...felt sympathy for Gatsby, and I wanted to know the reason the author gave the book such a horrendous ending; thus, I researched the author. It turned out that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the book based on his life and experiences, which made me respect him more, maybe out of pity. I started to read more of his writings, and I learned numerous life lessons through them. In The Great Gatsby, “The Rich Boy,” and “The Bridal Party,” F. Scott Fitzgerald makes similarities in point of view, allusion, setting, plot, and theme. Fitzgerald’s unique writing style is composed of distinctive narrators. His narrators tend to narrate in both first person and third person narrative. The narrator uses third person narrative when the events are occurring in front of him and thus gives his own interpretation of the events. First person narrative is used when the narrator is involved in the story itself, often times confiding in the protagonist. In The Great Gatsby the narrator is known as Nick Carraway, who is Gatsby’s neighbor and Daisy Buchanan’s cousin. Carraway states “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores,” which depicts how Carraway is a reliable first person narrator but also a peripheral narrator who just observes and tells the story (Fitzgerald Gatsby 1). Through peripheral narration, Carraway is almost invisible and thus acts more like a third person narrator who describes the events...
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...during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. After graduating from high school, Hughes went to Mexico to visit his father, in hopes to convince his father that he should pay for his college education at Columbia University in New York City. On his way to Mexico on the train, while thinking about his past and his future, Hughes wrote the famous poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." After arriving in Mexico, the tension between Hughes and his father was strong. Hughes wanted to be a writer; his father wanted him to be an engineer. After Hughes sent some of his poetry to what was known as the “Brownies” Book and “Crisis” magazines, it was accepted. his father was impressed enough to agree to pay for a year at Columbia University. It was there at Columbia University were he begin releasing more poems that he had written. Hughes embraced crafting blues music into his poetry because it expressed the worries of the common man in a simple and direct manner. Blues songs feature heavy repetition, and singers often seem to be laughing and crying at the same time. One of his best works was the poem “The Weary Blues” which came in first place in a section of a literary contest in an Opportunity magazine published in 1925. The title itself gives an example on how Hughes wanted to give the reader an indication on how he crafted his fine arts. This poem became one of the most well known poems and helped launched his career. In the...
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...attention-grabbing novel. A novel that consist of different contexts, different genres and different tone and writing styles combined, letting the reader experience exactly what the writer is trying to say. Extract 1 is an account of the first public hanging that took place in the city of Minsk, Soviet Union under the Nazi occupation. (Mullany, 2010) The men, Kiril Trus and a sixteen year old Volodia Shcerbatsevich were members of a partisan cell organizing anti-fascist resistance. The seventeen year old girl, Masha Bruskina was a nurse who had been caught aiding the partisans. She provided civilian clothes and papers for wounded Red Army soldiers under her care and smuggle them back to the resistance. It is an in depth description of the brutality of this event, with emphasis on the circumstances under which this event took place. Extract 2 is an account, sixty years after this event. A journalist Jake Denbigh is working on the experiences of war-time immigrants during the 2nd World War. (www.carlabanks.uk/forest/) Jake is visiting a museum in the city of Minsk that is devoted to the atrocities of the Nazi occupation and is experiencing some of the events through looking at photographs. Extract 1 is set in the city of Minsk in the Soviet Union, four months after Germany invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June, 1941. (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Bruskina) The hangings were inplemented to make an example of them...
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...Lower East Side Memories : A Jewish Place in America By HASIA R. DINER The Lower East Side and American Jewish Memory I'm Jewish because love my family matzoh ball soup. I'm Jewish because my fathers mothers uncles grandmothers said "Jewish," all the way back to Vitebsk & Kaminetz-Podolska via Lvov. Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13 I write poems at restaurant tables Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual. —Allen Ginsberg, "Yiddishe Kopf" The poet Allen Ginsberg, born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, returned in his later years to a narrative style of expression, shifting gears from the anger and fire of his early career. In this poem from 1991 he also touched down again, after a long hiatus spent exploring Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, upon some Jewish themes, as a way of remembering the world of his youth. He described that world in one poem, "Yiddishe Kopf," literally, a Jewish head, but more broadly, a highly distinctive Jewish way of thinking, based on insight, cleverness, and finesse. That world for him stood upon two zones of remembrance. The world of eastern Europe, of Vitebsk, Lvov, and Kamenets-Podolski gave him one anchor for his Jewishness. Thai space of memory gave him a focus for continuity and inherited identity, tied down by the weight of the past, by family in particular. The other, the Lower East Side, nurtured and...
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...English Overseas English zwwx@overseaen.com 2011 8 http://www.overseaen.com Tel:+86-551-5690811 5690812 Narrative Patterns Research in O Henry's Novels · ， （ ， 332000 ） Abstract：O· Henry is living in the time when novelists are in the great pursuit of narrative pattern research. Hence his works is inevitably Henry's novels in my opinion is also marvelous for his outinfluenced. Beside his humorous language, surprising ends and expressions, O· standing narrative patterns arrangement. In this article, a research will be conducted onto his narrative pattern in the aspects of narrative perspectives, narrative space and narrative time. By this research, more information and references is intended to obtain for the further study on this area. Key words: Narrative Pattern; Narrative Perspective; Narrative Space; Narrative Time ： I02 ：A ：1009-5039(2011)08-0350-03 1 Introduction · O Henry (1862-1910), as one of the most famous writers of short story in American literature history, or even around the whole world. Plus his contribution in narrative patterns research, he is also honored as the one of the founders of American short story history. Great praises, as well as critics are raised from the world onto his short novels which are well known for the humor, vivid spots description, surprising endings. However, in this article we will pay attention to the narrative patterns in O· Henry's novels, the area of which seldom calls focus and research from the American literature...
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...twilight and dark. Just as the East represents the arrival of sun with its light and rationality—of darkness dispelled— so too does the West embody the loss of that sun’s light and logic and the commencement of night. However, there are more boundaries between East and West than merely the presence or absence of light. After the time of Columbus, the people who looked toward the West, and particularly the North American continent, saw more than just land. The West was a sacred place where magic, hallowed, and even treacherous experiences were possible. This idea that possibilities existed in the West that did not exist elsewhere motivated millions to leave the Old World for the new and redefine themselves in a Western landscape of unlimited possibilities. What is the West? These early settlers, religionists, and explorers to the West came to the shores of the Atlantic seaboard unsure of what to expect from the new landscape they encountered. By leaving their homes and coming to a new land to make a new life, these immigrants breached a frontier. Frontiers are not solidified lines of demarcation; instead, they are indistinct and shifting perceptions that divide what is “us” from what is not yet “us.” As immigrants traveled west they increased the distance from their old, comfortable lives, and with each...
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...elements are crucially re-imagined. Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” was released on November 19, 1999, a few months before the new millennium. Set in 1799, Burton’s film modifies the 1790 date that Irving’s text is set in, showing an acute concern with living out anxieties surrounding millennial change in the ‘safe’ formats of film and of established folk legend. Irving’s tale, written in 1820, also works with antiquity, but in a different manner: it lives out colonial cultural anxieties of Irving’s present, as he seems to be concerned with constructing archetypes of folk and with placing folk culture in the new American literary landscape. Examining the two versions of the tale, then, provides a fascinating peek into the transformation of concerns and values in America from Irving’s nineteenth century landscape to Burton’s twentieth (on the verge of twenty-first) century. Burton makes several significant moves that modify the basics of Irving’s tale, frequently at the cost of the folk elements of Irving’s version. The frame narrative of Irving’s story—the tale, part of a series titled “The Sketch Book,” begins with the preface “Found among the papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker—is completely done away with (Irving 41). What is more, the second narrator of the story, who is narrating to Knickerbocker “at the corporation meeting of the ancient city of the Manhattoes,” is also disposed of (Irving 61). There is no narrator at all in Burton’s film, and the action that...
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...characterized by elaborate legal maneuvers and shared passionate advocacy, not only sought to seek liability for these crimes but also became the framework for broader political and ideological struggles. Additionally, the Boston Massacre left a permanent mark on the memory of the American people, serving as a key piece of resistance against British oppression. Throughout the decades following the event, the massacre would be memorialized through different memorials, including speeches, paintings, exhibits, and statues. These would not only represent and memorialize those who lost their lives during the massacre, but also represent the struggle for the revolutionary cause, further cementing the massacre’s place in America’s fight for independence. By exploring the narratives surrounding law and the memory surrounding the Boston Massacre, this paper aims to shed light on the process of justice, politics, and remembrance in early...
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...colonial seaport cities. These harbors not only brought a steady wave of immigrants to the country but produced increased amounts of wealth through industry, artistry, and commerce. Very much like the seaport cities of modern United States, colonial seaports were rich with diversity and activity. However, these seaports were teeming with turmoil as well as the cost of living skyrocketed and many different cultures and classes of people struggled to co-inhabit these areas. In the eighteenth century, all major American cities were urban seaports. Regarded as the countries first urban centers, the largest of these were towns such as Boston, New York City, Salem, Charleston, Philadelphia, and Providence. They were the docking place for immigrants who came to the colonies in search of freedom and potential economic opportunity. When these immigrants arrived they disembarked in the heart of the hustle and bustle of these cosmopolitan seaports. “A jumble of shops, taverns, and homes crowded the streets; the spires of churches studded their skylines. The narrow cobblestone streets of Boston and New York also challenged pedestrians, who competed for space with livestock being driven to the butcher, roaming herds of swine and packs of dogs, clattering carts, carriages, and horses” (118). Many of these immigrants settled in the seaport cities they arrived in, immediately becoming a part of the evident social hierarchy of these areas. Seaport cities were home...
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...different things depending on the situation. Freedom is an important theme on Frederick Douglass's "Narrative Life" as well as my chosen books "Worst Case" by James Patterson and "The Diary of Anne Frank" by Anne Frank. All these books illustrate the theme of freedom in different ways, but all follow a theme of personal freedom. Freedom is not easily achieved for any of the characters in these three books. * Michael Benette is the main character in "Worst Case". He is the lead detective on an on going serial killer case. Emily Parker is New York cities FBI abduction specialist, also Benettes partner. The case that they were given involves a serial killer who abducts innocent children of extremely wealthy families in New York city. It's their job to make sure that the children come back safe and hopefully alive. * Benette and Parker relate to Douglass because they all had been robbed of their freedom. Benette and Parker had becomes slaves to the serial killer. This killer would leave no clues or ransoms. It was up to them to jump start the case. They worked day and night to make sure that the kids were free from the killer. All their time is taken away by the investigation. This puts a hold on their personal time, work became life for them, and the serial killer didn't make it easier for anyone. *Work took over Douglass's life as well. He was never given a chance to have a personal life. It was taken away from him when he was born into slavery. He grew up on several plantations...
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...be taken into account that this idea is quite broad and doesn’t reflect the real essence of the term. However, there is also another definition that gathers this essence: American Literature is the one that represents the Americanism, the singularity of the USA philosophy and culture. This way, instead of focusing on who the author is, it is focused on the content of the writing. In that which concerns Fiction, the following documents are the ones considered as narrative: Speeches Letters Short Stories Essays Political Documents Sermons Novels Diaries 1 FIRST LITERARY EXPRESSIONS The first documents in which the idea of Americanism is very present are the Sermons. They respond to the strict Protestantism settled in the New Continent after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans in the Mayflower (1620) and the Arabella (1630). They established a theocratic community whose main and only point of reference was the Bible. That is why the idea of the ‘city upon a hill’ is still very present in American mentality. As we all know, their community was also governed by the concept of Predestination. This belief was based in the idea that we are saved or condemned since the very moment we are born or even, since the very moment when the Universe was created. Therefore, the way they confronted Good and Evil was that of effect-cause: if you are one of those who were going to be saved you certainly...
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...Otherness: Essays and Studies 1.1 October 2010 Haunting Poetry: Trauma, Otherness and Textuality in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days Olu Jenzen Early conceptions of trauma are intimately linked not only with modernity but specifically with the height of industrialisation (Micale and Lerner 2001). This is converged in the opening of Specimen Days particularly in the image of an industrial accident at the ironworks where a young man is killed by the stamping machine. His young brother, replacing him at the machine after the funeral, then experiences an apparition of the dead brother still trapped inside the machine, which leads him to believe that all machines house entrapped ghosts of the dead. Writing on the Victorians’ anxieties about internal disruption caused by the advent of the railway, Jill Matus (2001, 415) has pointed out that, Freud himself remarked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), [that] there is ‘a condition [which] has long been known and described [and] which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of traumatic neurosis’ (12). Freud’s remark brings to the fore the traumas of the industrial age as both individually and publicly experienced and negotiated. This condition of trauma as private and public, individual yet also societal is held in tension throughout Cunningham’s novel. Reflecting on the otherness of trauma and its vexed relationship to representation...
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...The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a definite page-turner due to Fitzgerald’s passion, and emotion that he has captured. The novel was published on April 10, 1925; however, did not sell many copies until his death. Before his death he was believed to be a failure, but is now considered one of the best American writers of the 20th century. The story takes place in New York City and on Long Island. More specifically, the West and East Egg during the roaring 20’s. Fitzgerald reflects on his own life making The Great Gatsby more of a personal narrative. F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life has influenced his writing on the novel The Great Gatsby....
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...One day in the afternoon while I was surfing on the Internet, one of my friends forwarded a really interesting website addressed www.stillfree.com to me. At the beginning, I thought it was some kind of shopping promotional website but after clicking on it, an interesting video popped up. I saw a man being video recorded while he was climbing up a fence of a military airport. Then, he ran quickly towards the Air Force One, which is the personal aircraft of the President of the United States, and tagged a graffiti drawing on the jet. It gave me a big shock after watching the video because that man actually sneaked in to the US military airbase and tagged the Air force One aircraft. The event was being broadcast on some major TV channels. After making everything clear, I realized that video was not really took place at the US airbase and it was actually made up by a prominent fashion designer Marc Ecko. The whole process of the video was so real, but it came up as a campaign video to promote the art of graffiti. There are many different points of view on graffiti and it has always aroused arguments on its legalization. Graffiti can be recognized as a form of art, or crime. Graffiti consists of inscriptions, slogans and drawings scratched, scribbled or painted on a wall or other public or private surface. According to The Dictionary of Art, the word "graffiti" is derived from the Greek term "graphein" (to write) and the word "graffiti" itself is plural of the Italian word "graffito...
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...N I N G O B J E C T I V E S 10 1. Identify the purpose and structure of narrative writing. 2. Recognize how to write a narrative essay. Rhetorical modes simply mean the ways in which we can effectively communicate through language. This chapter covers nine common rhetorical modes. As you read about these nine modes, keep in mind that the rhetorical mode a writer chooses depends on his or her purpose for writing. Sometimes writers incorporate a variety of modes in one essay. In covering the nine rhetorical modes, this chapter also emphasizes these as a set of tools that will allow you greater flexibility and effectiveness in communicating with your audience and expressing your ideas. rhetorical modes The ways in which we effectively communicate through language. 1.1 The Purpose of Narrative Writing Narration means the art of storytelling, and the purpose of narrative writing is to tell stories. Any time you tell a story to a friend or family member about an event or incident in your day, you engage in a form of narration. In addition, a narrative can be factual or fictional. A factual story is one that is based on, and tries to be faithful to, actual events as they unfolded in real life. A fictional story is a made-up, or imagined, story; the writer of a fictional story can create characters and events as he or she sees fit. However, the big distinction between factual and fictional narratives is based on a writer’s purpose. The writers of factual stories try to recount...
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