been achieved, the journey will be over and enlightenment will be reached.

Most literary scholars agree that Siddhartha was prompted by Herman Hesse’s fixation on Eastern spirituality. Is there a case to be made that Siddhartha is designed to celebrate Eastern religion? Is Hesse’s treatment of spirituality as relevant today as it was when he wrote the novel?

• I think Heese's idea that Siddhartha be in Eastern Spirituality was right. When we think of enlightenment and Buddhas, our culture has taught us to think able the Eastern part of the world instead of the one we are currently in. It would be difficult to imagine that enlightenment is waiting at the furthest corner of Manhattan. 

Siddhartha features substantial activity and narrative action. At the same time, it is about one man’s largely internal spiritual quest. What is the relationship between the internal and exterior worlds of Siddhartha? How does Siddhartha negotiate these worlds?

• Siddhartha's internal world is set on Nirvana and obtaining it one way or another, and the external world he lives in provides the opportunities for Siddhartha to find Nirvana whether it is with his wife, the Semanas, or Govinda. The two worlds are constantly struggling for consensus, and when he reaches the river, he comes to terms and his worlds are at peace.

Herman Hesse’s novels before Siddhartha focused on alienated young men who rejected the cultures of their upbringings. However, these other novels did not feature the spiritual elements of Siddhartha. How do the spiritual elements of Siddhartha make it different from any other story of an alienated youth?

•  I couldn't come up with this answer because I had no prior information about Heese's other books, but based on what the question gives about the other books("alienated young men who rejected the cultures of their upbringings") I still couldn't figure it out. I would a more specific passage where Siddhartha alienates himself in his youth.

In order to prepare for the AP test, I would have to look at all the text we read over the course of a year and study the themes and specific things in the books by comparing them to other books that I have read.


http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/siddhartha/study.html
http://www.shmoop.com/siddhartha/questions.html