Prose
Kerouac’s On the Road is emblematic of the ethos adopted by a loose collective of American artists and writers known affectionately as this.
Who are The Beats?
Talk about imposing. The Raven of Poe’s aptly-titled poem bursts into the narrator’s room and seats itself atop a marble bust of this mythical figure.
Who is Athena? (or Pallas?)
Lear reminds this character, his youngest daughter, that “Nothing will come of nothing,” after she refuses to flatter him before the court.
Who is Cordelia?
It's an object, character, or event that figuratively represents an abstract idea or concept.
What is a symbol?
If your essay considers how a work of literature reflects its historical moment, you’re probably writing from within this analytical framework.
What is New Historicism?
The name of the character in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” afflicted with a disease, described by the narrator as a “settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person.”
Who is Madeline Usher?
It's the city mentioned in the title of Phillis Wheatley’s address to university students. (Not the one north of London, mind you.)
What is Cambridge?
As many of us have discussed in our class conversations, Lear is in many ways blind to the hollowness of flattery. But it is this character who actually loses his eyes.
Who is Gloucester?
Consisting of three distinct forms, this concept is used to describe situations in which there is a significant difference between what is expected to happen and what actually happens
What is irony?
He's the one who actually lowered the beetle through the skull’s eye socket in “The Gold-bug,” although it took him two tries.
Who is Jupiter?
The fight, involving a broken beer bottle, between these two characters forms the backbone of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Who are Tayo and Emo?
Trained as a professional physician, this poet pioneered the school of Imagism in poetry, which emphasized a focused poetics devoid of superfluous language.
Who is William Carlos Williams?
Like the contestants on Pat Sajak’s show, the characters of King Lear ride this circular configuration of fate, brought to highs and lows in their turn.
What is La Rota Fortuna, or the Wheel of Fortune?
Spelled differently than the optical kinds you see in Magic Eye books, this term denotes references in a written work to other texts, myths, and people.
What are allusions?
Along with the ego, these two concepts make up the tripartite division of the psyche in Psychoanalytic theory.
What are the id and superego?
Known for his brutality, this slave-breaker is physically confronted and, eventually, subdued by a teenaged Frederick Douglass.
Who is Mr. Covey?
Much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry consisted of short lines expressing specific sensations or feelings—a form of poetry known as this.
It's the character who speaks these lines to Lear: “And yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou has pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing in the middle.”
Who is the Fool?
It's the name of the poetic meter much of Shakespeare’s work, as well as much English poetry, is written in.
What is iambic pentameter?
It’s the name of the poet whose work, inspired by the Cubist artwork of Pablo Picasso, made meaning not only in the words themselves but also in their arrangement on the page.
Who is E. E. Cummings?
Carl, Tim, Grover, and Étienne—the main characters of Thomas Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration”—form a kid-led resistance organization against parents and the PTA named Operation this, taken from a Kirk Douglas film
What is Spartacus?
In Joy Harjo’s poem “3 A.M.,” the speaker is “trying to find a flight to” this place, a Hopi village in Arizona first settled almost a millennium ago.
What is Old Oraibi or Third Mesa?
Edmund opens Act I Scene 2 by addressing this anthropomorphized concept, naming it “my goddess. To thy law / My services are bound.”
Who / what is Nature?
They’re the two main parts of a metaphor: one, an abstract concept or idea, the other a familiar object or thing.
What are tenor and vehicle?
It's the name of the narrator who observed: “From then on I carried a big stick with me in the tent in case they got the idea we Mexicans were fouling up their trailer camp. They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am.”
Who is Sal Paradise?