...My writing has changed a lot throughout the years, but this year I feel I have made the most progression. I went from not being able to finish a short story to being able to finish one with a well-developed plot. While I am very happy about my development in writing short stories I am most proud of my growth in writing poetry and dramatic writing. But it hasn’t always come naturally. It has involved a lot work on my part too. As expected, my writing quality in sixth grade was very different than what it is now. I used to write to tell an epic tale of mystery and hardship, which doesn’t sound so bad, but there was always one major flaw in all of my writings. Plot. None of my writings had a developed plot before I jumped right into the story. I would go with the flow and write what sounded good, which works to an extent, but without a plot my story was going nowhere. It was just one epic exposition, no climax, no resolution. Eventually I would get tired of a story and just...
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...enables the poet to look deep into the heart and soul of things. It is through the imaginative faculty that poet arrives at the general truths basic to human nature. Through the imaginative power, the poet is able to present emotions which he has not directly experienced. But he presents them in such a way that they seem personally experienced. Imagination is always associated with the created power and is a poetic principle. It is a transforming power as it has the ability to change the usual and ordinary in an unusual and uncommon way. Poetry is a modified "image of man and nature”. The poet is able to impart "the glory and freshness of a dream" to ordinary things of nature. He can present in his poetry the light that never was on land and sea. He is able to do so to the creative faculty of imagination. It is thus an active power. Poet is not a passive reflector of images formed from nature. He is a man who not only feels strongly but also thinks long and deeply. He is able to treat absent things as if they are present. Here Canterbury tales present an example of this imaginative power to visualize objects which are not present before poet’s eyes in their concrete forms but he presents them before us that they seem real. 29 pilgrims of Chaucer are his imaginative characters, all their qualities, merits and demerits are his own creations and here his creation is supported by his imagination. Imagination enables the poet to look deep into the heart and soul of things. It is through...
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...Everyone faces hardships at some point in their life, it is the way we choose to handle them that matters. Some people make the best of a bad situation, learn from it, and use the lesson learned to their advantage. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe did just that. The difficulties that both Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne were forced to face throughout their lives greatly influenced their writing and played a significant role in them being some of the most well-known writers in the sub-genre of dark romanticism. Nathaniel Hawthorne is best known for his dark romantic works such as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Dark Romanticism is a sub-genre of Romanticism that in tells a fascination with irrational, grotesque,...
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...Discovering through Literacy Literacy has continued to expand my worldview, while allowing me to both express myself and understand my introverted brother more. I found literacy to be the key to an enriched life, full of learning new perspectives that previously I was unaware of. I feel as if reading and writing marked a turning point in my life as I developed the skills to understand myself and others in greater depths. From listening to stories from my parents, to being inspired to express my thoughts through a journal, and my brother being greatly involved with reading, people have continued to encourage my development in reading and writing. When I was younger, my mom read the book The Windigos Return to my brother and I. This book had...
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...officer, 1969-71; JCC Journal, editor, 1969-71; Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, publications editor, 1972-77; Social and Economic Studies, editor, 1972-77; freelance writer and researcher, part-time teacher in communications, publishing consultant, and speech writer, Jamaica, 1977-82; Institute of Jamaica Publications, managing editor, 1982-89; Jamaica Journal, editor, 1982-89; freelance teacher, writer, lecturer, 1989-; University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, visiting lecturer/writer-in-residence, 1990; Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, University of Miami, Florida, director of fiction workshop, 1994, 1995; St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, Dana Visiting Professor of creative writing, 1994-95; University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, writer-in-residence, 1998-99. Life's Work Jamaican-born journalist, poet, and short story writer Olive Senior is one of Caribbean literature's leading feminist voices. Her works, though written in English, remain heavily influenced by the region's patois, and draw heavily upon its oral storytelling traditions. In both her verse and fiction, Senior critiques the political and cultural ties that continue to bind Jamaica to its British colonial past. Her protagonists often find themselves divided between the resulting two worlds of assimilation and preservation, and she gives their speech and inner dialogues a corresponding tone. "In Jamaica, much as in England, diction has traditionally...
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...Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Novel Notes and Three Men on the Bummel which belong to the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century. He is famous for his art of story-telling and his humour which is based on misunderstanding. He is good at revealing the weak sides of human nature. This extract is about three men who decided to cook an Irish stew. They began cooking from peeling the potatoes. They threw another products which they wished to get rid of and mixed all carefully. At the end Montmorency bought fresh caught water-rat. After some discussions these three men decided to try something new and added the rat. Eventually, they were very happy by their cook masterpiece. By this text the author wanted to tell us that it had better to try something new than to be indifferent and do everything as usual. People ought to develop in this case world progress would go ahead. Jerome presents his story as 1st-person narration with descriptive passages. This extract may be divided into the following parts. The first one is a description of Sonning. The second is decision of cooking an Irish stew. The third is Montmorency’s contribution to the dinner. The last one is about great success of Irish stew. This text is written with the cheerful, humorous, emotional and optimistic prevailing mod. The author used in this text a lot of lexical and stylistic devices which helped to create the needful atmosphere. In the description of Sonning Jerome...
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...LITR221 January 26, 2014 All Good Things Must Come to an End A Course Review of 2013-2014 Winter Semester of LITR 221 The amazing thing about literature is that it can be interrupted differently by each person who reads it. Which means that while one piece of writing is amazing, creative, and witty to one person to another person it could be the most boring, uninteresting, and redundant piece of literature they have ever read. In this semester of Literature 221, I was given the opportunity to read works from many different genres, time periods, and styles of writing. Some of which, like Emily Dickinson’s Life I and Life XLIII, Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, and Sherman Alexie’s What You Pawn I Will Redeem I thoroughly enjoyed and learned from. While others such as Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, Mark Twain’s excerpt When The Buffalo Climbed a Tree from Roughing It, and the excerpt from Sula by Toni Morrison weren’t exactly my cup of tea. Emily Dickinson is a remarkable poet who often writes from a very emotional and self-examining perspective. This is why I really enjoyed the two selections of her work we had to read this semester. In her first poem Life I, the very first two lines make you stop and think, “I’M nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?” (Dickinson 2) Bam! I was hit in the face with self-reflection. Am I somebody? Or am I a nobody? Emily Dickinson continues by saying “how dreary to be somebody!” (Dickinson2...
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...father at his request. She proceeds to tell him a story about a mother who, in order to be closer to her drug-addicted son, decides to experiment with the same drug and becomes a drug-addict herself, only to be deserted by the son when he rises above his dependency. Building on her relationship with her own father, Paley artfully uses intertwined narratives and character relationships to present the themes of experience and opportunity. The central conflict between the father and daughter lies within their different life experiences due to a vast generation gap, leaving them with different views not only in life but also in literature. He is an eighty-six year old man, bedridden due to heart disease and, despite his health problems, fully alert. A physician by profession and an artist in retirement, he is still very particular with details and requires that of her as well. In comparison, the daughter, who is also the narrator, has a completely different view on life. Young, comfortable with herself and with changes necessitated by a changing world, she rejects her father’s tendency to cling to the familiar and reject change. Mellow and creative-minded, she is committed to art as a form of self-actualization, whereas her father sees it as a mere vocation- something a careful few “do” but ignorant multitudes play at “doing” while waiting for something real to do. Thus, it is not surprising tension builds between them when he asks her to tell him a...
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...These writings held little fame while Poe was alive because no one else wrote anything like them, most people found them to be too scary and inappropriate, that they even complained to magazines about Poe’s other short stories. Now, they are some of the most famous poems out there. Most of Poe’s writings are gothic and that is what he is best known for. His stories are mysterious and that’s what keeps the readers interested. It is too bad that Poe was not alive to see how popular his work has gotten because that is all he ever wanted in life. He went through so many jobs and even traveled around to different cities giving lectures. He received a little more recognition and drew bigger crowds with the release of The Raven, but his death followed shortly...
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...My Creative Response to “To My Brother Miguel (in memoriam)” Of all the texts in the book of readings, this particular poem remained in my thoughts for a long time. It’s an emotional piece; the writer clearly delivered a lot of heavy feelings within it. Whether or not the poem is based on real life experience by the poet is irrelevant to my comprehension of the piece’s emotional message and eulogy to a long since dead family member. Throughout the piece he contrasts himself by both writing in the voice of a child and an ironic, slightly world-weary adult. The innocence of his childhood voice and memories, countered with the lingering sadness of his adult one gave me pause to think about the range of voice being brought to the table. The piece lacks a distinct sense of rage at the narrator’s loss of his brother. This made me highly intrigued as to what the poem would feel like if it was filled with rage or even regret. And while the narrator lingers on past memories, he certainly doesn’t regret the time he spends dwelling over them. The largest voice missing from the poem was that of the dead brother himself. I entertained the thought of writing an opposing poem from the point of view of the dead brother, in the same style as the original piece, while he laments over the fact that his brother won’t let his memories pass on. But I thought that that piece would lack the anger and regret that I felt was missing from the original piece. So I instead made the brother a slightly...
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...A Guide to Writing the Literary Analysis Essay I. INTRODUCTION: the first paragraph in your essay. It begins creatively in order to catch your reader’s interest, provides essential background about the literary work, and prepares the reader for your major thesis. The introduction must include the author and title of the work as well as an explanation of the theme to be discussed. Other essential background may include setting, an introduction of main characters, etc. The major thesis goes in this paragraph usually at the end. Because the major thesis sometimes sounds tacked on, make special attempts to link it to the sentence that precedes it by building on a key word or idea. A) Creative Opening/Hook: the beginning sentences of the introduction that catch the reader’s interest. Ways of beginning creatively include the following: 1) A startling fact or bit of information Example: Nearly two hundred citizens were arrested as witches during the Salem witch scare of 1692. Eventually nineteen were hanged, and another was pressed to death (Marks 65). 2) A snatch of dialogue between two characters Example: “It is another thing. You [Frederic Henry] cannot know about it unless you have it.” “ Well,” I said. “If I ever get it I will tell you [priest].” (Hemingway 72). With these words, the priest in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms sends the hero, Frederic, in search of the ambiguous “it” in his life. 3) A meaningful quotation (from the book you are analyzing...
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...Hebrew Literature At the end of the lesson, students should be able to: 1. Enumerate some of the masterpieces of the Hebrew Literature 2. Know the characters, the plot, and the moral that is enclosed with every literary masterpiece. 3. Demystify the hidden messages of every literary masterpieces. Duties of the Heart Author: Chovot HaLevavot * Chovot HaLevavot, or Ḥobot HaLebabot (Hebrew: חובות הלבבות, English: Duties of the Heart), is the primary work of the Jewish philosopher Bahya ibn Paquda, full name Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda. Ibn Paquda was a Jewish philosopher and is believed to have lived in Saragossa, Spain, in the first half of the eleventh century. * It was written in Judeo-Arabic (but in Hebrew characters) approximately in 1040 under the title Kitab al-Hidāya ilā Fara'id al-Qulūb, Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, sometimes titled as Guide to the Duties of the Heart, and translated into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon in the years 1161-80 under the title Chovot HaLevavot. There was another contemporary translation by Joseph Kimhi, but its complete text did not endure the test of time. * The Duties of the Heart is divided into ten sections termed (she'arim) "gates", corresponding to the ten fundamental principles which, according to Bahya's view, constitute human spiritual life. This treatise on the inner spiritual life makes numerous references to both Biblical and Talmudic texts. It draws on the contemporary Sufi Islamic influences present...
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...things and their true nature. Underlying each of these conflicts and every scene in the film is the battle between cynical detachment and vulnerability. The opening lines “Me and Mom vs. You and Dad sets the stage for an excessively competitive doubles tennis. Younger son Frank sides with Mom where older brother Walter proudly joins the father who gives some questionable advice regarding her backstroke. Competitive games are repeated throughout the film’ boxing, ping-pong. The fiercest competition is the literary competition to publish that both parents are engaged in. In this area the father condescendingly tries to give advise for his wife to improve her writing. Characters Bernard the father had formerly published a book and teaches creative writing at a community college. He seems to be in a creative slump. He is contemptuous and egotistical with little awareness of his behavior on others. He seems to be failing in work, his marriage and financially but consistently blames his failure on others; idiots who don’t publish him, philistines, and his wife’s...
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...Tungalag Ganbold English 314 Julie Booche April 4, 2012 Villains in Fairy Tales Research paper All children love to listen to fairy tales. When we were young, we ask our parents to tell us stories. People are not sure why fairy tales are so interesting and why every children love them. While it is entertaining, it is also moral lesson to young children. They learn from the fairy tales about good and evil. They learn how to distinguish good and evil, wise and foolish, and moral and immortal. Children learn many lessons from the characters of fairy tales and it is very interesting to see that they love heroes in the fairy tales and do not like the bad guys in the stories. When I was thinking about the research topic, the one thing pulled my attention was why there are villains in almost all fairy tales. It is very interesting to think that all fairy tales have villains. In this paper I am going to talk about who the villains in the story are, why authors talk about villains in their stories and what readers learn from them. I will use mostly about fairy tale villains such as my favorite fairy tale’s villain, Cinderella’s stepmother. When we read the stories, we can tell who the villain in the story is. They are usually described as stepmothers, witches, monsters, sneak, thief, robber and traits. For example, in the Cinderella story, Lady Tremaine is a villain. In the article “Top 10 Most Evil Disney villains”(Antonia) the author described the Lady Tremaine as self centered...
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...Some definitions of literary devices, techniques and style from searching via http://www.ferretsoft.com/ LITERARY DEVICES http://mrbraiman.home.att.net/lit.htm Literary devices refers to any specific aspect of literature, or a particular work, which we can recognize, identify, interpret and/or analyze. Both literary elements and literary techniques can rightly be called literary devices. Literary elements refers to aspects or characteristics of a whole text. They are not “used,” per se, by authors; we derive what they are from reading the text. Most literary elements can be derived from any and all texts; for example, every story has a theme, every story has a setting, every story has a conflict, every story is written from a particular point-of-view, etc. In order to be discussed legitimately, literary elements must be specifically identified for that text. Literary techniques refers to any specific, deliberate constructions of language which an author uses to convey meaning. An author’s use of a literary technique usually occurs with a single word or phrase, or a particular group of words or phrases, at one single point in a text. Unlike literary elements, literary techniques are not necessarily present in every text. Literary terms refers to the words themselves with which we identify and describe literary elements and techniques. They are not found in literature and they are not “used” by authors. Allegory:...
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