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322 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
- 3rd side (hint)
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The Education of Henry Adams
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Henry Adams
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HA = Grandson of John Quincey. The book laments how the late Victorian education failed to prepare him for the dawn of the 20th century.
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Aeschylus
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Orestia
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The tragic fate of the house of Atreus.
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Maya Angelou
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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Literary Autobiography--coming of age with racism
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Lucky Jim
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Kingley Amis
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comedic satire on presumption of academia--one of the first "campus novels." Main character: James Dixon
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Aristophanes
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Lysistrata
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Athenian woman Lysistrata gets the Greek women to withhold sex from their husbands until the war is ended. Departs from conventions of Old Comedy by splitting the chorus (Old Men and Old Women)
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Mathew Arnold
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Sweetness and Light
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Title of the oppening chapter of Culture and Anarchy, defending the virtue of culture to reform society. Culture as the pursuit of perfection--the best known and thought in the world. Sweetness: beauty. Light: intelligence.
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Margaret Atwood
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The Handmaid's Tale
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Distopic tale--Republic of Gilead (led by the sons of Jacob) displaces US govmnt. Reign of biggoted theocracy (yes, this is the real danger we are in). Offred is main character (of-Fred; Fred=commander to whom she is the concubine). Atwood doesn't like the gender politics of Genesis.
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W. H. Auden (tribute)
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"In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
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"The day of his [Yeat's] death was a dark, cold day"
"Teach the freeman how to praise" |
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W. H. Auden (art)
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"Musee des Beaux Arts"
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The indifference of the world to suffering--Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus"
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W. H. Auden (hollow man-ish)
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"The Unknown Citizen"
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Very similar to "Hollow Men."
He is conventional, respectable. But: "Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: / Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard." |
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Ge Tell In on the Mountain
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James Baldwin
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Semi-autobiographical; examines role of Christian Church in Black American's lives--both the good and bad. Four prayers to tell the life stories of the speakers--John, Gabriel (J's father), Elizabeth (J's mother), Florence (Gabriel's sister).
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Notes of a Native Son
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James Baldwin
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A collection of essays dealing mostly with race issues. Semi-autobiographical.
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Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
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Eric Auerbach
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Compares classical rhetorical style and goals with Biblical style--and this tension ultimately leads to the triumph of realism. Interesting connections to Matthew Arnold on Hebraism and Hellenism.
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"The Dutchman"
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Amiri Baraka
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Black man Clay and white woman Lula embody American race issues. She flirts, then derides. He monologues about how if blacks were cold and calculating like the whites then they would just kill the whiltes. But he doesn't want to be violent. So she stabs him twice in the heart.
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"Lost in the Funhouse"
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John Barth
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Title of a collection of short stories and also the title of the most acclaimed of them.
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Murphy
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Samuel Beckett
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Novel. Murphy becomes a male nurse and discovers the lure of non-existence and commits suicide. Also has to do with Ireland. As with "Waiting for Godot," it goes from comedy to terror.
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Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave
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Aphra Behn
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British novel set in Africa and the West Indies, concerning Oroonoko and his love Imoinda. The power structures of both nations conspire to keep them apart and finally he carries out a slave rebellion. It fails. She has him kill her and then he stoically bears his own horrific execution.
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Eric Auerbach
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Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
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Bible vs. Classical Rhetoric. Leading to 19th century realism.
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Saul Bellow
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Henderson the Rain King
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Philosophical coming of age--Henderson goes to Africa on a spiritual quest and attains a rebirth.
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Elizabeth Bishop
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The Moose
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Poem about a bus journey--old people conversation overheard at the back--bus stops for a moose. "Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy?"
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Wayne Booth
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The Rhetoric of Fiction
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Booth had Mormon parents. "Implied author." Three "lines of interest" and author may manipulate for his purposes. Intellectual/cognitive: to know the truth. Qualitative/aesthetic: desire to see any pattern or form completed. Practical/human: desire for those we love to succeed and those we hate to fail.
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Jorge Luis Borges
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Labyrinths
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Collection of short stories.
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Bertold Brecht
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The Threepenny Opera
Mother Courage |
Macheath (thief) wants to marry Polly Peachum; her father (king of beggars) opposes and tries to get Macheath hung, but in a parody of ex-machina happy endings, the queen pardons him and they get married.
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Gwendolyn Brooks
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"We Real Cool"
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"We real cool
[we do black gang-type-things] . . . We die young" |
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Robert Browning
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"Caliban Upon Setebos"
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"Natural Theology"
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Three more poems by Robert Browning
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“The Bishop Orders His Tomb,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “My Last Duchess”
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John Bunyan
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The Pilgrim's progress
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Robert Burns (love poem)
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"A Red, Red Rose"
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"O my luve's like a red, red rose . . . [and] the melodie . . . Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear . . ."
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Robert Burns (gothic poem)
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"Tam O' Shanter"
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Tam drinks till late, walks home and sees a witches dance, calls at a young infernal stripper, gets chased--and barely makes it away, for she snatches off his mare's tail. Moral of this "tale o' truth": if you feel inclined to drink, "remember Tam o' Shanter's mare"
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Robert Burns (religious satire)
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"Holy Willie's Prayer"
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Hypocrite Willie's prayer reveals his Calvinistic orthodoxy, adultery, and ill will towards a clergy man who bested him in a public contest of words. Very much like a rameumpton prayer.
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Robert Burton
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The Anatomy of Melancholy
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Early 17th century "medical" text on the causes and cures of melancholy--and on everything else as well. Keats claimed it as his favorite book.
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Samuel Butler (17th cent)
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Hudibras
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Mock-heroic narrative, published after the Stuart restoration, satirizing the roundheads/parliamentarians. Influenced by Don Quixote.
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Samuel Butler, Victorian; satire
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Erewhon
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Describes the eponymous country (nowhere spelled backwards) discovered by the protagonist--a satirical utopia poking fun at some Victorian attitudes.
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Samuel Bulter, Victorian; semi-autobiographical
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The Way of All Flesh
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Traces four Pontifex generations, dwelling lastly on Ernest, who becomes a clergyman, looses his faith, marries a bigamist, and becomes an author. Anti-Victorianistic.
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William Byrd
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The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina
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Byrd was one of the chief surveyors.
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Four texts by Byron
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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Don Juan Manfred "She Walks in Beauty" |
Manfred is a Faustian character, who summons seven spirits to help him forget some unspeakable guilt (relating to a former lover). They fail and he ultimately commits suicide.
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Albert Camus, essay
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"The Myth of Sysiphus"
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Sysiphus as the absurd hero. Godless world, lacking ultimate purpose, is yet something. The consciousness of the futility constitutes both the torture and the joy. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
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Albert Camus, novel
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The Stranger
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Meursault, under condemnation for his murder, and having recognized and raged at the indifference of the universe, finally feels happy again--it becomes "benign indifference."
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Willa Cather
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My Antonia
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Part of a trilogy, which also includes O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Outlines Jim Burden's life and relations, especially with Antonia. Both main characters move to Black Hawk, NE at the same time (at the opening of the story).
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Geoffrey Chaucer
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Troylus and Criseyde
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rime royale; similar setting and plot to Shakespeare's tragedy, but less bleak. Part of the cycle the Matter of Rome.
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Anton Chekhov (play)
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"The Cherry Orchard"
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Early 20th century Russian play: Aristocratic family whose estate is sold to the son of a former serf to pay their mortgage. Having sold it, they leave to the sound of the cherry orchard being cut down. Deals with the cultural state of things which would culminate in Communism (shifting classes and class structures).
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Anton Chekhov (short story)
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"The Darling"
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Olenka P. marries/falls in love with four different men, the first two of whom die. She immerses her self-identity in them--in their professions, particularly.
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Kate Chopin (short story; not "The Storm")
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"The Story of an Hour"
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Louise Mallard hears her husband died in a railroad accident. She mourns--then suddenly feels liberated. And then it turns out he didn't die after all. And then she dies instead.
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Kate Chopin (novel)
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The Awakening
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Chopin is a late 19th century American proto-feminist. Very similar message to A Doll's House. Edna Pontellier falls in love with Robert on vacation and thinks of leaving her husband Leonce. Robert wants her but knows the relationship is doomed. He leaves her--then retuns--then leaves again. She drowns herself.
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William Congreve
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The Way of the World
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1700 play, one of the best Restoration comedies. Mirabell (man) and Millamant (woman) get married AND get the inheritance despite Madam Wishfort's opposition. Attempted trickery fails, Fainall blackmails Wishfort, Mirabell helps her out on condition--etc.
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Joseph Conrad (novel)
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Lord Jim
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A first mate who had abandoned a distressed ship finds a new life in Patusan, where he finds redemption. He fights corruption and robbers--and finally willingly takes a fatal bullet as punishment for the death of the chief's son.
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Joseph Conrad (short story)
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"The Secret Sharer"
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Nameless but newly captained protagonist discovers and saves the swimmer Leggatt, who fled his own ship after killing an insolent crewmember. Hides him, then sails close enough to shore to let him swim; proves his seamanship and mettle in the process.
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James Fenimore Cooper (last and first)
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The Deerslayer
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Published 1841. Prequel to the Leatherstocking tales (Natty Bumppo, protagonist). Bumppo saves two would-be Indian scalper friends, then tries to rescue his Indian buddy's fiance from the Hurons and gets captured in the process. His friends plan his escape.
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James Fenimore Cooper (second)
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The Last of the Mohicans
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1826. Bumppo/Hawkeye foils a French/Indian ambush of the English during the Seven-Years War. Hawkeye, his firned He and his friend Chingachgook, and several other good guys save (mostly successfully) other good guys. Uncas and Cora die and Hawkeye shoots the bad guy Magua/Sly Fox.
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Julio Cortazar
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Hopscotch
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1960s "counter-novel"; stream of consciousness, multiple endings, and other post-modernly methods. Mostly set in Paris. Horacio Oliveira the main character. Serpent club's philosophical discussions and the search for "heaven," conceived as the ninth square in the eponymous game.
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Stephen Crane (novel)
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Red Badge of Courage
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Union soldier Henry Fleming flees one battle; then, in a redemptive moment, acts as stadard-bearer in a subsequent battle.
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Stephen Crane (novella)
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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
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Slum story. Pete "ruins" Jimmie's sister Maggie; the whole neighborhood goes to the devil and Maggie dies a prostitute, rejected by her family. Upon learning of her death, the mother exclaims, "I'll forgive her!"
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Countee Cullen (longer poem)
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"Heritage"
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Harlem Renaissance poet.
"One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? . . . [Drums and jungle love and such] . . . . . . Not yet has my heart or head In the least way realized They and I are civilized." |
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Countee Cullen (shorter poem)
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From the Dark Tower
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"We shall not always plant while others reap . . .
Not always bend to some more subtle brute" |
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e. e. cummings
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"In just-"
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in Just-
spring when the world is mud- ....... when the world is puddle-wonderful |
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e. e. cummings (cowboy)
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"Buffalo Bill's"
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Buffalo Bill's
defunct . . . . . . . how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death |
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e, e, cummings (university)
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"The Cambridge Ladies"
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the Cambridge ladies do not care,above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy |
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e. e. cummings (father)
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my father moved through dooms of love
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my father moved through dooms of love
. . . . . . because my Father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all |
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Daniel Defoe
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Moll Flanders
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Defoe also wrote R. Crusoe.
1721. Moll Flanders' desperation drives her to marry and deceive a gazillion men: full title = The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums. |
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Thomas De Quincey
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Confessions of an Opium-Eater.
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Published by James Hogg--"Confessions" evidently popular with that company!
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John Donne
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"On Going to Bed"
and "Death be Not Proud" |
Get naked, babe!
and You're not so hot--"death, thou shalt die." |
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John Dos Passos
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Manhattan Transfer
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1925. A history of New York from the gilded age to the jazz age in the form of a collage of short stories.
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Fredrick Douglas
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The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglas
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1845. From slave to free man.
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Theodore Dreiser
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Sister Carrie
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1900. Wisconsin girl moves in w/sister (and the latter's husband) in Chicago. Becomes a kept woman, has an affair w/married man, flees w/him to Canada, returns to NYC, and becomes an actress while he deteriorates. She attains stardom as he declines into beggarhood and suicide. "Greatest urban novel."
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John Dryden (poetic political satire)
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Absolom and Achitophel
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The Monmoth rebellion told as the OT story. Duke of Monmoth was the illigitimate and staunchly protestant son of Charles II.
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John Dryden (heroic tragedy)
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All for Love or, the World Well Lost
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1677. Remaking of Antony and Cleopatra, but with the three unities.
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John Dryden (mock heroic poem)
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Mac Flecknoe
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1682. Satire on Dryden's contemporary Shadwell--whose defining heroic characteristic is dullness.
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Anne Killigrew (the person)
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died at 25 (smallpox), immotalized by Dryden who wrote a famous elegy to her memory, comparing her to Sappho
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---.
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Johnathan Edwards
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Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God
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T. S. Elliot (Shakespeare Criticism)
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Hamlet and His Problems
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Hamlet (both the character and the play) fail to attain clarity because they fail to find/produce an "objective correlative." Which means an object that allows audience/character to understand the internal state of the subject.
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T. S. Elliot
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Tradition and the Individual Poet
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Poet is a medium for the expression of the whole tradition--not of "nature" or "self" or whatever else. Texts always in dialogue, and innovation changes the whole tradition. Anticipates the postmodern notion of intertextuality as foundation of meaning.
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Ralph Ellison
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Invisible Man
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Harlem Renaissance. He is socially invisible, writing from the brightest spot in NYC.
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R. W. Emerson (essay besides "Nature"; literary theme)
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The Poet
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"Our . . . [American things and places] . . . are yet unsung"
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R. W. Emerson (anti-tradition essay)
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Self-Reliance
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"Our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"
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Euripides (pre-Troy tragedy)
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Iphigenia in Aulis
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Agamemnon is told that to appease Artemis he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. He sends for her, changes his mind twice, then finally goes through with it. (Some Christianized versions have a deer in the thicket.)
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T. S. Elliot
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Tradition and the Individual Poet
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Poet is a medium for the expression of the whole tradition--not of "nature" or "self" or whatever else. Texts always in dialogue, and innovation changes the whole tradition. Anticipates the postmodern notion of intertextuality as foundation of meaning.
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Ralph Ellison
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Invisible Man
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Harlem Renaissance. He is socially invisible, writing from the brightest spot in NYC.
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R. W. Emerson (essay besides "Nature"; literary theme)
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The Poet
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"Our . . . [American things and places] . . . are yet unsung"
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R. W. Emerson (anti-tradition essay)
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Self-Reliance
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"Our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"
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Euripides (pre-Troy tragedy)
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Iphigenia in Aulis
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Agamemnon is told that to appease Artemis he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. He sends for her, changes his mind twice, then finally goes through with it. (Some Christianized versions have a deer in the thicket.)
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William Faulkner
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As I Lay Dying
Side 3 |
Addie Bundren's death and her family's grossness, ingratitude, etc.
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Willaim Faulkner (a short story from a novel/collection of short stories set in Yoknapatawpha, MI.)
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The Bear
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Isaac and some others hunt Old Ben, finally killing him at the cost of the dog and a man; Isaac refuses his plantation inheritance, then gets married and she convinces him to take it back; then returns to his old hunting grounds.
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W. Faulkner (best novel)
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The Sound and the Fury
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1929. Also set in Yoknapatawpha. Narrated by an omniscient narrator and three members of the declining Southern aristocratic Compson family--the first being a literal idiot ("a tale told by an idiot").
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W. Faulkner (second-best novel)
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Light in August
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Pregnant Lena follows Lucas (now "Joe Brown") to Yoknapatawpha ; Joe Christmas carries on relations with Joanna who turns to religion and gets murdered by one of the Joes; Christmas gets blamed and killed at Reverend Hightower's house; Brown escapes and Lena and Byron follow him (and presumably settle down together).
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Henry Fielding
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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
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The bastard child Tom Jones is opposed in his love for Sophia Western by her father. His nature contrasted with his legitimate but hypocritical brother Blifil.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (short)
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Babylon Revisited
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Charlie's return to Paris--and parental troubles over his daughter Honoria.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (novel)
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Tender is the Night
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Dick and Nicole Diver. Nicole: neurotic/incestuous heiress who starts out at bottom. Dick: the psychoanalyst who married his patient Nicole, gets her money, cures her, and then develops alcoholism and begins his dive. Together they make an X.
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Gustave Flaubert
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Madame Bovary
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Charles Bovary marries a widow; she dies and he marries Emma. Emma grows bored w/marriage and has two affairs, grows vain, and runs up a ton of debt. Her "lovers" refuse to bail her out; she commits suicide, but "even the romance of suicide fails her." Charley preserves her room as a shrine, discovers the love letters, tries to understand and forgive, and dies himself. Their daughter goes to work at a cotton mill.
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F. M. Forster (criticism)
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Aspects of the Novel
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Book compiled for a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1927 on the English novel. He highlights ["the"] seven universal aspects of the novel: story, characters, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm.
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F. M. Forster (novel on connection)
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Howard's End
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1910. Famous epigraph: "Only connect..." Margaret Schlegel is usually viewed as the heroine of the story because, in staying married to Henry Wilcox despite the scandal, she acts as a uniting force, bringing all the characters peaceably together at Howards End. Henry is sometimes viewed as a hero because he triumphs over his inability to connect with the situations of others. In the end, the open-minded intellectuality of the Schlegels is reconciled or balanced with the practical economy of the Wilcoxes, each learning lessons from the other.
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F. M. Forster (novel whose title is based on "Leaves of Grass")
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A Passage to India
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1924. Based on Indian uprisings. Adela accuses Dr. Aziz (Midnight's Children!) of sexual assault. But it turns out she was just psychologically violated by the "boum" echo of the Indian cave. His trial as emblem of racial/political tensions. Aziz finally acquitted; he asserts need for Indian independence.
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E. M. Forster
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A Room with a View
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About a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England. Lucy and George's love story--which finally succeeds despite social opposition. Anti-institutional.
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Northrop Frye
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Anatomy of Criticism
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Frye's intro critiques the evaluation of literature based on one's pet philosophy (Marxist, Freudian criticism...). He also argues that natural taste is superior to scholarly learning.
The body of the text consists of four essays--taxonomies/histories of mode, symbol, myth, and genre. Mode most famous--mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic. |
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Allan Ginsberg
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"Howl"
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Robert Frost (fruity poem)
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"After Apple Picking"
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he is sleeping? (after apple picking). Has had too much apple picking. Was on his way to sleep when he looked through the [ice] pane of glass.
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Robert Frost (border poem)
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"Mending Wall"
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Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him, . . . . . He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.” |
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Robert Frost (couple)
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"Home Burial"
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Dialogue between husband and wife. He finds her looking at the grave. Woman doesn't think her husband has a heart--he dug the grave of their first, and still could speak of daily things.
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Nikolai Gogol (clothing)
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"The Overcoat"
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Safe, timid, poor, stingy, ridiculous Akaky mocked for his threadbare coat--replaced--new coat celebrated--then stolen--cannot get it back--Akaky dies and his ghost returns to steal others' overcoats.
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Nikolai Gogol (face)
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"The Nose"
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Gogol:Ukranian born Russian writer. Realist or surrealist? Also wrote "Diary of a Madman." "The Nose": An official's nose detaches itself from his face, parades as a human, attains higher rank than its owner, refuses to be reattached, and then (it seems) reattaches itself.
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Oliver Goldsmith (poem)
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"The Deserted Village"
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Protests the destruction of an ancient village to make room for a aristocratic garden.
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Oliver Goldsmith (novel)
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The Vicar of Wakefield
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One of the most influential 18th century novels. Mr. Primrose's Job story--also a satire on sentimental fiction? (since Primrose's idealism doesn't [at first] work well with the "Real world" and requires a nobility-ex-machina to extricate him. Bad things happen to him--beginning with the loss of his wealth, and culminating with the seduction of his daughter by Thornhill.
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Oliver Goldsmith (play)
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She Stoops to Conquer
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Laughing comedy re-rises as sentimental comedy declines. Kate pretends to be a servant to win the heart of Marlow. He and a fellow-nobleman are played on when they are told they must stay at an inn, and directed to their actual destination . . . In the end (and many laughs later) both couples end up together.
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Thomas Gray (masterpiece)
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"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
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1751. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. . . . Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray; [Concludes with an imaginative recreation of the life memorialized in an epitaph--which comprises the final stanzas. |
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Thomas Gray (second-best?)
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Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes
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Mock-heroic relation of the incident, concluding with a moral:
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes And heedless hearts, is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters, gold. |
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Thomas Hardy (how much is that doggy in the window?)
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"Ah, Are you Digging on my Grave"
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"Who is it digging? My lover? My family? My enemy?"
"I am your dog." "Ah, who is so faithful as a dog?" "Er . . . I was just burying a bone." |
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Thomas Hardy (determinism)
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"Hap"
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I wish my misery were caused by a malicious God--it would have some meaning then. But no--it is the merest Chance and blind Time.
"These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain." |
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Thomas Hardy (dead love)
|
"Neutral Tones"
|
A remembered moment of a dying relationship by a dead pond.
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|
|
Thomas Hardy (title alludes to Gray)
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Far From the Madding Crowd
|
Love story of shepherd Gabriel Oak and heiress Bathsheba--with two other men marrying (or almost marrying) her first, but killing each other off.
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|
Thomas Hardy
|
Jude the Obscure
|
Criticizes the bourgeois values associated with marriage through the tragedy of his star-crossed lovers, Jude and Sue, whose attempts to defy social conventions for the sake of love lead to their misery.
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Thomas Hardy
|
The Return of the Native
|
Sad story of star-crossed lovers Eustasia, Clym, Wildeve, Venn, and Thomasin. Sexual politics, marriage, cruel fate. Typical Hardy.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (short)
|
"My Kinsman, Major Molineaux"
|
Robin looks for the eponymous major, finally witnesses him getting tarred and feathered.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (novel)
|
The Blithedale Romance
|
Blithedale is a "utopian" farming community, yet subject to lusts and love triangles culminating in Zenobia's suicide. Legend of the Veiled Lady, who turns out to be Priscilla.
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|
Joseph Heller
|
Catch-22
|
Satire on bureaucracy of war. Catch-22: Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.
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|
Ernest Hemingway (Spanish Civil War)
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
|
1940. Robert Jordan, dynamiter in the Spanish Civil War, is assigned to blow up a bridge. Does despite treason, but gets injured, and refused to be put out of his misery in the hopes of first taking a few of the enemy.
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|
Hemingway (bullfighting)
|
The Sun Also Rises
|
1926. Sexual tension between a bunch of men in love with/seduced by a sexually liberated 1920s lady. Iconic modernist novel; themes of the "lost generation," masculinity, nature . . .
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|
Hemingway (WWI)
|
A Farewell to Arms
|
1929, American Frederic Henry serving in Italian Army; his romance with Brit nurse Catherine. They escape the war together but she and their son die at his birth.
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Hemingway (waiters)
|
"A Clean Well Lighted Place"
|
Young waiter impatient with customer; wants to get home to his wife. Old waiter empathizes with customer's need for a clean, well-lighted place as the best possible alternative to purr loneliness. Closes with a nihilistic version of the Lord's Prayer ("nada be thy nada"...)
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Hemingway (organizes crime)
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"The Killers"
|
Nick Adams tries to warn a boxer who failed to cooperate in a rigged fight and is now being hunted by hit-men.
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Hemingway (first collection of shorts)
|
In Our Time
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George Herbert ("rest")
|
"The Pulley"
|
Early 1600s. God gave not man rest, but gave him all the rest of the good gifts--that they might seek for the rest to be found in him.
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George Herbert
|
"Easter Wings"
|
Four stanzas making two hourglasses: "Most poor" and "Most thin" the bottlenecks; "With "Thee" beginning the broadening--and ending in flight.
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|
George Herbert
|
"The Altar"
|
Shape poem. His heart is the altar, and he offers it:
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine. |
|
|
Robert Herrick
|
"To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
|
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.
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|
|
robert herrick
|
"Upon Julia's Clothes"
|
fishing metaphor--oh how that glittering taketh me . . .
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|
Hermann Hesse
|
Siddartha
|
Story of a disciple of Buddah.
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|
Thomas Hobbes
|
Leviathan
|
|
|
|
G.M. Hopkins
|
"Spring and Fall"
|
"Hey, kid. You cryin for the dying leaves? Huh, nah, you cryin' for youself."
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|
|
A. E. Housman
|
"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now..."
|
The cherries are blooming; I've only got about fifty more years to live, so I'm going to gaze.:"
|
|
|
A. E. Housman
|
"To an Athlete Dying Young"
|
"You were smart to die while you still had glory."
|
|
|
A. E. Housman (love)
|
"When I Was One-and-Twenty"
|
At 21, a guy warned me against falling in love. I'm 22; now I know he was right.
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|
|
A. E. Housman
|
Terence, this is stupid stuff
|
Sure my poetry is depressing, but it's good medicine for life.
"Mithridates, he died old." |
|
|
William Dean Howells
|
The Rise of Silas Lapham
|
1885. Foundational text in the American realist movement. Silas goes from rags to riches, looses it all, and then resists the temptation to sell his mills to settlers.
|
|
|
James Langston Hughes
|
"Harlem"
|
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry . . . fester . . . etc. Or does it explode? |
|
|
James Langston Hughes
|
“Theme for English B”
|
Purports to be a school assignment--"write one page". Teacher says,
let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true. Then it's leaves of grass colored style. |
|
|
Zora Neale Hurston
|
Their Eyes Were Watching God
|
Janie Crawford's three marriages--Logan, Starks, and Tea Cakes.
|
|
|
Aldous Huxley
|
Brave New World
|
|
|
|
Henrik Ibsen
|
The Wild Duck
|
1884. Family with lots of skeletons, including wife's former affair; ends with daughter's [redemptive???] suicide. It was supposed to be the duck sacrificed.
|
|
|
The two most famous shorts by Washington Irving.
|
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
and Rip Van Winkle |
|
|
|
Eugene Ionesco
|
The Lesson, Rhinoceros
|
Early theatre of the absurd--one act nonsense play; full-length protest of ideological conformity, in which his friends one by one turn into rhinoceroses.
|
|
|
Henry James (short)
|
"The Real Thing"
|
1892. Painter uses aristocrats as models of aristocrats . . . but finds that some lower-class models are more capable in that capacity.
|
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|
Henry James (Paris)
|
The Ambassadors
|
Strether goes to Paris to retrieve Chad from his seducer--and falls in love with her and with Paris. Decides not to return--until new ambassadors are sent who make him uncomfortable in Europe. He finally returns, but Chad remains.
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|
|
Henry James (criticism)
|
The Art of Fiction
|
Rebels against rules on fiction.
"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting." |
|
|
Henry James (waste)
|
The Beast in the Jungle
|
Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a "beast in the jungle." Mary Bartram loves him. He learns that the great misfortune of his life was to throw it away, and to ignore the love of a good woman.
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|
Henry James (marriage and adultery)
|
The Golden Bowl
|
Amerigo marries Maggie; Maggie gets her father to marry Amerigo's former mistress. They ultimately have an adulterous affair, which Maggie discovers and fixes, regaining the affection of Amerigo.
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|
|
Henry James (expat scheming)
|
The Portrait of a Lady
|
The portrait is of Isabel Archer--spirited, stubborn, loyal. She is an American in Europe, who inherits and is cheated out of money by fellow ex-patriots, one of whom marries her.
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Henry James (Italian death)
|
Daisy Miller
|
Another American woman in Europe--Daisy "adapts" to European morals and hangs out with an Italian dude and catches the Roman fever and dies--all the while being pursued by Winterbourne.
|
|
|
Henry James
|
The Turn of the Screw
|
|
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|
Samuel Johnson
|
The Vanity of Human Wishes
|
1749. Satirizes the scholar and everyone else. The antidote to vain human wishes is non-vain spiritual wishes.
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|
|
Ben Johnson (satirical play)
|
Volpone or The Fox
|
1606. A merciless satire of greed and lust. Volpone is supposed to be dying; everyone vies for space in the will. He pretends to die. . .
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|
|
Ben Jonson (7 yr old)
|
On My First Sonne
|
Son = Ben's "best piece of poetry." Ben's sin was loving him too much.
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|
|
Ben Jonson (Jacobean failure)
|
"Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue"
|
Failed masque performed for Charles 1 in honor of his ascension. Hercules guided by Mercury to find a titular reconciliation in Daedalus.
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|
|
Ben Jonson (very short)
|
"To The Reader"
|
PRAY thee, take care, that tak'st my book in hand,
To read it well—that is, to understand. |
|
|
Franz Karka (short)
|
"A Hunger Artist"
|
An individual marginalized and victimized by society at large. And also, I think, by his own perverse desires (to fast indefinitely) and pathetic lack of desires (to live). Freudian-seeming (thanatos).
|
|
|
Kafka (novel)
|
The Trial
|
1925. The story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed to neither him nor the reader.
|
|
|
John Keats (dream/rape)
|
"The Eve of St. Agnes"
|
1820. Madeline and Porphyro.
|
|
|
John Keats (head)
|
Isabella, or the Pot of Basil
|
Isabella and Lorenzo.
|
|
|
Keats
|
Ode on Melancholy
|
Fascinating poem--when melancholy descends, don't sleep it or poison it (yourself)--but glut your sorrow--for she has her throne with Beauty, Joy, and Pleasure in their achingest forms.
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|
|
Keats (poetic compliment)
|
On first looking into Chapman's Homer
|
"MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold," but in Chapman I met Homer.
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|
|
Jack Kerouac
|
On the Road
|
Sal (author's alterego) and Dean take road-trips and have adventures. Journey of discovery of Americana and of self.
|
|
|
D. H. Lawrence (short)
|
"The Rocking-Horse Winner"
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|
|
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D. H. Lawrence (novel)
|
Sons and Lovers
|
1913. Mother doesn't love their father and adopts them as (asexual) lovers, which means they have only their sexual love to give to another woman. Semi-autobiographical.
|
|
|
John Locke
|
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
|
|
|
|
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
|
"The Song of Hiawatha"
|
|
|
|
Robert Lowell (Boston)
|
"For the Union Dead"
|
The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial and the South Boston Aquarium. An aesthetic (i.e. not essentially political) comment on the Civil Rights movement. Cool poem!
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|
|
Robert Lowell (death)
|
Mr. Edwards and the Spider
|
. . .
What are we in the hands of the great God? . . . This is the Black Widow, death. |
|
|
Robert Lowell
|
the quaker graveyard in nantucket
|
"The Lord survives the rainbow of His will."
|
|
|
MacLeish, Archibald
|
“Ars Poetica” (not Horace)
|
A poem should be . . .
. . . A poem should not mean But be |
|
|
Sir Thomas Malory
|
Le Morte D'Arthur
|
1485.
|
|
|
Katherine Mansfield (Young)
|
"Bliss"
|
1920. Bertha Young, the main character, age 30. Extremely naïve but happy. Hosts a dinner party, discovers that her husband is having an affair with one of the guests.
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|
|
Katherine Mansfield (Sheridan)
|
"The Garden Party"
|
1922. The Sheirdans host a dinner party. Find out neighbor died. Have party anyways. Laura brings leftovers to neighbors house. Enamored with the corpse. "Isn't life . . ."
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|
|
Christopher Marlowe (blank verse)
|
Doctor Faustus
|
|
|
|
Marlowe (famous poem)
|
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
|
COME live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield. |
|
|
Christopher Marlowe (haven't read)
|
Tamburlaine the Great
|
Tamburlaine conquers ferociously until his death, and dies begging his sons to conquer the rest of the world.
|
|
|
Andrew Marvell
|
"To His Coy Mistress"
|
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime . . . The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. . . . Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. |
|
|
Three texts by Herman Melville
|
Benito Cereno
Moby Dick Bartleby the Scrivener |
|
|
|
Geroge Meredith (Victorian novelist and poet?!)
|
The Egoist
|
1879. Sir Willoughby's attempts at marriage: sentimental Laetitia Dale and strong-willed Clara Middleton are both pursued and both reject him. Victorian gender issues.
|
|
|
John Stuart Mill
|
On Liberty
|
|
|
|
Arthur Miller (not Death of a Salesman)
|
The Crucible
|
Reverend Paris discovers his niece Abigail and other girls trying to practice witchcraft (though he's not sure). Abigail was trying to kill John Proctor's wife Elizabeth because she wanted to marry him. Being caught, they fear punishment, so they accuse other people. The Putnams are grasping for the land of the accused; Reverend Hale is the witchcraft expert. Putnam has to confess to his adultery to try to stop the trials, but only gets accused himself. He dies because he refuses to sign his confession.
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|
|
John Milton (Not Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes)
|
Lycidas
|
1637. Pastoral elegy. Greek mythology . . . and the the Shepherd who was the Pilot of the Galilean sea has his say, and the speaker is comforted, and looks to dawn.
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|
|
Moliere
|
Tartuffe
|
|
|
|
Thomas More
|
Utopia
|
|
|
|
Toni Morison (not Beloved)
|
Song of Solomon
|
1977. Macon "Milkman" Dead III. Milkman because breastfed, unlike the orphan Guitar, his best friend. All the relationships are messed up and Milkman's lover and Guitar both try to kill him.
|
|
|
V. S. Naipaul
|
A House for Mr. Biswas
|
|
|
|
W. B. Yeats
|
Adam's Curse
|
Lovin' and poetry just don't come easy now, do they?
|
|
|
Vladimir Nabokov
|
Lolita
|
1955 novel. The protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged literature professor Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather. His private nickname for Dolores is Lolita.
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|
|
V. S. Naipaul
|
The Mystic Masseur
|
1957. The comic novel is about a frustrated writer of Indian descent in Trinidad who rises from an impoverished background to become a successful politician on the back of his dubious talent as a 'mystic' masseur - a masseur who can cure illnesses.
|
|
|
Flannery O'Conner (controversial ending)
|
"A Good Man is Hard to Find"
|
The Misfit kills grandma and Bailey family.
|
|
|
Flannery O'Conner (waiting room)
|
"Revelation"
|
Ruby Turpin converses with equally self-righteous lady until the latter's daughter throws a book at her and tells her to go back to hell. She realizes this is a rebuke from God and finally accepts it--and sees in vision herself and husband Claude bringing up the rear of the heaven-bound hikers.
|
|
|
Flannery O'Conner (racial integration)
|
"Everything That Rises Must Converge"
|
Arrogant Julian and his bigoted mother take a bus trip on an integrated bus. A black mother-and-son get on too. Nobody is heroic.
|
|
|
Flannery O'Connor
|
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
|
Shiflet marries Lucynell, dumps her at a restaurant, picks up a guy by the road--and "angel from Gawd"--who rejects his sentimental encomium on his mother: “My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking polecat.” He feels the rottenness of the world abd speeds away to another city.
|
|
|
Flannery O'Connor
|
Good Country People
|
Hulga gets her prosthetic leg stolen by alleged Bible salesperson.
|
|
|
Frank O'Connor
|
"Guests of the Nation"
|
1931, portraying the execution of two Englishmen (Belcher and Hawkins) held captive by the Irish Republican Army. Bonaparte and Noble are the main IRA characters.
|
|
|
Eugene O'Neill
|
Desire Under the Elms
|
Eben tricks his two half-brothers off the farm after his dad abandons it. Dad (Ephraim) comes back and his wife has a child by Eben. She then kills the baby for love of Even, who turns her over to the sheriff.
|
|
|
Eugene O'Neill
|
The Hairy Ape
|
1922. Expressionist play. Yank leaves oceanliner after being called "filthy beast"; can't find camaraderie with any people--finally releases an ape for the purpose and is crushed in its embrace.
|
|
|
Eugene O'Neil (bar)
|
The Iceman Cometh
|
1939. Salesman Hickey calls a bar-full of dead-end drunks and prostitutes to repentance--but then confesses that it was really his reaction to his wife-murder. Despair.
|
|
|
Eugene O'Neil (Pulitzer)
|
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
|
Tyrone family: father and two sons, alchoholics, and mother, morphine addict, conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and half-sincere attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation.
|
|
|
Eugene O'Neil (Orestes)
|
Mourning Becomes Electra
|
O'Neil updates the Orestes myth in three plays about the murders, adultery, incest, etc. of the family of General Ezra Mannon (civil war)--who is the Agamemnon figure.
|
|
|
George Orwell (two that I've read)
|
Animal Farm, "Shooting an Elephant"
|
|
|
|
George Orwell (essay)
|
"Politics and the English Language"
|
Critiques political diction as intentionally concealing or obscuring meaning. Argues instead for "plain English."
|
|
|
Geroge Orwell
|
1984
|
"Bib brother" controls everything--even what people think. Dilapidated London--except giant govmnt bldgs. War of some sort--nobody knows why. Can never turn TV off. No way to be objective because Winston Smith writes a diary (illicit). Two people matter to him--Julia (pretty) and O'Brian (higher up in gov). Gets into an affair with Julia; gets invited to O'Brian's. Confesses that he's a rebel. O'Brian says he is too and gives him Goldstein. But it was a ruse. O'Brian turns them in. They get tortured and broken. Final line: "Winston loved big brother."
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|
|
Wilfred Owen
|
Dulce et Decorum Est
|
|
|
|
William Pater
|
The Renaissance
|
Since all is in flux, to get the most from life we must learn to discriminate through "sharp and eager observation": for "every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, – for that moment only". Through such discrimination we may "get as many pulsations as possible into the given time": "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."
Passion for beauty most powerful to counter stagnation of habit. |
|
|
Thomas Love Peacock
|
Nightmare Abbey
|
Satire on Gothicism, Romanticism, and Transcendental Philosophy. Mr. Scythrop.
|
|
|
Harold Pinter (family romance)
|
Homecoming
|
Messed up crap. Teddy brings his bride "home" to London from USA and she seduces/gets seduced by his brothers. He goes back without her.
|
|
|
Harold Pinter (apartment)
|
The Caretaker
|
Theater of the absurd. Mentally challenged Ashton, his bro Mick, and homeless man Davies.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath (novel)
|
The Bell Jar
|
1963 roman a' clef (i.e. very autobiographical fiction) about Esther's descent into depression, hospitalization, electro-therapy . . .
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath (patricide)
|
Daddy
|
I needed to kill you . . .
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Lady Lazarus
|
Dying is an art, and I do it exceptionally well.
[holocaust stuff: I am your victim] Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. |
|
|
Pope (mock heroic besides Rape of the Lock; anti-critics, esp. Shakespearean Theobald)
|
The Dunciad
|
|
|
|
Pope (critique of 18th century literary world)
|
An Essay Concerning Criticism
|
'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. To err is human, to forgive divine. Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Tread |
|
|
Pope (religious)
|
An Essay on Man
|
An Essay on Man is a poem published by Alexander Pope in 1734. It is a rationalistic effort to use philosophy in order to "vindicate the ways of God to man" (l.16), a variation of John Milton's claim in the opening lines of Paradise Lost, that he will "justify the ways of God to men" (1.26). It is concerned with the natural order God has decreed for man. Because man cannot know God's purposes, he cannot complain about his position in the Great Chain of Being (ll.33-34) and must accept that "Whatever IS, is RIGHT" (l.292), a theme that would be satirized by Voltaire in Candide (1759).[1] More than any other work, it popularized optimistic philosophy throughout England and the rest of Europe.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan The proper study of Mankind is Man. |
|
|
Ezra Pound
|
In a Station of the Metro
|
THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. |
|
|
Ezra Pound
|
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly
|
Pound's poetic autobiography--plus satire on how England lost the taste for good art, which he wants to resuscitate.
|
|
|
Ezra Pound
|
A Retrospect
|
Three rules (H.D. and another modernist agreed)
A few don'ts Sets forth his version of modernism. |
|
|
Ezra Pound
|
Canto 1
|
Reworking The Odyssey. Libations and burials, Elpenor (new-dead at Circe's), Tiresias, Anticlea . . .
|
|
|
Ezra Pound
|
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
|
Lovely love-letter from two-year's wife to her merchant husband:
At fourteen I married My Lord you. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. At sixteen you departed, |
|
|
Marcel Proust
|
Remembrance of Things Past (literally: In Search of Lost Time)
|
1920s, French. Translated. Very psychologically aware--theme of involuntary memory. Not plot-driven. Narrator's coming of age--growing up, participating in society, falling in love, and learning about art.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon
|
The Crying of Lot 49
|
CA, 1960s. Oedipa isn't sure if she has discovered signs of the underground activity of the ancient postal firm Trystero.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon
|
Gravity’s Rainbow
|
Pessimistic end of WWII, Germany's V2 rockets and the "black device." Postmodern novel, heavily allusive, snatches of nonsense poems, etc.
|
|
|
Ann Radcliffe
|
The Mysteries of Udolpho
|
|
|
|
J.D. Salinger
|
The Catcher in the Rye
|
|
|
|
Sir Walter Raleigh
|
The Author’s Epitaph, Made by Himself
|
Close contemporary of Shakespeare's, explorer and poet--searched for [basically] El Dorado.
Time betrays our trust, but "The Lord shall raise me up, I trust." |
|
|
Sir Walter Raleigh
|
The Nymphs Reply
|
If only it were that simple. But I must plan for age and misfortune.
|
|
|
Sir Walter Raleigh
|
Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son
|
Make sure the Wood, the Week, and the Wag (i.e. you) don't meet together for a hanging.
|
|
|
John Crowe Ransom
|
Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
|
Ransom was a seminal figure in New Criticism (Formalistic).
She scattered the geese; they said in Goose "alas." we are vexed at her brown study, Lying so primly propped- |
|
|
John Crowe Ransom
|
Janet Waking
|
Lovely poem: Janet wakes and runs to see her hen--dead from a bee sting.
|
|
|
John Crowe Ransom
|
"Piazza Piece"
|
—I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
—I am a lady young in beauty waiting (she rejects him) |
|
|
Samuel Richardson
|
Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded
|
|
|
|
Theodore Roethke
|
“My Papa’s Waltz”
|
20th century American poet. Drunk father "waltzing"--violent? affectionate?
"then waltzed me off to bed, still clinging to your shirt" |
|
|
Theodore Roethke
|
"Root Cellar"
|
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath. |
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Dante Gabrielle Rossetti
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"The Blessed Damosel"
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I'll teach him the ways of heaven when he gets here . . . if only.
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John Crowe Ransom
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"Piazza Piece"
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—I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
—I am a lady young in beauty waiting (she rejects him) |
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Samuel Richardson
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Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded
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Theodore Roethke
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“My Papa’s Waltz”
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20th century American poet. Drunk father "waltzing"--violent? affectionate?
"then waltzed me off to bed, still clinging to your shirt" |
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Theodore Roethke
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"Root Cellar"
|
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath. |
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Dante Gabrielle Rossetti
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"The Blessed Damosel"
|
I'll teach him the ways of heaven when he gets here . . . if only.
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Two texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Confessions, The Social Contract
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John Ruskin
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The Stones of Venice
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Carl Sandburg (place)
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"Chicago"
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Hog butcher, tool maker, wheat stacker . . . yes you are wicked, but you are laughing and full of life.
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Two texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Confessions, The Social Contract
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John Ruskin
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The Stones of Venice
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Carl Sandburg (place)
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"Chicago"
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Hog butcher, tool maker, wheat stacker . . . yes you are wicked, but you are laughing and full of life.
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Yeats (coxcomb)
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“Crazy Jane and the Bishop,”
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She asks to be brought under the oak at midnight to curse the bishop and be visited by her dead lover.
(All find safety in the tomb.) The solid man and the coxcomb. |
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Yeats (babe)
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"The Dolls"
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The dolls at the dollmaker's house are insulted by the "noisy, filthy thing" (the real child) . . . which is "an accident"??!
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Three already-known poems by Yeats
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The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Second Coming Leda and the Swan |
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Yeats (dialogue)
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"Dialogue Between Self and the Soul"
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Baffling, but something about worldliness versus relinquishment.
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Yeats (Keats)
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"Sailing to Byzantium"
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That is no country for old men . . . [therefore I sailed to Byzantium] . . . [to be gathered] Into the artifice of eternity. I will become Keats' Grecian Urn.
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Yeats (pilgrim soul)
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"When You Are Old"
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When you are old [remember youth] How many loved . . . your beauty with love false or true . . . But one . . . loved the pilgrim soul in you . . . [and then murmus sadly how love fled].
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Yeats (birds)
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The Wild Swans at Coole
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The 59 wild swans at Coole are cool--it's been 19 Autumns since I counted them--where will they go next?
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Yeats (art)
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The Circus Animals Desertion
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Love of art vs. reality; Yeats' writers block.
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Yeats (gay)
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Lapis Lazuli
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Hamlet and Lear are gay--and the tragedy cannot grow--
"All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay." --the Chinamen carved in lapis lazuli are gay too-- |
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Yeats (love)
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Adam’s Curse
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Shall we write a poem though a line may take hours and people think you an idler. Adam’s Curse is that love and beauty don't come easy, and books that say they do lie.
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William Wycherley
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The Country Wife
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1675 (early Restoration) comedy about a rake (Horner) who pretends impotence and a country wife (Pinchwife) who discovers the pleasures of London life (esp. London men).
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Virginia Woolf (one day)
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Mrs. Dalloway
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1925. Clarissa D.'s life and high London society. Septimus Smith commits suicide. Clarissa hosts a party.
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Virginia Woolf (ten years)
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To the Lighthouse
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Ramsays at summer home, then dinner party, then ten years and WWI, then a sailing trip to the lighthouse where some reconciliation happens.
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Jean-Paul Sartre (play)
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"No-Exit"
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"Hell is other people"
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Jean-Paul Sartre (novel)
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Nausea
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Dejected historian Antoine Roquentin comes face to face with his disgust of things and with the emptiness and provisionality of existence.
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Jean-Paul Sartre (ancient play existentialized)
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The Flies
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Electra and Orestes avenge their fathers' murder and battle Zeus. Shame of being human.
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Walter Scott
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Ivanhoe
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12th century England, revival of interest in Medieval, Walter of Ivanhoe, a Saxon among Normans.
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Old English elegy/wisdom lit
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The Seafarer
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Medieval Mystery Play
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The Second Shepherd’s Play
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Bethlehem shepherds and thief perform antics, spew dubious wisdom, and then the shepherds see the angel and converse with Mary.
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George Bernard Shaw (satire)
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Arms and the Man
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Comedic satire on warfare and hypocrisy.
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George Bernard Shaw (criticism)
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A Dramatic Realist to His Critics
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Responding to negative reviews of Arms and the Man, Shaw declares that his play amounts to a "comedy of the collision of the realities represented by the realist playwright with the preconceptions of stageland." Whereas stage life "is artificially simple and well understood by the masses," real life is not understood and is "credible, stimulating, suggestive, various, free from creeds and systems—in short, it is real."
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George Bernard Shaw (three act play)
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Major Barbara
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The eponymous Salvation Army officer becomes disillusioned when said Army takes money from dubious sources and decides to preach to those not in poverty, rather than converting slum-dwellers in exchange for bread.
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George B. Shaw (musical)
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Pygmalion
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1912. Higgins, Doolittle, etc.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (Keats)
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"Adonais"
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (to a bird)
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"To a Skylark"
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Hail to thee, blithe spirit--
Bird thou never wert-- . . . . . . Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now! |
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (ruined art)
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Ozymandias
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (alps)
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Mont Blanc
|
Nature is not wholly gentle or benevolent; it is full of grandeur but only in relation to the human imagination.
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Shelly (Peterloo)
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Ode to the West Wind
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Shelly wants to contribute to the insipiring wind of revolution in the wake of Peterloo.
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan (comedic conflict over a woman)
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The Rivals
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1777, comedy of manners in Bath. Conflict over a woman. The character Mrs. Malaprop gives rise to a new term.
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Snake and Sneerwell)
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The School for Scandal
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Snake and Sneerwell go about stirring up trouble and trying to get their way in Georgian society.
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Sir Phil. Sidney (not The Defence of Poesie)
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Astrophel and Stella
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'Fool' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'
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Upton Sinclair
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The Jungle
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Meat packing...
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Isaac Bashevis Singer
|
Gimpel the Fool
|
1953. Polish Jewish American author. Collection of short stories.
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Two plays by Sophocles
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Antigone, Oedipus Rex
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Edmund Spencer (special poem)
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Epithalamion
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Poem for a bride on her way to the wedding night.
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Edmund Spencer (first major)
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Shepheardes Calendar
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1579. Spencer's first major work, a pastoral, with often ironic commentary included by "E.K."
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Edmund Spencer (most major)
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The Faerie Queene
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Una, Duessa, Red Cross Knight, Archimago, dragon, political and religious allegory . . . Elizabeth responded by pensioning Spencer.
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Gertrude Stein
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Three Lives
|
Three Lives (1909) was Gertrude Stein's first published work. The book is separated into three stories, "The Good Anna", "Melanctha", and "The Gentle Lena".
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J. Steinbeck
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Grapes of Wrath
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An advertisement goads the Joads to CA from dust-bowl OK. Too much labor; no rights; unionizing; union-breaking; violence; break-up of family.
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Laurence Sterne
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Tristram Shandy
|
1759 novel. Story of "his" "life"; accidentally named wrong, humors imballanced at moment of procreation, etc. Funny, farcical, ridicule of solemnity.
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Robert Louis Stevenson (not Dr. Jeckel and Mr. H. OR tREASURE iSLAND)
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Kidnapped
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David Balfour and Alan Breck (Scottish Jacobite) team up to woop conspiring shipmates and adventure in Scotland together.
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Tom Stoppard
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Rosencranz and Gildenstern are Dead
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Wallace Stevens
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The Emperor of Ice-Cream
|
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream
|
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Wallace Stevens
|
Sunday Morning
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Mundane distracts her from Sacrament.
Pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink. |
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Wallace Stevens
|
On Mere Being
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[A palm beyond the last thought with a bird singing.] You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine... The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. |
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Other poems by Wallace Stevens
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“Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Snow Man”
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August Strindberg
|
Miss Julie
|
1888. Swedish playwright. Miss Julie's love relationship with male servant; the power dynamics; both servile before her father the count. He convinces her that the only way out it suicide?
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Johnathan Swift
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The Battle of the Books
|
1707. Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Parody of an epic battle; authors and critics duking it out.
|
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Phillis Wheatley
|
On Being Brought from Africa to America
|
Remember, Christians, Negros black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th'angelic train.[
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Kurt Vonnegut
|
Slaughterhouse Five
|
|
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Four texts by Mark Twain
|
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Puddin’ Head Wilson
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James Thurber
|
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
|
|
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|
Thucydides
|
History of the Peloponnesian War
|
|
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John M. Synge
|
The Playboy of the Western World
|
1907. Irish playwright. Christy claims he killed his father and wins the love of a town and a woman. But his dad survived (oops) so he tries again and this time the town condemns him.
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Tennyson (loss)
|
"Break, Break, Break"
|
Break, break, break At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me
|
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Tennyson (a woman between fantasy and reality but not in Shalott)
|
"Mariana"
|
Embodies melancholy--her habitat prisons her and she wishes she were dead.
|
|
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Dylan Thomas
|
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
|
|
|
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Dylan Thomas
|
Fern Hill
|
Nostalgic poem--begins with straighforward evocation of childhood visits to grandma, then mourns the loss of Eden.
|
|
|
Jean Toomer
|
Cane
|
High modernist participant in the Harlem Renaissance. Several of the vignettes have been excerpted or anthologized in literary collections, perhaps most famously the poetic passage "Harvest Song", included in several Norton poetry anthologies. The poem opens with the line: "I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown."
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|
Alice Walker (novel)
|
The Color Purple
|
Purple = suffering. Black women's suffering. Celie's suffering.
|
|
|
Alice Walker
|
"Everyday Use"
|
|
|
|
Robert Penn Warren (novel)
|
All the King's Men
|
Willie Stark's rise to Southern political power, and his right-hand man the narrator and political reporter Jack Burden.
|
|
|
Robert Penn Warren (poem)
|
"Blow West Wind"
|
Suggestive lines referring to dead father and violence and evidence being gone.
|
|
|
John Webster
|
Duchess of Malfi
|
Just after Shakespeare, performed in the Globe. Duchess marries below her order and her two brothers extract their revenge and perish in the process. Dark and bloody, psychologically complex characters.
|
|
|
Eudora Welty (novel)
|
Delta Wedding
|
1940s, Southern, mythological connections.
|
|
|
Eudora Welty (short)
|
"Why I Live at the P0"
|
Short Story.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton (mean to NYC elite)
|
The House of Mirth
|
1905. Lily Bart's fall from social grace a the ruthless hands of New York's social elite.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton (not quite as mean)
|
The Age of Innocence
|
1920. Somewhat kinder to the upper class of NYC. Marriage of an engaged couple (Newland and May) threatened by another woman of scandal (Ellen).
|
|
|
Edith Wharton (fictional town)
|
Ethan Frome
|
Another New England novel--Ethan's marriage threatened.
|
|
|
Walt Whitman (US commentary)
|
Democratic Vistas
|
1871. Comment on the American character and the Louisiana purchase.
|
|
|
Walt Whitman (on the settlers)
|
"Pioneers! O Pioneers!”
|
|
|
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Walt Whitman (Lincoln)
|
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d"
|
Mournign the assasination of Lincoln.
|
|
|
Walt Whitman (historical spot)
|
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
|
About the exact spot the Brooklyn bridge was later built.
|
|
|
Tennessee Williams (Pollitt)
|
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
|
Play about Big Daddy Pollitt, Southern cotton tycoon, dying of cancer, and his family's problems.
|
|
|
Tennessee Williams (single sisters)
|
The Glass Menagerie
|
Tom, his mother Amanda, his sister Laura. A wants L married; L is insecure about the outside; Tom brings coworker home who diagnoses L, makes her love him, announces he is engaged, breaks her glass animal, and leaves.
|
|
|
Tennessee Williams (Southern aristocracy versus industry)
|
A Streetcar Named Desire
|
1947. Culture clash between two characters, Blanche DuBois, a relic of the Old South, and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial, urban working class, and Blanche's sister's husband.
|
|
|
William Carlos Williams (imagist)
|
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
|
So much depend . . .
Imagist masterpiece. |
|
|
William Carlos Williams (fallen leaf)
|
“The Young Housewife”
|
Walled away in neglige or shy outside. Fallen leaf.
|
|
|
William Carlos Williams (wife)
|
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
|
Seeking wife's forgiveness.
|
|
|
William Carlos Williams (oops . . . sorry)
|
“This is Just to Say”
|
Sorry I ate your plums.
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