... An army of twenty thousand men led by the king was waiting for us at the foot of the hill. Though it was clear to us that we’re outnumbered, we never thought about death in the back of our minds. We knew Odin had already saved us a place in Valhalla. And not long enough, the ground we were on would be drenched by English blood. “As soon as this battle began, consider their arses already fucked up by our swords and axes. Alright, let’s bring it on!” I cried to my troops. Driven by wrath, we drew our swords together to the firmament. We took the first charge while the enemy archers kept on showering us with arrows. We were ahead from our infantry who skidded to a stop as they raised their shields deflecting the arrows. My cavalry then continued to advance. The ground trembled as we rode together for glory. Some of my good men were caught by the first wave of arrows. It didn’t matter to us. We knew that those fallen warriors would be welcomed by Odin at the doorstep of the golden hall. Another wave of arrows was released to the sky. One after another, my men fell from their horses. It was a devastating sight but we still carried on. We would defeat the enemies and impale their heads in the spikes anyway. Then there was a boisterous laugh echoing from somewhere distant. It was like a mock to me. A taunt to my fallen friends. It was the king, the tyrant of England. A tingle of anger suddenly lifted my spirit when I spotted him in horseback along with his bannermen at the hilltop...
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... It was a calm day in the alley. The year was 2815, Jordan and his younger sister Lina were playing a game of cards, while their mother was putting clothes on a line to dry. Tomorrow was Jordan’s birthday, he was turning 16. His mother had baked a cake and bought some new clothes for him with as much money as they had. She finally got a job working at a factory about a mile away and worked 12 hours a day on minimum wage to make Jordan’s birthday possible. Everything was going fine until the animatronic billboards flickered to life with the emperor’s face on them. “ Greetings all citizens, it is my pleasure to announce that this city is going to be renewed to it’s former glory, I have dispatched troops to eradicate all life and to tear down the city”. The screen went blank. Jordan and his family started panicking at the thought of eradication, they knew that they needed to hide or flee right now because it wouldn’t be long before troops were there. They decided to flee from the city, they packed up all their stuff and started running for the back entrance between the wall built around the city and the open world. They had just gotten to the back entrance when all of a sudden, everything went wild. Planes flew over dropping bombs, troops were marching in through both sides of the city and people were dying, Jordan’s mother got killed, Lina got killed and Jordan got injured badly, the city was up in flames and the only thing that Jordan could see and...
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...to use them. After three days of cutting firewood with a manual saw and hauling it to the barn for splitting, Joker declared "I'm going for a drive". The pair decided to finish their local explorations where they had left off. Joker couldn't help but laugh when they drove by the scene of Trey's accident. The next home was closed up tight. The second home was at the intersection where they wanted to make another right turn. It was a battlefield. The long ranch home sat back from the road with a once nice paved driveway. The smell from the twice dead bodies was terrible. A fence made of newish locust posts and barely rusting barbed wire surrounded the house. The barbed wire was a tangle like Trey had seen in photos of world war one in France. Hundreds of the dead lay outside the wire and more had been shot while tangled up. The fence was breached in two places. Directly opposite the front door, sheer force of numbers had collapsed the fence. A carpet of dead bodies lay all the way to the home. The other breach was a stock gate, originally mounted to permit one vehicle to pass through, but now laying on the asphalt. The convicts picked their way through the mess, wearing plastic bags over their footwear and found piles of empty brass both at the front door and a window overlooking the downed gate. Around at the rear the fence had held and far fewer bodies had been shot. Most of the windows in the front were broken. The door was off its hinges, but neither...
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...Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” starts with the brief tongue-in-cheek statement, “this is true.” While most authors seek to build credibility with their reader, O’Brien actively undermines his own trustworthiness in order to convey the skepticism with which he believes audiences should treat all ‘true’ war stories. His most effective strategy for doing so is the interweaving of a potentially fictitious narrative within a formal essay, further developing “How to Tell a True War Story’s” message of disillusionment with the attributes characteristically attributed to war and the dubious nature of war stories by creating a sense of suspicion and general distrust between the reader and the speaker. As O’Brien interweaves narrative within his essay, such stories are...
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...Mr. Macomber English 3 AP Syllabus 1.5 English 3 AP Course Overview Students in this introductory college-level course read and carefully analyze a broad and challenging range of nonfiction prose selections, deepening their awareness of rhetoric and how language works. Through close reading and frequent writing, students develop their ability to work with language and texts in order to establish greater awareness of purpose and strategy, while strengthening their own composing abilities. C16 Students examine rhetoric in essays, images, movies, novels, and speeches. They frequently confer about their writing by conferencing in class. C 14 Feedback is given both before and after students revise their work to help them develop logical organization, enhanced by specific techniques to increase coherence. Rhetorical structures, graphic organizers, and work on repetition, transitions, and emphasis are addressed. I comment on individual drafts, and I write memos to the class in a blog about whole-class concerns such as specificity of quotations, parallelism, and transitions. C13 Simultaneously, students review the simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence classifications. We examine word order, length, and surprising constructions. Loose and periodic sentences are introduced. We examine sample sentences and discuss how change affects tone, purpose, and credibility of the author/speaker. In addition, feedback on producing sentence structure variety...
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...plans regarding Vietnam?” The essay will compare and contrast how the United States reacts to Vietnam before and after the Tet Offensive, while also evaluating any other factors that might also had a role. Since the Tet Offensive is a series of events, the essay will analyze all effects since the start of the offensive through the end. Source 1: “Tet” section of “Vietnam: A history” by Stanley Karnow Stanley Karnow worked for Time, Life, the Washington Post, and NBC to cover Asia from 1959-1974. He started to write this secondary source book when he arrived in Vietnam on July 1959. The book serves to...
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...the "revolutionary" cinemas of Cuba and Argentina. Argentina was part of third world revolutionary cinema, Solanas and Getino’s “Third Cinema” manifesto essay set the agenda for Argentina’s film making, Solanas explained that not all big productions were necessarily first cinema. Writing later in 1970s, Getino noted that “the force and cohesion of the popular movements in Argentina –were not as strong as we had imagined” (Octavio Getino, “some Notes on the concept of a ‘Third Cinema,” in Tim Barnard, ed., Argentine Cinema [Toronto: Nightwood, 1986], p. 107). In Cuba, feminist filmmaking pioneered the turn to issue-centered, grassroots problems. As the international women’s movement grew, films on rape, self-defense and house-keeping were paralleled by explorations of women history which are epitomized in the U.S. films Union Maids (1976) and with babies and Banners (1978) by Women’s Labor History Project. During the next decade, minority women also played an increasing part in the changes in experimental cinema. 2. What factors influenced the development of militant black African cinema in the 1960s and 1970s? Global cold war tensions increased as political turmoil turned to violent conflict in developing Third world nations. Responding to all these, cinema became politicized on a scale not seen since World War II....
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...Bibliographic Essay on African American History Introduction In the essay “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro- American History” the eminent historian John Hope Franklin declared “Every generation has the opportunity to write its own history, and indeed it is obliged to do so.”1 The social and political revolutions of 1960s have made fulfilling such a responsibility less daunting than ever. Invaluable references, including Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Evelyn Brooks Higgingbotham, ed., Harvard Guide to African American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert E. Weems, Jr., eds., The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); and Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds., Dictionary of Afro- American Slavery (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988), provide informative narratives along with expansive bibliographies. General texts covering major historical events with attention to chronology include John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000), considered a classic; along with Joe William Trotter, Jr., The African American 1  Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); and, Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The...
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...Analysis Essay 2/16/14 In Tim O’Brien “The Things They Carried” The first story in the collection introduces the cast of characters that reappear throughout the book. The cast is made up of the soldiers of the Alpha Company, led by First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. The platoon is deployed to fight in the Vietnam War. The narrator, O’Brien, is one of the soldiers, and he distinguishes one soldier from another in this first story by the items that they carry. Authors as far back as Homer described soldiers going into battle by naming the things that they carried: goatskins filled with water, spears, and locks of hair from their beloved ones. O’Brien updates this literary strategy. His characters carry the modern implements of war. But the feeling evoked is similar: static lists make the characters seem already dead, prematurely mourned. The lists are like wills. The first story is told in third person, with some insight into the mind of Jimmy Cross. This movement between perspectives is called free indirect discourse, and serves to distance the reader from the soldiers. The reader sees them as if they were in a movie, moving slowly across an unfamiliar landscape, carrying their various burdens. The ancient movement of men going to war is juxtaposed with the rough, modern language of the soldiers themselves. They use slang, swear at each other, and try to diffuse the feeling of danger and helplessness by describing death as being “zapped” or “torn up.” Often dramatic narratives are driven...
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...Global Cold War tensions increased as political turmoil turned to violent conflict in developing Third World nations. Responding to all of this, cinema became politicized on a scale not seen since World War II. The Third World was at the forefront of revolutionary cinema as filmmakers in those countries treated cinema as a tool of social change and a weapon of political liberation. This use of film as a social and political force emerged first in Latin America and spread to Africa and China, while also emerging in the First World countries including the U.S.S.R. and United States. The counterculture and the New Left were examples of an international politics of youth that focused on opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, critique of post-World War II capitalist society, and social-protest movements focused on equality of diverse groups. Eventually, radical leftism declined in the mid-1970s, but engaged filmmaking remained central to the micropolitics of the era. A June 1979 alternative-cinema conference in New York assembled over 400 political activists working in film and video in the United States. In some countries, government liberalization led to funding for militant film. The new Labour government in Britain assisted Liberation Film and Cinema Action, while the regional Maisons de la Culture allotted money for local media groups in France. Some parallel distribution and exhibition circuits proved successful in promoting films about nuclear power, day care...
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...Past Papers, Marks Scheme indicative content and examiners Report comments June 2010 A) How far did ‘peaceful coexistence’ ease Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the USA in the years 1953–61? Mark Scheme: Candidates should have knowledge about the main features of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in the period 1953-61. Developments which helped to ease Cold War tensions might include: the end of the Korean War (1953); Soviet settlement of border disputes with Turkey and Iran (1953) and recognition of Israel (1953); Austrian independence and improved Soviet-Yugoslav relations (1955); the ‘Geneva spirit’ based on east-west summit diplomacy and Khrushchev’s visit to the USA in 1959. Developments which sustained Cold War tensions during the period might include: US attitudes towards communism in the 1950s (domino theory, ‘roll back’, Eisenhower doctrine); Soviet concept of peaceful coexistence based on long-term victory of communism; the impact of the Hungarian Rising (1956) and the launch of Sputnik (1957); the U2 spy plane incident (1960) and the issue of Germany (1958-1961). At Levels 1 and 2 simple or more developed statements will provide either only simple or more developed statements about peaceful coexistence with either only implicit reference to the extent tensions were eased or argument based on insufficient evidence. At Level 3, students should provide some sustained...
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...arguments usually question or celebrate the transgressive potentials of the book (Giroux; Mendieta), or address issues of masculinity brought into the fore by their literary and cinematic representations emergent in the same decade (Tuss; Friday). However, few, if any, have addressed the literary aspirations of the text and its author. Although none of the approaches to the thematic concerns of Fight Club are unjustified, in the argument that follows I will suggest that conclusions drawn and critical judgments passed have been hasty, and not only failed to take into account the formal aspects of story-telling, but that the narrative features of Palahniuk’s text have largely went unexplored, and constitute a blind spot of the reception. Critics condemning or acclaiming the novel, and, indeed, many a cultic reader of Palahniuk ignored Fight Club as a literary narrative, and have inadvertently been repeating the catchphrases of the text, either reinforcing or trying to undermine what they have understood as their meaning. I see the significance of Palahniuk’s fiction and the literary event of Fight Club’s publication in somewhat different terms. Palahniuk’s emphasis and continued insistence on minimalism suggest that his fiction is properly understood as belonging to a literary tradition whose evaluation remains troubled and, for a large part, unsettled. Nevertheless,...
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...what American Literature is in itself and which pieces of writing we can include within this label. It is believed that when a piece is written in North America, more precisely in the USA, it would automatically be given this epithet. But it should 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...
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...at theatres, on television, or home video are typically narrative films. They tell stories about characters going through experiences. But what are they really about? What is the content of a film? DIGGING DEEPER: FOUR LEVELS OF MEANING Recounting the plot of a movie, telling what happens, is the simplest way to explain it to someone else. But this is neither a film review nor a film analysis. It’s merely a synopsis that anyone else who sees or has seen the movie will likely agree with. This level of content may be called the referential content, since it refers directly to things that happen in the plot and possibly to some aspects of the story that are merely implied by the plot. In John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), four men from the city go on a weekend canoe trip that unexpectedly becomes a life or death struggle for survival of man against man and man against nature. Some characters survive, others don’t. Most films can be analyzed more thoroughly to reveal deeper levels of meaning. A review (perhaps 400-1200 words) typically includes personal impressions and evaluations of a movie’s content and techniques. A good review may be subjective, yet still touch superficially on topics that might be explored in more detail in a longer formal analysis. An analysis (perhaps 1200-12,000 words) attempts to determine how the film actually uses various cinematic techniques and elements of film or narrative form to make a viewer react in a certain way and why it...
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...New Terrorism? Predicting the Future of Terrorism Introduction/ Purpose Terrorism is an often controversial subject. “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.” This is a well known quote that is often used to allude to the complexity of terrorism. Terrorism, the word itself is a word that has possessed over a hundred definitions and a concept that has changed as the societies of the world have progressed. The use of the terms terrorism and terrorist are politically weighted, and are often used for a polarizing effect, where 'terrorism' becomes simply a relativist term for the violence committed by an enemy, from the point of view of the attacked. Because of the political nature of some struggles, 'terrorism' can become identified as simply any violence committed against established institutions. A terrorist is, strictly speaking, one who is personally involved in an act of terrorism. The term "terrorism" comes from the French 18th century word terrorisme (under their government's Reign of Terror), based on the Latin language verbs terrere (to tremble) and deterrere (to frighten from). The use of the term "terrorist" has had broader applications however, ranging in application from disgruntled citizens to common political dissidents. It is important to understand terrorism in our modern arena and under stand its effects on society. ‘Terrorism’, as a unified political and ideological motif did not arise spontaneously in response to particular instances...
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