...Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 i RTNA01 1 13/6/05, 5:28 PM READING THE NOVEL General Editor: Daniel R. Schwarz The aim of this series is to provide practical introductions to reading the novel in both the British and Irish, and the American traditions. Published Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930 Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Daniel R. Schwarz Brian W. Shaffer Forthcoming Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel Paula R. Backscheider Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel Harry E. Shaw and Alison Case Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 Shirley Samuels Reading the American Novel 1865–1914 G. R. Thompson Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel James Phelan ii RTNA01 2 13/6/05, 5:28 PM Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Brian W. Shaffer iii RTNA01 3 13/6/05, 5:28 PM © 2006 by Brian W. Shaffer BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Brian W. Shaffer to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and...
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...4 Main Idea • • • • • What is a main idea? What is a topic? How do you recognize the difference between general and specific ideas? What is a stated main idea? What is an unstated main idea? Everyday Reading Skills: Selecting a Book Copyright ©2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. 118 CHAPTER 4 Main Idea What Is a Main Idea? The main idea of a passage is the core of the material, the particular point the author is trying to convey. The main idea of a passage can be stated in one sentence that condenses specific ideas or details in the passage into a general, allinclusive statement of the author’s message. In classroom discussions, all of the following words are sometimes used to help students understand the meaning of the main idea. thesis main point central focus gist controlling idea central thought Whether you read a single paragraph, a chapter, or an entire book, many experts agree that your most important single task is to understand the main idea of what you read. Topic Main Idea Major Detail Major Detail Major Detail Minor Detail Minor Detail Minor Detail Minor Detail Minor Detail Recognize General and Specific Words The first step in determining the main idea of a selection is to look at the specific ideas presented in the sentences and try to decide on a general topic or subject under which you can group these ideas. Before tackling sentences, begin with words. Pretend that the sentence ideas in a selection have been reduced...
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...HISTORY AND THEORY STUDIES FIRST YEAR Terms 1 and 2 Course Lecturers: CHRISTOPHER PIERCE / BRETT STEELE (Term 1) Course Lecturer: PIER VITTORIO AURELI (Term 2) Course Tutor: MOLLIE CLAYPOOL Teaching Assistants: FABRIZIO BALLABIO SHUMI BOSE POL ESTEVE Course Structure The course runs for 3 hours per week on Tuesday mornings in Terms 1 and 2. There are four parallel seminar sessions. Each seminar session is divided into parts, discussion and submission development. Seminar 10.00-12.00 Mollie Claypool, Fabrizio Ballabio, Shumi Bose and Pol Esteve Lecture 12.00-13.00 Christopher Pierce, Brett Steele and Pier Vittorio Aureli Attendance Attendance is mandatory to both seminars and lectures. We expect students to attend all lectures and seminars. Attendance is tracked to both seminars and lectures and repeated absence has the potential to affect your final mark and the course tutor and undergraduate coordinator will be notified. Marking Marking framework adheres to a High Pass with Distinction, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, Complete-toPass system. Poor attendance can affect this final mark. Course Materials Readings for each week are provided both online on the course website at aafirstyearhts.wordpress.com and on the course library bookshelf. Students are expected to read each assigned reading every week to be discussed in seminar. The password to access the course readings is “readings”. TERM 1: CANONICAL BUILDINGS, PROJECTS, TEXTS In this first term of...
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...THE PLAYER Good game design is player-centric. That means that above all else, the player and her desires are truly considered. Rather than demanding that she do something via the rules, the gameplay itself should inherently motivate the player in the direction the designer wants her to go. Telling players they must travel around the board or advance to the next level is one thing. If they don’t have a reason and a desire to do it, then it becomes torture. In creating a game, designers take a step back and think from the player’s viewpoint: What’s this game about? How do I play? How do I win? Why do I want to play? What things do I need to do? MEANINGFUL DECISIONS Distilled down to its essence, game design is about creating opportunities for players to make meaningful decisions that affect the outcome of the game. Consider a game like a boxing match. So many decisions lead up to the ultimate victory. How long will I train? Will I block or will I swing? What is my opponent going to do? Where is his weakness? Jab left or right? Even those few, brief questions don’t come close to the myriad decisions a fighter must make as he progresses through a match. Games invite players into similar mental spaces. Games like Tetris and Chess keep our minds busy by forcing us to consider which one of several possible moves we want to take next. In taking these paths, we know that we may be prolonging or completely screwing up our entire game. The Sims games and those in...
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...GMAT GRADUATE MANAGEMENT ADMISSION TEST McGraw-Hill’s 2008 Edition James Hasik Stacey Rudnick Ryan Hackney New York | Chicago | San Francisco | Lisbon London | Madrid | Mexico City | Milan | New Delhi San Juan | Seoul | Singapore | Sydney | Toronto Copyright © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 0-07-151120-2 The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: 0-07-149340-9. All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Where such designations appear in this book, they have been printed with initial caps. McGraw-Hill eBooks are available at special quantity discounts to use as premiums and sales promotions, or for use in corporate training programs. For more information, please contact George Hoare, Special Sales, at george_hoare@mcgraw-hill.com or (212) 904-4069. TERMS OF USE This is a copyrighted work and The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (“McGraw-Hill”) and its licensors reserve all rights...
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...Barack Obama Dreams from My Father “For we are strangers before them, and sojourners, as were all our fathers. 1 CHRONICLES 29:15 PREFACE TO THE 2004 EDITION A LMOST A DECADE HAS passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identitythe leaps through time, the collision of cultures-that mark our modern life. Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book’s publication-hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact. I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter registration project in...
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...five years in at age twenty-six, had lived and trained together for years. Some had come up together through basic training, jump school, and Ranger school. They had traveled the world, to Korea, Thailand, Central America... they knew each other better than most brothers did. They'd been drunk together, gotten into fights, slept on forest floors, jumped out of airplanes, climbed mountains, shot down foaming rivers with their hearts in their throats, baked and frozen and starved together, passed countless bored hours, teased one another endlessly about girlfriends or lack of same, driven in the middle of the night from Fort Benning to retrieve each other from some diner or strip club on Victory Drive after getting drunk and falling asleep or pissing off some barkeep. Through all those things, they had been training for a moment like this. It was the first time the lanky sergeant had been put in charge, and he was nervous about it. Pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death, Amen. It was midafternoon, October 3, 1993. Eversmann's Chalk Four was part of a force of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators who were about to drop in uninvited on a gathering of Habr Gidr clan leaders in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. This ragged clan, led by warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, had picked a fight with the United States of America, and it was, without a doubt, going down. Today's targets were two of Aidid's lieutenants. They would be...
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...NOTE: This PDF document has a handy set of “bookmarks” for it, which are accessible by pressing the Bookmarks tab on the left side of this window. ***************************************************** We are the last. The last generation to be unaugmented. The last generation to be intellectually alone. The last generation to be limited by our bodies. We are the first. The first generation to be augmented. The first generation to be intellectually together. The first generation to be limited only by our imaginations. We stand both before and after, balancing on the razor edge of the Event Horizon of the Singularity. That this sublime juxtapositional tautology has gone unnoticed until now is itself remarkable. We're so exquisitely privileged to be living in this time, to be born right on the precipice of the greatest paradigm shift in human history, the only thing that approaches the importance of that reality is finding like minds that realize the same, and being able to make some connection with them. If these books have influenced you the same way that they have us, we invite your contact at the email addresses listed below. Enjoy, Michael Beight, piman_314@yahoo.com Steven Reddell, cronyx@gmail.com Here are some new links that we’ve found interesting: KurzweilAI.net News articles, essays, and discussion on the latest topics in technology and accelerating intelligence. SingInst.org The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence: think tank devoted to increasing...
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...In Cold Blood Truman Capote I. The Last to See Them Alive The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building...
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...In Cold Blood Truman Capote I. The Last to See Them Alive The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building...
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