...A novel is a long prose narrative that describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story. The genre has historical roots in antiquity and the fields ofmedieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, theplot, the relation to reality, the characterization, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced to literary prose in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. ------------------------------------------------- Definition[edit] Gerard ter Borch, young man reading a book c.1680, the format is that of a French period novel. | Madame de Pompadourspending her afternoon with a book, 1756 – religious and scientific reading has a differenticonography. | The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates intimacy, and length can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of the field of literary fiction from the field of historical narrative fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years...
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...The personal account, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist by Yossi Klein Halevi captures the emotions of a Holocaust survivor in a way that other historical sources are not able to. The memoir is about Halevi’s story growing up as the son of a Holocaust survivor in Brooklyn in the 1960’s-70s. When reading this memoir it is important to understand, memoirs are primary sources that follow a single person’s first-hand account and focuses on a specific event or experience, not their entire life. Other historical sources are usually broader and depict a period of time rather than singular personal stories. A memoir is limited as a primary source; Memoirs are limited to only one individual's point of view, rather than an analysis of many people's perspectives...
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...Independent Reading I was successful in enjoying reading different kinds of genres. Before I came to eighth grade, I constantly read fiction and realistic fiction books. However, the independent reading program helped me read different kinds of books. I didn't know that reading different books could be this fun. I struggled as a reader on finding time to read. In the beginning of the grade, it was easy to find time to read; however, as time passed by and more assignments were forming, it became harder to find time to read. Pride Piece I think the memoir was the best piece I wrote. I put lots of effort into this piece. I tried to use lots of figurative languages in order to spice up the piece and make sound more interesting. Because the topic...
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...Why it matters? It's a mystery of literature involving a man of words. Words which caused uproar back in 1789. The British readers were captivated by his personal experience of being enslaved at age 11, kidnapped from Nigeria, and brought into slavery of a New World in a terror-filled ship. Equiano's tale is viewed as an authoritative description of the villainous Middle Passage, one of the very first narratives from a slave, a story that gave the hatchling abolitionist movement a buzzing moral influence; except it may not be exact. Therein lays the mystery: Because if the gentleman who penned "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African" was not born in Africa, but rather born into slavery in South Carolina -- as Vincent Carretta suggests -- then who was he? Where did he learn to speak fluent Igbo? And how did he obtain such agonizing details about life aboard an 18th-century slave vessel? The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains. . . . The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. (Equiano, 1789) In that lies the controversy: Carretta's findings, detailed in his biography of Equiano, have ignited a blaze...
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...At some point in everybody’s lives they will receive advice from friends. Often advice administered by friends has been quite excellent and developed from personal experience, and it should be taken seriously. However, there are people in the world who like to discover lessons the difficult way, rather than taking the word of others. For example, a person will advise another person, not to read My Antonia, because it is a boring drab story like most books written a long time ago, despite once being great and well-received (people’s interests change over 100 years). Furthermore, the person receiving this advice may be slightly stubborn and read the book anyway, and that person will find out for themselves how awful the book truly is. My Antonia was not a good book, it was in fact a very awful and boring book. At no point in the story did it ever become interesting or exciting (a common theme in many of these stories). Furthermore, the overall story of its completion is one of the most stupid and pointless story arcs ever. Also, the characters (another common issue I have with older literature) are not interesting at all. My Antonia was one of the worst books ever, and it should be burned in a fire for being so terrible. The first issue with My Antonia has been the level of interest to the story. The story is so...
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...Definition: What is literature? Why do we read it? Why is literature important? Literature is a term used to describe written or spoken material. Broadly speaking, "literature" is used to describe anything from creative writing to more technical or scientific works, but the term is most commonly used to refer to works of the creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction. Generally, most people have their own ideas of what literature is. When enrolling in a literary course at university, you expect that everything on the reading list will be “literature”. Similarly, you might expect everything by a known author to be literature, even though the quality of that author's work may vary from publication to publication. Perhaps you get an idea just from looking at the cover design on a book whether it is “literary” or “pulp”. Literature then, is a form of demarcation, however fuzzy, based on the premise that all texts are not created equal. Some have or are given more value than others. Most forays into the question of “what is literature” go into how literature works with the reader, rather than how the author set about writing it. It is the reception, rather than the writing, which is the object of enquiry. Largely, what we call “literature” is often a subjective value judgment, and naturally, value judgments, like literary tastes, will change. Etymologically, literature has to do with letters, the written as opposed to the spoken word...
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... | |PERSONAL INFORMED INTERPRETATION | | | |Students who decide to write this type of essay should be aware of what is meant by the term ‘personal informed | |interpretation’. Think of this phrase as three separate words: | | | |‘Personal’ - What does the novel mean to you? How does it make you feel? This does not have to be a positive feeling - just | |because someone you know loves this novel above all others, does not mean that you have to! However, do not just write your | |essay in the form of a ‘rant’ - your reasons, whether you love or loathe the novel, must be reasoned and reasonable, but | |above all, personal. | | | |‘Informed’ - Your essay must demonstrate that you have understood the novel. In addition, you will be required to endorse | |this understanding with wider, relevant reading, showing that you have...
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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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...The two readings that I have chosen to write my final paper for our “Queer Americans” class over are Middlesex and Fun Home. Although the two books are very different stories, they also have undeniable similarities at the same time as they portray the struggles as well as the rewards in dealing with their queer sexualities. These readings connect well because they both deal with two coming of age individuals dealing with struggles in discovering their sexualities, with very dysfunctional home lives. The way queerness is depicted between the two storylines have been drawn out in two very unique, yet equally effective within the messages that the books portrayed. Queerness, usually a word or phrase that describes a type of sexuality, it correlates...
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...In Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians, she invokes many instances of violence, historical erasure, and a sense of questioning identity both in personal situations, and in simply talking about the brutality of colonialism, and its effects in the scheme of historical consciousness. In reading it, it causes the reader to think about why she does this, and what end goal it may achieve. Michael Dorris’ piece Indians on the Shelf puts the erasure of Native American culture into a context in which erasure is portrayed as a rewriting of a history. Miranda’s tribal memoir constantly critiques, and reconstructs the history of a people systematically erased by the American government, using many different types of documents. This helps further illustrate how the winners really do write the history when it comes to the American education system, but also shows how much of an impact the breaking of silence has. Miranda shows the instances of abuse in her own family, as well as including a “genealogy of violence” to start and finish the first section in her book. Reflecting on why she chose to do this, I felt as though she included this to show not only how violence can be passed down from generation to generation (ie the fact that in the missions, Native people were subjected to unspeakable violence, and the direct desecendant now abuses his own family), but speaks to a sense of identity and the question of it. She does not include her own family tree, because she wants to take a stand against...
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...SOLOMON NORTHUP bY Jeanne M. McGlInn anD JaMes e. McGlInn 2 A Teacher’s Guide to Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup Table of Contents SYNOPSIS......................................................................................................................................3 ABOUT THE AUTHOR...............................................................................................................3 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY GUIDE............................................................................3 MEETING COMMON CORE STANDARDS.............................................................3 THE SLAVE NARRATIVE GENRE...............................................................................3 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW..........................................................................................................4 DURING READING.....................................................................................................................6 SYNTHESIZING DISCUSSION QUESTIONS.......................................................................9 ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES.......................................................................................................9 ACTIVITIES FOR USING THE FILM ADAPTATION........................................................ 11 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES................................................................................................... 13 ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THIS GUIDE.............................
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...& 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 fed him. It also offered him his passport out of and into the bigger world. Here he wrote his youthful poetry, he told his readers, at delicatessen tables, influenced by the great ideas of Western civilization—in this poem, through reading Dostoyevsky. This formulation, while captivating...
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...I had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, and the Indian country of the great plains …” (Laura Ingalls Wilder) Laura Ingalls Wilder is best known for her “Little House on the Prairie” series and for her contribution to children’s literature. There were several things that factored into shaping Wilder as a writer a major one being her personal experience of growing up on the frontier with her family. It was not until later in her life that she wrote the series and the series had gotten published. Over the following years of its publication her books have made it on library and school reading lists as well as been awarded. In American literature Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of the most...
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...Author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln Goodwin focuses on great men of history, but she is the foremost exponent of a historiographic school that focuses on the armies of aides and administrators that enable such men to greatness. In this narrative work Goodwin continues her historiographic focus and commemorates President Teddy Roosevelt, his friend, administrator, and successor William Howard Taft, and the muckraker McClure’s Magazine. Both Taft and McClure’s Magazine functioned as the supporting arm of Roosevelt’s progressivism within the United States. Additionally, Goodwin provides a detailed account of the meteoric rise of Theodore Roosevelt from “sickly and timid boy” to big-city police commissioner to Rough Rider to U.S. president (34). It is also interwoven with the less known and spectacular ascension of William Howard Taft, from “Big Bill” at Yale University to Ohio magistrate to governor-general of the Philippines to Roosevelt’s secretary of war and eventually the hand-picked...
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...ARTICLE IN PRESS Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 1647–1657 Understanding breast cancer stories via Frank’s narrative types Roanne Thomas-MacLean* Dalhousie University Family, Medicine Teaching Unit, Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital, P.O. Box 9000, Priestman St. Fredericton, NB Canada E3B 5N5 Abstract While breast cancer narratives have become prevalent in Western culture, few researchers have explored the structure of such narratives, relying instead on some form of thematic analysis based upon content. Although such analyses are valuable, Arthur Frank (The Wounded Storyteller, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995) provides researchers with an additional means of studying stories of illness, through the examination of their structures. In this article, the author applies Frank’s work to a phenomenological study of embodiment after breast cancer. Frank’s three narrative types are used to enhance understanding of the ways in which stories are culturally constructed, using data collected through one focus group discussion and two in-depth interviews with each of 12 women who had experienced breast cancer. The author then conveys the significance of this form of analysis for future research. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Breast cancer; Qualitative and narrative Introduction Frank (1995) writes that those who are ill ‘‘need to become storytellers in order to recover the voices that illness and its treatment often take away’’...
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