Jane Smiley

King Lear and A Thousand Acres: A Comparison William Shakespeare 's tragedy King Lear, originally performed in 1606, chronicles the downfall of a king. Three hundred-eighty-five years later, Jane Smiley published the novel A Thousand Acres which parallels King Lear,with a few exceptions. Both tragedies present the tale of a father who divides what he owns amongst two of his daughters while rejecting the third, who later comes to the father’s aid. In one story the father is a king and in the other a farmer, but these works of literature differ in more than just superficial aspects; they differ in the type of tragedy they are. King Lear contains the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy, such as immense suffering and while A Thousand Acres contains…

Nature is the foundation of everything that is on our earth and beyond the limits of our universe. Without nature, we would not be able to exist in the first place, and it is through nature that we can continue to live. In “King Lear” by William Shakespeare and “A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley, the authors both illustrate just how important nature, in the form of a mother, really is through actions of Goneril and Ginny. Even though “A Thousand Acres” is a modern retelling of the famous “King…

Under Review: “Moo” by Jane Smiley Jane Smiley is a writer well known for her Pulitzer Prize winning effort “A Thousand Acres”, in which she adapts Shakespeare’s tragedy, “King Lear”, to a more contemporary Iowan/American-Midwestern setting. A startlingly tragic & insightful story which delved into the lives of families in a small Iowan farming community and dissected the issues of patriarchy, environmentalism, feminism and family dysfunction, her astute observational abilities and her…

In the novel Moo, Jane Smiley uses Dean Nils Harstad, Marly Hellmich, Dr. Gift, and Chairman X to emphasize how, when there is a conflict between personal belief systems and workplace practices, individuals will sacrifice their morals to reduce the amount of time or effort required to achieve their professional or personal goals. The belief systems discussed can be either religiously, politically, or economically centered. Using religious symbolism, Smiley utilizes the sacrificed beliefs of the…

Why might an author decide to reimagine a classic? An author’s intent to reimagine a classic could stem from the idea of reinventing the classic to pertain to modern ideas and society. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley does this by stemming original ideas off of the classic King Lear by William Shakespeare. Though A Thousand Acres is a recreation it does share commonalities and differences with the original in which was based such as in ways of plot lines, characters, themes, and thesis. Jane…

Even though the phrase “point of view” is just three measly words, it is one of the most important choices an author needs to make while deciding how they are going to write their story. Will they write in first person and use “I”, and “we”, or write in 3rd person and address people by their names or use pronouns like “he” or “they”? Although many people decide to write in third person point of view, both the stories The Georges and the Jewels by Jane Smiley, and Black Beauty: The Autobiography…

Noted by Smiley, “being honest about Huckleberry Finn goes right to the heart to whether we can be honest about our heritage and identity as Americans.” By employing hypophora, Smiley emphasizes the initial purpose of reading works from a non-contemporary setting. After asking “Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or Huckleberry Finn,” the author answers with “because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created.” The part after the word…

A Thousand Acres is a classic tragedy, which is written by American author Jane Smiley in 1991; won several rewarding awards, like the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991. The novel, has some connections with king Lear -- a tragedy which is written by Shakespeare, which is a reworking of the King Lear plots, represents a modernized interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In this short comparative essay, we will focus on indicating and comparing parallel characters, similar…

Book Stealer One day May was feeling bored. She was in her house and needed something to do. She did have the laptop but her big sister Lilly wanted to borrow it and broke it by dropping it at her house. May didn’t get mad because Lilly was going to get a better laptop in a few weeks. So, she decided to read a manga. May liked manga and anime it was because of the drawing style and the story line. May jumped out of her beds and walked to her bookcase where she keep…

book by John Le Carre. Apparently it follows the book closely, but the book is long, with too many details to fit into a two-hour movie. Thus, there are things left out, including some of the cohesion. But it is still somehow possible to follow at least most of the plot – however difficult it may be. But this difficulty is symbolic of how it is for Smiley to track down the mole. We can’t rely on Smiley to do all the work for us; we have to figure some of it out ourselves. The problem is that…