Poetry
Literature 2
Literature 3
Literature 4
Literary Movements
100
And when at Night - Our good Day done - I guard My Master's Head - 'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's Deep Pillow - to have shared - To foe of His - I'm deadly foe - None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb - Though I than He - may longer live He longer must - than I - For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die—
What is "[My Life had Stood - a Loaded Gun -]" by Emily Dickinson
100
The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice. In this same frame of mind an intelligent man can go to the theatre and applaud the impossible hero, who with his single sword slays everybody in the play except the equally impossible heroine. So can an ordinary peace-loving citizen sit by a comfortable fire and read with enjoyment of the bloody deeds of pirates and the fierce brutality of Vikings. This is the way in which we gratify the old, underlying animal instincts and passions; but we should shudder with horror at the mere idea of such practices being realities in this day of enlightened and humanitarianized thought. The Southern whites are not yet living quite in the present age; many of their general ideas hark back to a former century, some of them to the Dark Ages. In the light of other days they are sometimes magnificent. Today they are often cruel and ludicrous.
What is _Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson
100
We see we was too late—couldn't do no good. We asked some stragglers about it, and they said everybody went to the show looking very innocent; and laid low and kept dark till the poor old king was in the middle of his cavortings on the stage; then somebody give a signal, and the house rose up and went for them. So we poked along back home, and I warn't feeling so brash as I was before, but kind of ornery, and humble, and to blame, somehow—though I hadn't done nothing. But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same.
What is _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ by Mark Twain
100
As for Clarisse, she was charmed upon receiving her husband’s letter. She and the babies were doing well. The society was agreeable; many of her old friends and acquaintances were at the bay. And the first free breath since her marriage seemed to restore the pleasant liberty of her maiden days. Devoted as she was to her husband, the intimate conjugal life was something that she was more than willing to forego for a while. And so the storm passed and every one was happy.
What is "The Storm" by Kate Chopin
100
This is the literary movement from which Naturalism derived.
What is Realism
200
Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels - until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.
What is "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop
200
“We don’t often slaughter a chicken. It is not a moral position, but it is a disinclination to undergo too many animal deaths. I have to say that I regret this softness In myself, because the world we have here is less fertile and lively because of it—presents fewer experiences, fewer relationships, fewer moral problems. I think it is good to experience one’s power over the animal, to treat it well, house it properly, give it a good life and a painless death. To feel with one’s own hands the bloody cost of one’s appetites, and to know viscerally what one is like—one is like an animal, one lives in nature, where death is.”
What is _Good Will_ by Jane Smiley
200
“Bless her little heart!” said he with a big hug, “she will be as sick as she pleases. But let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!” “And you won’t go away?” I asked gloomily. “Why how can I dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!” “Better in body perhaps-” I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.
What is "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
200
"How then would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation,-how would that suit you?" "Not at all. It does not trike me that there is any thing definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular." “Stationary you shall be then" I cried, now losing all patience, and for the first time in all my exasperating connection with him fairly flying into a passion. “If you do not go away from these premises before night I shall feel bound-indeed I am bound-to-to- to quit the premises myself!" I rather absurdly concluded, knowing not with what possible threat to try to frighten his immobility into compliance.
What is "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville
200
This characteristic of postmodern writing is described as "blank parody" or parody without critique.
What is Pastiche
300
We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed us – The Dews drew quivering and chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –
What is "[Because I could not stop for Death -]" by Emily Dickinson
300
When one of the dogs came to where the old woman sat with her back against the tree and thrust his nose close to her face he seemed satisfied and went back to run with the pack. All the Grimes dogs did it at some time during the evening, before she died. I knew all about it afterward, when I grew to be a man, because once in a woods in Illinois, on another winter night, I saw a pack of dogs act just like that. The dogs were waiting for me to die as they had waited for the old woman that night when I was a child, but when it happened to me I was a young man and had no intention whatever of dying.
What is "Death in the Woods" by Sherwood Anderson
300
“As we are having this discussion, Liz lights the kerosene lamps and sets the casserole of beans and rice in the range. Its fragrance, compounded of coriander seed an dill seed, floats around us. His answers are hypnotic: cause and effect seem to part from one another, promising that to seek any further into the sources of these events will yield nothing. The key now is to simply act, to act simply—to forbid to punish to exact payment, to make sure he is listening, that he understands. My grandfather, who had five sons and many dogs, always swore the treated boys and Saint Bernards the same way.”
What is _Good Will_ by Jane Smiley
300
She was Hollow with what had been fear but was now just a hollow emptiness. All that screaming had blasted it out of her. She say, one leg cramped under her, and deep inside her brain was something like a pinpoint of light that kept going and would not let her relax. She thought, I’m not going to see my mother again. She thought, I’m not going to sleep in my bed again. Her bright green blouse was all wet. Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, “The place where you came from ain’t there anymore, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy’s house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down anytime. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?”
What is "Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
300
This is why naturalism rejected romance as a literary mode.
What is excess idealism, distance from reality, inability to advance with time.
400
But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven’t mentioned orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
What is "Why I am not a Painter" by Frank O'Hara
400
...“Better,” he said. He begun to laugh again. “Better,” he said. He couldn’t hardly say it for laughing. He say on the ground and us watching him, laughing and laughing. It was bad. It was bad so. I be durn if I could see anything to laugh at. Because there just aint nothing justifies the deliberate destruction of what a man has built with his own sweat and stored the fruit of his sweat into. But I ant so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.
What is _As I Lay Dying_ by William Faulkner
400
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.
What is _As I Lay Dying_ by William Faulkner
400
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless … In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you, the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter.
What is "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston
400
These are the four aesthetics of Modernism.
What are: - Fragmentation/montage - Aesthetic Self-consciousness - Ambiguity and uncertainty - Disintegration of the individual
500
II I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
What is "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens
500
One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from his teeth.
What is "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather
500
“Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced. Don’t lie down after eating a heavy meal. Don’t drink liquor on an empty stomach. If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating. The world is more complicated for adults that it is for children. We didn’t grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I’m the closest they could find, that’s all.”
What is _White Noise_ by Don DeLillo
500
“…this little girl’s no trouble and’s gonna be nice to me, so Ellie keep to yourself, this ain’t your date—right? Don’t hem in on me, don’t hog, don’t crush, don’t bird dog don’t trail me,” he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if he were running through all expressions he’d learned but no longer was sure which of them was in style, then rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed…
What is "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
500
This is an explanation of the three stages of the Sign and those literary periods with which they (generally) align.
What is... 1. Realism: The sign has a direct correlation to the real. It can communicate with us about the real world. 2. Modernism: The sign distorts reality, though still references some kind of real. Reality can be gathered, but only with enough work. 3. Postmodernism: The sign has no relationship to reality. The sign and communication have become dominated by the media and can only communicate about representations of reality, never reality itself.
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