GRE English Subject Test 2 questions with answers, Exams of English Language

Download GRE English Subject Test 2 questions with answers and more Exams English Language in PDF only on Docsity! GRE English Subject Test 2 questions with answers Henry James major works and famous characters ✔The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Bostonians, The Aspern Papers (about a biographer of Jeffrey Aspern--a fictionalized Byron, who comes to get some papers from the poet's former mistress and daughter). Characters in his books: Isabel Archer, Maggie Verver, Daisy Miller ( a flirtatious nouveau riche American girl in Europe) , Lambert Strether, Merle, Osmond, Goodwood Stackpole. Famous English Periodicals ✔Richard Steele founded the Tatler in 1709; Steele and Addison founded The Spectator; Jonathan Swift--The Examiner; Daniel Defoe--The Review; Samuel Johnson--The Rambler; Eliza Haywood--The Female Spectator Cleanth Brooks (Critic) ✔New Criticism: paraphrase, irony, paradox Harold Bloom (Critic) ✔The Anxiety of Influence (a book of Criticism): misreading or misprision William Empson (Critic) ✔Seven Types of Ambiguity; Some Versions of Pastoral T.S. Eliot (Critic) ✔Criticism and the Individual Talent; The Metaphysical Poets: objective correlative Kenneth Burke (Critic) ✔symbols, pentad, equipment for living Alexandrine ✔a line of iambic hexameter--final line in a Spenserian stanza Alliteration ✔Use of repeated consonant or sound, usually at beginning of a series of words Anthropomorphism ✔Assigning human attributes to nonhuman things; ex. Aslan Apostrophe ✔a speech addressed to someone not present, or to an abstraction Bildungsroman ✔novel of education; follows a young person through naivete to experience and maturity Caesura ✔the pause that breaks a line of Old English verse or any deep pause in a line of verse Decorum ✔neoclassical principle of drama; how a characters style of speech is fitting with the character's station Doggerel ✔a derogatory term describing poorly written poetry epithalamium ✔a work, usually a poem, written to celebrate a wedding Euphuism ✔Name comes from John Lyly's Euphues (1580). writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech, grandiose metaphors, mythological references, rhetorical questions, Flat and Round Characters ✔terms of E.M. Forster's: flat characters--those built around a single dominant trait; round--those developed with psychological complexity Georgic ✔dealing with working people in the countryside--comes from Virgil's Georgics Hamartia ✔the tragic flaw in a character--Aristotle's term Homeric Epithet ✔39 line poem of six stanzas of six lines each and a final stanza of three lines. No rhyme. Certain words repeated at end of each line. Gerund ✔a verb acting as a noun, uses "ing" ending: sleeping Participle ✔a verb acting as an adjective, usually ends in "ed" Substantive ✔a group of words acting as a noun: Eating strawberries outside is very messy Subordinate Conjunction ✔a word that introduces a subordinate clause Jacques Lacan (Critic) ✔The Mirror Stage in the Formation of the I; an endless chain of signifiers has its analogue in Frued's theory of dreams; language structures the unconscious; keywords--mirror, signifier, substitution, desire, jouissance, objet petit a, imaginary order, symbolic order, real order. Marxist Criticism ✔keywords--base, superstructure, class, proletariat, means of production, bourgeoisie, imperialism, dialectical materialism. New Historicism ✔specifics of culture are determinative; institutions of society (including its language) forms the consciousness of individual members of society; keywords--ideology, encoded ideology supporting dominant class; Feminist and African-American and Post-Colonial are all species of New Historicist Feminist Criticism ✔ Identity Criticism ✔include feminist and African-American and Post-Colonial criticisms in questioning the constructions of "self" in literature Psychoanalytic Criticism ✔keywords--oedipal complex, libido, ego, id, superego, subconscious, unconscious, repression, resistance; Harold Bloom most famous--theorizes that authors subconciously position their work against previous authors, his keywords--strong- poet Archetype or Myth Criticism ✔Jung and Freud and Frye; look for symbols, motifs, character types, plots that are recurrent; such recurrences reveal the collective unconscious Formalist Criticism ✔Began in 1920s, focused on what facets or laws make a work a piece of literature; keywords--defamiliarization, device of plot, device of story, voice, etc. New Criticism ✔Dominant in American and English Universities in mid-20th century; famous New Critics: T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, F.R. Leavis; avoid speculation about authorial intent or the essential message of a work; key words--intentional fallacy, affective fallacy, heresy of paraphrase; key technique: CLOSE READING Structuralism ✔founded in Europe during era of New Crit in America; Saussure's theory of language; related to Semiotics; meaning is not intrinsic but produced by the structure of a unit; keywords--differance, sign, signifier, signified, binary oppositions, spatial metaphors, center, periphery, vertical and horizontal axes Post-Structuralism--Deconstruction ✔Derrida; focuses on the gaps, displacements, excesses within a given unit or structure; keywords--erasure, trace, bracketing, differance, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminacy, decentering, mimesis, alterity, marginality, desire, lack. Reader-Response Criticism ✔reader's experience of a text is the key literary event; literary works involve an implied or ideal reader; keyword--horizon of expectations Mikhail Bakhtin ✔dialogism; I-for-myself, I-for-other, Other-for-me; polyphony; chronotope (time space); heteroglossia (qualities of lit that are extralingual, primacy of context over text); Goethe ✔The Sorrows of Young Werther; part of Sturm und Drang; Faust; epic poem Hermann and Dorothea; part of the Weimar Classicism movement Berthold Brecht ✔German playwright; Baal; In the Jungle; Drums in the Night; reworking of Marlowe's Edward II; "epic theater"; Man Equals Man project; Gabriel Garcia Marquez ✔Love in the Time of Cholera; ONe Hundred Years of Solitude; The Autumn of the Patriarch; magic realism Jorge Luis Borges ✔El Aleph; Ficciones; A Universal History of Infamy; magic realism. philosophical exploration of modern anxiety. Writes using endless libraries, labyrinths, nested dreams. Chinua Achebe ✔Nigerian novelist; Things Fall Apart; Athol Fugard ✔South African playwright; Tsotsi--a novel; The Coat--a play Nadine Gordimer ✔South African writer; A Watcher of the Dead--short story; The Lying Days--a novel; wrote against apartheid Hades= ✔Pluto, god of the underworld Hestia= ✔Vesta, goddess of the hearth Hermes= ✔Mercury, messenger god Artemis= ✔Diana, goddess of the hunt Apollo= A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! Tennyson, "Ulysses" (1842) ✔Ulysses is old and restless and dreaming of sailing again. Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"(1921) ✔Yeats poetry contains much symbolism. Symbolist movement is a late 1800s movement of which Yeats is part. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Old English Verse form ✔lines structured according to accented syllables only, not rhymed, uses alliteration and involves a central pause called the caesura. Beowulf ✔sung by scops (bards), oral first, written about 750 A.D. Beowulf the swedish hero. Slays Grendel the monster at request of Hrothgar. Famous hall is Heorot. Fights a dragon late in life and dies fighting. Wiglaf assumes his position. Strong stress verse, alliterative, includes caesura. Piers Plowman ✔William Langland. Eight allegorical visions. alliterative verse. 1380. Canterbury Tales ✔Geoffrey Chaucer. 1387. Knight's Tale ✔The Knight is valorous and polite. His tale is of Arcite and Palamon, fast friends who, falling in love with the same girl, fight for Emily. Arcite wins but perishes and Palamon wins Emily. Prioress' Tale ✔The prioress is dainty and materialistic and loves her dogs. she has a coral rosary and a golden brooch that says "love conquers all." Boy killed by Jews for singing Alma Redemptoris. Miraculously keeps singing after dead. "Murder will out" Nun's Priest's Tale ✔a fable about Chaunticleer, a vain rooster who sings well and the beautiful Perteltote, the hen. Sir Russell is the fox. Cha. dreams about being eaten by the fox, Per chides him for being cowardly. Sir Russell comes and asks Ch. to sing. He does and Sir Russell seizes him. Just before he eats him, he gloats and opens his mouth and Ch. escapes. Mock heroic. Merchant's Tale ✔The merchant wears motley clothes and a beaver hat. He talks business and success constantly, though he is in debt. Old man named January marries a young beauty, May. Later, he goes blind and becomes jealous. Keeps her close by always. May meets her adulterer lover, Damian and they meet in a tree while January is holding the trunk. The god Pluto unblinds January who beholds his wife's unfaithfulness. She lies that she did what she did in order to restore his sight. Wife of Bath's Tale ✔Read description of her in the prologue and in her specific prologue since she is tested on the GRE. She is large, loud, flamboyantly dressed, loose in morals. Her tale is that one of King Arthur's knights rapes a woman. He is sentenced to death. The Queen protests. Arthur hands him over to the Queen's justice. He must answer correctly the question: What do women most want? He meets an ugly witch who says she will give him the answer if he marries her. He agrees. She tells him it is sovereignty and she turns into a beautiful woman. Miller's Tale ✔The miller is a big burly fellow with a large beard and a big wart on his nose. He is coarse. His tale is about Handy Nicholas who is the boarder of a rich carpenter and his wife, Alison. The carpenter reveres Nich as a learned astrologer. Together Alison and Nich convince the carpenter that the end of the world is coming by flood and he should spend the night in a washtub on the roof. Meanwhile, they commit adultery. Later, Alison's other suitor Absalom comes by singing at the window. She promises him a kiss and fools him. Angry, he goes to fetch a hot poker. Nich and Alison try to fool him again, this time, Nich gets burned on the behind. He cries out for water and the carpenter thinks the flood has come and cuts the rope of the tub and clatters down. Pardoner's Tale ✔the Pardoner is thin, vain, just returned with pardons from Rome. He is really a huckster and not manly. He carries a bit of the true cross, a scrap of St. Peter's sail, a sheep bone used to cure all. He tells a story that is self-incriminating with the moral: Radix malorum est cupiditas--the love of money is the root of all evil. The tale: three immoral drunks set out to find death. They are told to look for Death under a tree where they find treasure. In trying to get more of the treasure for themselves, they murder each other. Other tales ✔The Franklin's Tale: a lover Aurelius; a faithful wife, Dorigen; and Dorigen's husband, Averagus. Reeve's tale: a greedy miller named Simkin gives his wife and daughter to John and Alan, two clerks, whom he earlier swindled. Clerk's tale: Griselda, patient wife endures the trials set for her by her jealous husband, Marquis Walter. Doctor's tale: Virginia has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of the evil judge, Apius. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ✔(1380) At a New Year's banquet in Camelot, a mysterious green knight enters to challenge any knight to strike off his head. If he survives, the challenger agrees to allow to suffer the same fate exactly one year later. Gawain accepts the challenge. He succeeds and the Knight puts his head back on. A year later Gawain is journeying to keep the promise and comes to a castle in which is the Green chapel where he is to meet his fate. He takes a magic girdle that was to keep him safe Faulkland, friend of Jack Absolute Bob Acres, friend of Jack Absolute Sir Lucius O'Trigger, an Irish baronet Fag, Captain Absolute's servant David, Bob Acres' servant Thomas, Sir Anthony's servant Lydia Languish, a wealthy teenaged heiress, in love with "Ensign Beverley" Mrs. Malaprop, Lydia's middle-aged gu Jonathan Swift ✔Gulliver's Travels. 1726. (obviously not Restoration comedy play). Lilliput (residents are 6 inches tall). Brobdingnag (residents are giants). Laputa (a flying island). STruldburgs (unhappy immortals who want to die). Houyhnhnms (intelligent, wise horses). Yahoos (dirty, slovenly, immoral human-like creatures). Known as "the Dean." Alexander Pope ✔1688-1744. wrote almost exclusively in heroic couplets. Ends all his lines on natural pauses. Tightly controlled and impeccably structured poetry. Major works: An Essay on Criticism. The Rape of the Lock (the most important for the test) in which Lord Petre cuts a lock of Belinda's hair. Mock epic including all essential features of epic inside a plot focused on a coffee party, a card game, etc. The Dunciad: mock epic is a savage assault on bad poetry, particularly that of Colley Cibber who was the poet laureate of England. Bayes is crowned, in the poem, as the poet laureate of Dulness. Dulness will prevail over all arts and sciences. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) ✔Considered the best literary mind of the 18th century. Early years he was poor. Wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (poem), The LIves of English Poets (biography), essays for The Rambler, and compiled the first modern English dictionary. Also, Rasselas (novel about the Prince of Abyssina's quest for a happy life). James Boswell ✔Johnson's biographer--The Life of Johnson. Renders Johnson as superiorly erudite and witty and melancholy. Includes conversations between Johnson and famous intellectuals of the day. William Blake (1757-1827) ✔He has two distinct styles. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are simple and clear in syntax and meter. Later, The marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion is visionary and mystic. Gothic Novel (1760-1840) ✔Usually include gloomy, half-deserted castles, ancient manor houses in disrepair, often include an evil twin locked somewhere in the house. Genre began with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto which includes supernatural events mixed with natural. Anne Radcliffe furthered the genre with The Mysteries of Udolpho in which supernatural events turn out, at the end, to have natural explanations. M.G. Lewis' "The Monk" is also a classic example as are many Poe stories. Gothic Explique ✔The process at the end of a gothic novel in which the novel is summarized and the natural explanation for seemingly supernatural events is given. Jane Austen ✔1775-1814. Sense and Sensibility: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Lucy Steele, Edward Farris, John Willoughby, Colonel Brandon. Mansfield Park: Bertrams, Fanny Price, Mrs. Norris. Emma: Emma Woodhouse, Mr. Knightley, Miss Bates, Frank Churchill, Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax. Northanger Abbey: spoof on Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho. features CAtherine Morland, the Allens, Henry Tilney, John Thorpe. Persuasion: Sir Walter, Elizabeth and Anne Elliot, Frederick Wentworth, Kellynch Hall (the manor). Lake Poets ✔Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey. Lived for a long time in the Lake district of England. Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads (with Coleridge), Preface to Lyrical Ballads, values rustic, pastoral people and settings and direct language. Coleridge: Biographia LIteraria--major Romantic work which outlines his principles of aesthetics and his belief that the imagination (primary imagination and secondary imagination) is the prime human faculty and is to be cultivated in the interest of poetry, it is what allows a human being to perceive the phenomena of the world and the self; Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Charles Lamb: London Essayist with whom Wordsworth and Coleridge corresponded. Used the pen name Elia. Victorian Essayist: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) ✔Sartor Resartus: fictional philosophy. Influenced by Kant. title means "the tailor reclothed"; relationship of outward appearance and inward essence; also chronicles Carlyle's (named Teufelsdrockh) spiritual progress; key terms--Weissnichtwo (professor's hometown), the Everlasting Yea, the Everlasting No, the Wanderer. Dryly humorous and philosophical and full of linguistic play. Victorian Essayist: John Henry, Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) ✔Converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism as chronicled in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The Idea of a University is his philosophy of the value of liberal arts education. Writing is extremely clear, very logical. Victorian Essayist: John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) ✔A social theorist and reformer. James Mill, his father, with Jeremy Bentham founded utilitarianism. Chronicled the melancholy of his early life in his Autobiography in which he blamed over emphasis on logic in his education at the expense of the arts as the cause. On Liberty--argues that in a democracy the rights of the individuals must be guarded from the "tyranny of the majority." "What is Poetry" is an essay which defines poetry as the articulation of the self to the self, as opposed to eloquence, which is the self to others. The Subjection of Women is a logical, moral attack on the subjection of women. Victorian Essayist: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) ✔Sees the ancient Greeks as models of culture and virtue and source of "sweetness and light." This is opposed to the philistinism of the middle class tastes. Major essay "Culture and Anarchy." Arts and culture bring forth the best in human beings. Victorian Essayist: John Ruskin (1819-1900) ✔An art critic. Originated the term "pathetic fallacy" to describe the projection of the author's feeling on inanimate objects. The Stones of Venice--his praise and exposition of the economy and social history of Venice through its architectural objects. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) ✔The Scarlet Letter: Roger Chillingworth (doctor/husband); Hester Prynne (the wife and lover); Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (the lover); Pearl (the illegitimate child). The Blithedale Romance: Miles Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla. Blithedale Farm where the action takes place is based on actual utopian farm, Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community founded by Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, Thoreau. The House of Seven Gables: the Pyncheon family, Hepzibah, old Maule, Phoebe, Holgrave, Clifford. Sins of the fathers will be visited upon the later generations. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas--biography of Stein as as an "autobiography" of Toklas and discusses Stein's relationship to famous artists, such as Picasso. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) ✔Best known as poet and literary critic. Uses lots of allusions to biblical, classical and literary sources. Emphasizes the bleak emptiness of current culture. Mixes various styles. "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock"--"Let us go then you and I" famous first line. Many allusions and many seemingly unrelated parts. Other famous lines: "In the room women come and go talking of Michelangelo" "And indeed there will be time to wonder, 'Do I dar? and 'Do I dare?'" Last stanza--"We have lingered by the sea, by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us and we drown." "The Waste Land"--A great example of Modernism. Five sections supplemented by pages of notes. FRagmented. Many words from many languages. Lots of cultural allusions. READ IT. "The Hollow Men"--last great poem of his early career. Concerned with finding meaning in post WWI Europe. "This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." "Ash Wednesday"--Major poem after his conversion to Anglicanism. Stylistic turning point. introduced traditional forms of melody and rhythm. Famous opening line: "BEcause I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn. " "Tradition and the Individual Talent"--Most famous critical work. preconversion philosophy of poetry. argues in favor of impersonal poetry. Tradition is a "simultaneous order" of timeless work that unites the past and the present. Great artists attach themselves to tradition as opposed to eschewing it. ARgues against the Romantic notion of the inspired genius. Further criticism introduced the concept of "objective correlative." heroic couplet ✔pairs of rhyming (aabbcc, etc.) iambic pentameter lines enjambed line ✔meaning of line runs over the end into the next line poetic inversion ✔inverting customary order of words for poetic purpose iambic hexameter ✔all iambic lines contain feet of two syllables--unstressed/stressed terza rima ✔used by Dante, lines of five iambic feet, sets of three lines per stanza, middle line of early stanza rhymes with first and third of next stanza, etc. (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.) spenserian stanza ✔eight five-foot iambic lines, followed by one iambic line of six feet. rhyme scheme: ababbcbcc. Daedelus ✔created the labyrinth for King Minos on Crete in which the Minotaur lived. J.M. Synge ✔wrote in early 1900s. The Playboy of the Western World his most famous play, which satires working class in Ireland. Yeats ✔Primarily a poet. But founded the Irish National Theater Co. His first play, The Countess Cathleen, is based on an Irish fable in which people sell their souls in order to overcome famine. O'Casey ✔The Plough and the Stars, 1926, about Irish nationalism and poverty, unidealized view of Irish people. Oscar Wilde ✔Irish poet and playwright. Salome is his play about John the Baptist's head and "the dance of the seven veils" Picture of Dorian Gray. A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest. Poems: Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis, about his imprisonment for two years for homosexual practice. In relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (called Bosie). George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) ✔Irish. Famous plays: Mrs. Warren's Profession (about prostitution) and Pygmalion and Man and Superman and Saint Joan and Arms and the Man and Major Barbara. Humanist Criticism ✔mostly concerned with the relation of the book to the moral universe. Matthew Arnold. Structuralist Crit. ✔center, perimeter, story architecture Bakhtin, Mikhail ✔Russian critic. heteroglossia, key term. The novel is characerized by the play of microlanguages that exist in a language. Bram Stoker ✔Dracula--Jonathan Harker is the narrator of this book through diaries and letters. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ✔Poe's only novel. Adventures of a young stowaway on board a ship. James Fennimore Cooper ✔LEather-stocking tales--main character is Natty Bumpo, also called Deerslayer, Hawkeye and Leatherstocking. Righteous, nature loving character. David Copperfield ✔Dickens' most famous. Semi-autobiographical. Mr. and Mrs. Micawber and Uriah Heep. Saul Bellow ✔The Adventures of Augie March. Novel set in depression era Chicago. Scheherazade ✔narrator of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Uses the suspense of interrupted stories each night to save her life. ottava rima ✔literally "eight rhyme." Eight lines usually iambic pentameter. Often abababcc. rhyme royal ✔SEVEN line regularly rhymed stanza. iambic pentameter. ababbcc. heroic couplets ✔Victorian poet. Excellent rhyme and meter. Mocks Victorian morality. Conventional verse and meter. Gwendolyn Brooks ✔20th century african american poet. Pulitzer. The Ballad of Pearl May Lee. Nikki Giovanni ✔20th century African American poet. Part of Black Arts Movement of 60s. Margery Kempe ✔medieval woman who, after marrying and raising children, devoted her life to Christ and wandered Europe proselytizing. Wrote her autobiography: The Book of Margery Kempe. Mary Rowlandson ✔Puritan. Vividly recorded her abduction by Native Americans Sarah Orne Jewett ✔19th cent. New England writer. The Country of the Pointed Firs. Mary Wollstonecraft ✔A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mother of Mary Shelley. Henry Fielding ✔Tom Jones--Goody Brown and Molly are main characters. Farce. Midas ✔Judged the musical contest between Marsyas (Pan) and Apollo. Midas received donkey's ears from Apollo as a result of his judgment that Pan was better. Henry James' style ✔involves lengthy baroque sentence construction, hesitations, considerations, possibilities envisioned and then discarded. Countee Cullen ✔Af. Am. Poet of Harlem Renaissance. Traditional academic in verse style. One Way to Heaven. The Black Christ. W.E.B. Du Bois ✔Af. Am. Harvard educated. The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Helped form NAACP. Harlem Renaissance ✔leading figures included Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan, 1930), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934), Wallace Thurman (Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923) and Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1935) (from Wikipedia) Paul Laurence Dunbar ✔Af. Am. poet. late 1800s. Used idioms of black speech in his verse. Amiri Baraka ✔Af. Am. poet, playwright, novelist. Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note. Langston Hughes ✔Af. Am. poet, playwright, novelist. leader of Harlem Renaissance. developed Jazz Poetry. Uses Af. Am. vernacular in his writing as well as jazz rhythms. "What happens to a dream deferred?" Dylan Thomas ✔poet. extravagantly musical verse. Gorgeous prose. "Do Not Go Gentle". Ezra Pound ✔modernist poet. spent time in Europe. Satiric poem: "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"and his long collection "The Cantos." William Carlos Williams ✔American modernist poet. spare and vivid imagery. "No ideas but in things." Uses pedestrian objects and language. Book length poem "Paterson" about his hometown. Ted Hughes ✔poet laureate of Great Britain in 1980s. Crow. focuses on dark side of human nature. renders people beastly. Sylvia Plath ✔American poet and novelist. poems (Ariel) are bitter and violent. The Bell Jar tells the story of her breakdown. Poems about her difficult relationship with her father. Committed suicide in 1963. William Dean Howells ✔Very conservative literary critic. Humorless in his criticism. Editor of Harper's and the Atlantic. died in 1927. proponent of realist technique in fiction. Novel: The Rise of Silas Lapham about a Bostonian who loses wealth but realizes truth. F. Scott Fitzgerald ✔Novelist at turn of century. The Great Gatsby (set in Long Island and Manhattan. Main character is Nick Caraway and the couple Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Jay Gatsby, a rich gangster who has an affair with Daisy, while Tom has an affair with Myrtle. Myrtle is murdered. Myrtle's husband murders Gatsby.) Other novels: Tender is the Night. This Side of Paradise. Samuel Pepys ✔1600s. Famous for his diaries. Accessible style, honest portrayal of a man in London during the Restoration. Notes from the Underground ✔Dostoyevsky. a bitter memoir of a hypochondriac alienated, lonely narrator. Marcel Proust ✔Masterpiece is Remembrance of Things Past, which focuses on the author's memories. 3200 pages. Also a translator into French of Ruskin. Andre Gide ✔symbolist writing. Novelist. The Immoralist. Rainer Maria Rilke ✔Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. autobiographical spiritual musings. Albert Camus ✔The Plague. The Stranger begins with the death of the narrator's mother. Plot centers on motiveless killing of a stranger on a beach and the subsequent trial. Balzac ✔1799-1850. French novelist and playwright. The Human Comedy is his masterpiece. Founder of realism. Complex, morally ambiguous characters. Pere Goirot (main character--Rastignac; naive and young). Lost Illusions is the story of a young handsome Lucian de Rebempre who travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name. Vautrin (famous criminal) helps him, though he loses the woman and his reputation and his integrity. the 1935 First American Writers Congress sponsored by the communist-leaning League of American Writers. best known for his U.S.A. trilogy, which consists of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). Jack Kerouac ✔early 20th century. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation.[4] Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement,. Thematic elements: dharma, night, sleeplessness, trains, jazz, tea, Neal Cassady. Under the Volcano ✔novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) published in 1947. The novel tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, on the Day of the Dead, 2 November 1938. The book takes its name from the two volcanoes that overshadow Quauhnahuac and the characters, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. John Berryman ✔20th century. Poems about Henry or Mr. Bones. Dreamsongs--poetry collection. Thomas Chatterton ✔1760s. Fabricated poems by fictional historical personages. Thomas Rowley, a monk, was a fictional author he created from the 1400s. Chatterton killed himself at age 18! Arthur Rimbaud ✔young prodigy, great poet. As a theorist, he was disgusted with contemporary (mid 1800s) poetry. Decided to become a "seer" by means of drugs and alcohol. Went to North Africa; abandoned poetry. Francois Villon ✔Poet of underside of Paris. Best known French poet of Middle Ages. Lived wildly. John Clare ✔Romantic poet. rural background. Went mad. Kept writing poetry from the mental hospital. John Steinbeck ✔Grapes of Wrath (character Tom Joad). W.H. Auden ✔uses earlier poetic forms and transforms them using "delicate modulations, half rhymes, near rhymes, eye-rhymes, enjambments". Arthur MIller ✔20th century American playwright. Death of a Salesman. The Crucible (Salem Witch Trials) . All My Sons. Tom Stoppard ✔Playwright. Themes: advanced physics, ancient poetry, the nature of love. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James ✔Narrator is English governess at a country estate. Children, Miles and Flora, are seemingly haunted by the former employees Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. Charlotte Perkins Gilman ✔The Yellow Wallpaper--feminist classic--uses gothic conventions, mental decline of a woman who is taken by her doctor-husband to a remote estate to rest. Herland--three male social scientists are stranded in an idealized all female society. Middlemarch ✔George Eliot. Main characters: Casaubon, Dorothea Brooke, Lydgate (the doctor). Henrik Ibsen ✔19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet."the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Pillars of Society, The Lady from the Sea, Rosmersholm, The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkman. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, A Doll's House--critical attitude toward 19th-century marriage norms. protagonist, Nora, leaving her husband and children because she wants to discover herself. Ibsen was inspired by the belief that "a woman cannot be herself in modern society," since it is "an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint." Sturm und Drang ✔literally 'storm and drive', 'storm and urge', though conventionally translated as 'storm and stress')[1] is a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music that took place from the late 1760s to the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements. The period is named for Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play Sturm und Drang, which was first performed by Abel Seyler's famed theatrical company in 1777. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also a notable proponent of the movement, though he and Friedrich Schiller ended their period of association with it by initiating what would become Weimar Classicism.The protagonist in a typical Sturm und Drang stage work, poem, or novel is driven to action—often violent action —not by pursuit of noble means nor by true motives, but by revenge and greed. Goethe's unfinished Prometheus V.S. Naipal ✔is a Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels.[1] A House for Mr Biswas In a Free State A Bend in the River The Enigma of Arrival Characters in the Fairie Queene ✔Redcrosse Una Sir Guyon Britomart Arthur Arthegall (or Artegall) Calidore Calepine Florimell & The False Florimell Belphoebe The Faerie Queene or Gloriana or Tanaquill Scudamore Satyrane Cambell and Triamond Marinell Timias Pastorella Tristram Caelia Medina, Elissa, and Perissa Alma and The Three Counselors Merlin Mercilla The Hermit The Palmer the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government's invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged elite of the Inner Party, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrime."[3]protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party, who works for the Ministry of Truth. Julie is the heroine. Michel Foucault ✔a 20th century French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. After his research into the penal system, Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish) in 1975, offering a history of the system in western Europe. In it, Foucault examines the penal evolution away from corporal and capital punishment to the penitentiary system that began in Europe and the United States around the end of the 18th century.[125] Biographer Didier Eribon described it as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works, and it was well received. [126] Foucault explained that his work was less about analysing power as a phenomenon than about trying to characterise the different ways in which contemporary society has expressed the use of power to "objectivise subjects." Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel was published in 1963, and translated into English in 1986. It is Foucault's only book-length work on literature. They claim that through discourse analysis, hierarchies may be uncovered and questioned by way of analyzing the corresponding fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. This is one of the ways that Foucault's work is linked to critical theory.[173] Edward Said ✔professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies.[3] Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives The Orient Said was an accomplished pianist; and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), Said redacted ideas gleaned from the works of the 17th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico, and other intellectuals, in the book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), about the theoretical bases of literary criticism.[37] Said's later works include The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and On Late Style (2006). Edmund Burke ✔1729[1] - 9 July 1797) was an Irish[2][3] statesman born in Dublin, as well as an author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher who, after moving to London, served as a member of parliament (MP) for many years in the House of Commons with the Whig Party. Burke published a treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. It was his only purely philosophical work, and when asked by Sir Joshua Reynolds and French Laurence to expand it thirty years later, Burke replied that he was no longer fit for abstract speculation (Burke had written it before he was nineteen years of age).[22] Anthony Trollope ✔Trollope's first major success came with The Warden (1855)—the first of six novels set in the fictional county of "Barsetshire" (often collectively referred to as the Chronicles of Barsetshire), dealing primarily with the clergy and landed gentry. Barchester Towers (1857) has probably become the best-known of these. the Palliser novels concerned itself with politics, with the wealthy, industrious Plantagenet Palliser (later Duke of Omnium) and Lady Glencora the sweeping satire The Way We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece.[47] blazon ✔A poetic catalogue of a woman's admirable physical features, common in Elizabethanlyric poetry: an extended example is Sidney's 'What ... Eugene Ionesco ✔26 November 1909 - 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way Samuel Johnson ✔1709 [O.S. 7 September] - 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755. It had a far- reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship" His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare, and the widely read tale The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.He believed that the best poetry relied on contemporary language, and he disliked the use of decorative or purposefully archaic language. [175] He was suspicious of the poetic language used by Milton, whose blank verse he believed would inspire many bad imitations. Also, Johnson opposed the poetic language of his contemporary Thomas Gray.[176] His greatest complaint was that obscure allusions found in works like Milton's Lycidas were overused; he preferred poetry that could be easily read and understood.[177] In addition to his views on language, Johnson believed that a good poem incorporated new and unique imagery. in his Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson rejects the previous dogma of the classical unities and argues that drama should be faithful to life Rasselas ✔The plot is simple in the extreme. Rasselas, son of the King of Abyssinia (modern- day Ethiopia), is shut up in a beautiful valley, "till the order of succession should call him to the throne".[3] He grows weary of the factitious entertainments of the place, and after much brooding escapes with his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah and his poet-friend Imlac. They are to see the world and search for happiness, but after some sojourn in Egypt, where they encounter various classes of society and undergo a few mild adventures, they perceive the futility of their search and abruptly return to Abyssinia.[4] Sir Philip Sydney ✔1554 - 17 October 1586) was an English poet, courtier, scholar, and soldier, who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. His works include Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesy also known as The Defence of Poetry ( The essence of his defence is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue) or An Apology for Poetry, and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Spenser ✔Wrote Amoretti--Amoretti is a sonnet cycle written by Edmund Spenser in the 16th century. The cycle describes his courtship and eventual marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.