Name That Author
This American writer spent his early life in Harlem, and worked, during WWII, in a defense plant in New Jersey
Who is James Baldwin?
This gullible father is so duped by Tartuffe that he almost gives his son's inheritance, and his daughter's hand in marriage, to the ignoble clergyman
Who is Orgon?
This comedy of character was banned shortly after its release in 1664 due to its unflattering depictions of a church official
What is Tartuffe?
Beginning in the nineteenth century, writers and artists associated with this movement felt "a new urgency to tell the unvarnished truth about the world, to observe social life unsentimentally, and to convey it as objectively as possible" (734)
What is Realism?
"The sea had always been my obsession, ever since I had seen it for the first time inside a colored ball; with its blue color it was like a magic lantern, wide open, the surface of its water unrippled unless you tilted the piece of glass, with its small shells and white specks like snow....The more I gazed at it, the cooler I felt its waters to be, and the more they invited me to bathe in them; they knew that I had been born amidst dust and mud and the stench of tobacco."
What is "The Women's Swimming Pool," by Hanan Al-Shaykh?
This nineteenth-century poet married against her father's wishes; after her marriage, she published the love poems she'd written to her beloved (but claimed they were translations of another poet's work)
Who is Elizabeth Barrett Browning?
A seventeenth-century bishop uses this pseudonym to publish criticisms of Sor Juana and to print, without permission, her Athenagoric Letter
What is (or who is) Sor Filotea?
This Modern essay employs stream-of-consciousness narration to capture the narrator's physical and mental meanderings as she contemplates her subject: women and fiction
What is A Room of One's Own?
Shaped by events including the Great Depression and two World Wars, people who lived from 1900-1945 can be said to have lived during this historical era
What is Modernity (or the Modern age/era)?
“The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.”
What is Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own?
This Modern poet wrote under Stalin's oppressive rule--and frequently memorized her poems, rather than writing them down, so that she couldn't be punished for her words
Who is Anna Akhmatova?
This seamstress earns a young friend's contempt when she trades her life of poverty for the more affluent life of a rich man's mistress
Who is Okyo?
The insecure speaker in this Modern poem is concerned about his thinning hair and confides that he has "measured out [his] life with coffee spoons"
What is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
After reading a government report about child laborers in mines and factories, the author of this lyric poem was inspired to write in the voice of such child workers--and as a result, helped inspire the British parliament to pass new laws regulating child labor
What is "The Cry of the Children"?
"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool."
What is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T. S. Eliot?
Despite growing up poor and receiving very little formal education, this Realist writer became one of the most renowned Japanese authors of her time
Who is Higuchi Ichiyo?
This young woman tells her friend about a women's swimming pool in Beirut--an action that prompts the friend's grandmother to curse her several times as a "devil"
Who is Sumayya?
This personal essay blends several significant events in the author's life--including the death of his father and the birth of his youngest sibling--with broader social and political contexts, including mounting racial tensions
What is "Notes of a Native Son"?
After Federico Garcia Lorca was killed by General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, one of his friends (and a fellow poet) penned this modern lyric that urges its readers to "Come and see the blood in the streets"
What is "I'm Explaining a Few Things"?
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."
What is "Sonnet 43," from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese?
This nineteenth-century writer became famous not only for his Realist short stories but also for his Nobel Prize-winning poetry and for his own musical genre (with examples of the latter including the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh)
Who is Rabindranath Tagore?
After his older brother returns home famished one night and commits a murder, this younger brother pins the blame on his own wife--and gets caught in an inescapable web of lies
Who is Chidam Rui?
This Modern Russian poem consists of several numbered parts, including some with their own subtitles; in it, the speaker recounts collective and individual experiences of grief
What is "Requiem"?
The Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire titled several of our assigned poems after this emotion, which he uses to signify a melancholic, paralyzing sense of boredom toward everything around him
What is spleen?
“Who carries the greater guilt
in a passion gone astray:
the woman, beseeched, who falls,
or the man who begged her to yield?
But why are you so alarmed
by the guilt you plainly deserve?
Love them for what you make them
or make them what you love.”
What is "Redondilla 92," by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz?