Desiree's baby, by Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin (February 8, 1850- August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have started the reign of feminist authors in the 20th century. Chopin was in a state of depression after losing both her husband and her mother. Her doctor then suggested that she should write as it would be a source of therapeutic healing for Chopin. By the early 1890’s Kate Chopin was writing short stories and articles and became very successful. She died at the age of 54 on August 22nd, 1904. 'Desiree's Baby', is a short story about a girl that was adopted by a couple. This young girl later falls in love with a man with a title, living in luxury. They have a beautiful boy, and the couple is happy. One day, the adopted mother comes to see the baby, noticing there is a problem, never mentioning the issue. Few days pass and the baby's father is missing, and he starts being mean to his workers again. Not noticing the issue, Desiree finally discovered the identity of the baby, he is mix raced. The child's father comes back to the scene, blaming her for the mishap. Desiree couldn't deal with the shame as she wasn't sure of her identity, and she killed herself as well as the baby. A while passed, and her husband decides to burn her things, the last thing he burns is a group of letters stating that he was really mix raced. The first short story we read as part of the lesson was, 'Desiree's baby'. This text was wonderfully written, with a good use of vocabulary. Initially the story starts with setting the scene, letting the reader know that Desiree was adopted. So by the time this piece of information was made relevant, it completely shocked me to feel that her suicide seemed like the only option for her. The last paragraph is definitely intended to provoke a certain action of sorrow, anger, and felt deceived for Desiree. As you found out that the cause for the great commotion was not anything to do with her. http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/library/desireesbaby.html |
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler is an American writer, know for his pulp fiction crime stories. He was born in Chicago in 1888. He published seven novels during his lifetime. One of these included, 'The Big Sleep'. During the depression Chandler lost his job as an oil company executive, at which he then decided to become a detective fiction writer. He published seven novels in his lifetime and was in the midst of writing an eighth novel as he died. This novel was then completed by Robert B. Parker. All of Chandlers novels were made into motion pictures except one (Playback). He died at the age of 70 on March 26th, 1959 from Pneumonia. "'don't fuss with me little man'. The purring voice had a edge, like sand in the bearings" Connotation: * Fuss; being child-like, and annoying. * Little; being better than him, having hegemony. * Purring; deadly, wild cat, dangerous. * Edge; sharp and deadly if you get too close. * Sand in the bearings; breaks the object down eventually. Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. Raymond Chandler uses the character Canino to express the connotations of words such as 'fuss' and 'little' to convey to the character Jones to feel inferior to Canino. This leads Jones to feel as if he is a child and annoying toward Canino. Raymond Chandler uses words such as 'purring' and 'edge' to convey the deadly part to Canino's character. |
Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was born on November 30th, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland. He was famously known for his many talents; being a satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and priest. He is most famous for his story ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ as well as his satires; ‘A modest Proposal’, A Tale of a Tub’ and ‘Drapier’s letters’. Swift used his satire prose to make a strong statement and to encourage change. He died at the age of 77 on October 19th 1745.
Jonathan Swift was a politician in Ireland in the 1700's that loved his country. He wrote satire pieces such as 'A Modest Proposal'. Swift suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. This satirical hyperbole mocks heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as Irish policy in general.
Jonathan Swift makes a proposal to stop children being a burden to their parents and Ireland. . He wants to “find out a fair, cheap, and easy Method” to make use of the starving children of the country. The writer also goes to the lengths of suggesting recipes for cooking the children in. Swift further explains his plan using exact weights and prices that the fattened children can be sold for.
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=3274300&pageno=1
To understand his work, you need to ask, 'what is satire?';
To this, you can reply, Satire is a form in art or in writing which criticises a person, government and institution, mainly by humour. It is used to make people laugh, as well as pick at people's faults.
My Version of satire;
The dress code for Lampton is the most picked on for the school. Being the most important factor of being a pupil here, we should make the rules stricter. The days of being a nice teacher are over. From now on everyone should come in naked, keeping everyone in a uniform matter. This will lead everyone to look smart and part of the Lampton spirit. The new changes would mean nobody will need to spend an extra half an hour at school for uni-check, leaving everyone happy to do as they please after school. Also leaving no space for confusion what to wear.
The Road
An unnamed father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a major unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on Earth. The land is filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for flesh. The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, gave up hope and committed suicide some time before the story began, despite the father's pleas. Much of the book is written in the third person, with references to "the father" and "the son" or to "the man" and "the boy."
Realizing that they cannot survive the oncoming winter where they are, the father takes the boy south, along empty roads towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and in a supermarket cart. The man coughs blood from time to time and eventually realizes he is dying, yet still struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation.
They have a revolver, but only two rounds. The boy has been told to use the gun on himself, if necessary, to avoid falling into the hands of cannibals. During their trek, the father uses one bullet to kill a man who stumbles upon them and poses a grave threat. Fleeing from the man's companions, they have to abandon most of their possessions. As they are near death from starvation, the man finds an unlooted hidden underground bunker filled with food, new clothes and other supplies. However, it is too exposed, so they only stay a few days.
In the face of these obstacles, the man repeatedly reassures the boy that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire." On their journey, the duo scrounge for food, evade roving bands, and contend with horrors such as a newborn infant roasted on a spit, and captives being gradually harvested as food.
Although the man and the boy eventually reach the sea, their situation does not improve. They head back inland, but the man succumbs to an illness. Before he dies, the father tells the boy that he can continue to speak with him in his imagination after he is gone. The boy holds wake over the corpse for days, with no idea of what to do next.
On the third day, the grieving boy encounters a man who says he has been tracking the pair. The man, who is with a woman and two children, convinces the boy that he is one of the "good guys" and takes him under his protection.
--The Road has received numerous positive reviews and honours since its release. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 90 out of 100, based on 31 reviews.Critics have deemed it "heartbreaking", "haunting", and "emotionally shattering". The Village Voice referred to it as "McCarthy's purest fable yet." In a New York Review of Books article, author Michael Chabon heralded the novel. Discussing the novel's relation to established genres, Chabon insists The Road is not science fiction; although "the adventure story in both its modern and epic forms... structures the narrative", Chabon says, "ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood." Entertainment Weekly in June 2008 named The Road the best book, fiction or non-fiction, of the past 25 years and put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "With its spare prose, McCarthy's post-apocalyptic odyssey from 2006 managed to be both harrowing and heartbreaking."
On March 28, 2007, the selection of The Road as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was announced. A televised interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was conducted on June 5, 2007 and it was McCarthy's first, though he had been interviewed for the print media before. The announcement of McCarthy's television appearance surprised his followers. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, when told of the interview. During Oprah's interview McCarthy insisted his son, John Francis, was a co-author to the novel, revealing that some of the conversations between the father and son in the novel were based upon actual conversations between McCarthy and his son. The novel was also dedicated to his son; in a way it is a love story for his son, but McCarthy felt embarrassed to admit it on television
An unnamed father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a major unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on Earth. The land is filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for flesh. The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, gave up hope and committed suicide some time before the story began, despite the father's pleas. Much of the book is written in the third person, with references to "the father" and "the son" or to "the man" and "the boy."
Realizing that they cannot survive the oncoming winter where they are, the father takes the boy south, along empty roads towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and in a supermarket cart. The man coughs blood from time to time and eventually realizes he is dying, yet still struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation.
They have a revolver, but only two rounds. The boy has been told to use the gun on himself, if necessary, to avoid falling into the hands of cannibals. During their trek, the father uses one bullet to kill a man who stumbles upon them and poses a grave threat. Fleeing from the man's companions, they have to abandon most of their possessions. As they are near death from starvation, the man finds an unlooted hidden underground bunker filled with food, new clothes and other supplies. However, it is too exposed, so they only stay a few days.
In the face of these obstacles, the man repeatedly reassures the boy that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire." On their journey, the duo scrounge for food, evade roving bands, and contend with horrors such as a newborn infant roasted on a spit, and captives being gradually harvested as food.
Although the man and the boy eventually reach the sea, their situation does not improve. They head back inland, but the man succumbs to an illness. Before he dies, the father tells the boy that he can continue to speak with him in his imagination after he is gone. The boy holds wake over the corpse for days, with no idea of what to do next.
On the third day, the grieving boy encounters a man who says he has been tracking the pair. The man, who is with a woman and two children, convinces the boy that he is one of the "good guys" and takes him under his protection.
--The Road has received numerous positive reviews and honours since its release. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 90 out of 100, based on 31 reviews.Critics have deemed it "heartbreaking", "haunting", and "emotionally shattering". The Village Voice referred to it as "McCarthy's purest fable yet." In a New York Review of Books article, author Michael Chabon heralded the novel. Discussing the novel's relation to established genres, Chabon insists The Road is not science fiction; although "the adventure story in both its modern and epic forms... structures the narrative", Chabon says, "ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood." Entertainment Weekly in June 2008 named The Road the best book, fiction or non-fiction, of the past 25 years and put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "With its spare prose, McCarthy's post-apocalyptic odyssey from 2006 managed to be both harrowing and heartbreaking."
On March 28, 2007, the selection of The Road as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was announced. A televised interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was conducted on June 5, 2007 and it was McCarthy's first, though he had been interviewed for the print media before. The announcement of McCarthy's television appearance surprised his followers. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, when told of the interview. During Oprah's interview McCarthy insisted his son, John Francis, was a co-author to the novel, revealing that some of the conversations between the father and son in the novel were based upon actual conversations between McCarthy and his son. The novel was also dedicated to his son; in a way it is a love story for his son, but McCarthy felt embarrassed to admit it on television
Birdsong
Marching to the front on the day before the Somme offensive, Stephen Wraysford leads his company down a track across farmland and comes upon something odd: "two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path". What could be its agricultural purpose? "Then he realised what it was. They were digging a mass grave." A moment later, his men see it too. "The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds." Someone higher up knows what is coming. Songs "die" and men will, almost as readily.
Birdsong has to imagine mechanised slaughter. In the description of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, death comes so thick that the narrative cannot pause for individuals. "Bodies were starting to pile and clog the progress." Stephen watches as a line of troops comes forward "in extended order" into the range of German machine guns, "which traversed them with studied care until every man had gone down in a diagonal line from first to last."
Characters often die in novels, but in this novel deaths cannot be handled in any conventional novelistic manner. The soldiers at the front have learnt not to be shocked, not even to be emotional, at any particular person's death, and the manner of narration has to reflect this. Deaths are narrated through the eyes of particular characters with a numbed factuality. From Stephen's original platoon, only three men remain alive at the front. "The names and faces of the others were already indistinct in his memory." Sometimes he recalled "a voice, a smile, a habitual trick of speech", but these are like dismembered aspects of personality rather than clues to any distinct individuals. This is a war in which explosives can reduce men "to particles so small that only the wind carried them". Tens of thousands of men simply go missing, their names recorded on monuments such as the arch at Thiépval, which so shocks Stephen's grand-daughter Elizabeth in the section of the novel set in the 1970s: "names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone". The novel kindles indignation by imitating this oblivion.
It is not just a matter of realism, it is also a manipulation of the reader's sympathies. At the front, anyone can die at any moment. In one battle, Stephen finds himself fighting desperately alongside a fellow officer called Ellis, and trying to talk him out of despair. Reinforcements arrive just in time, and Stephen retires with his men to their own trench. "Ellis had been killed by machine gun fire." We heard him speaking a few lines earlier, but his death is noted in passing. Caring about a character will not save him. One of the other characters into whose thoughts we are taken is Michael Weir, whom Stephen befriends. In one chapter we accompany Weir on home leave, and painfully witness his faltering attempts to describe his experiences to his father, who wants to hear nothing about his son's ordeal. The novel carefully acquaints you with this nervous, intelligent, fearful man, but then it kills him almost casually. As Weir walks towards him one day, Stephen notices that some parapet sandbags have become misplaced and is about to warn him. "Weir climbed on to the firestep to let a ration party go past and a sniper's bullet entered his head above the eye, causing trails of his brain to loop out on to the sandbags of the parados behind him."
After all the deaths that he has seen around him, Jack Firebrace thinks himself "immune to death". He imagines that he will inevitably survive, but also that death cannot any longer touch him. No sooner does he have this thought than something happens to change it. He receives a letter from his wife, Margaret, in which she mentions that their only child, John, "has been very poorly indeed and the doctor says it is diphtheria". The very wording of the letter heightens his – and our – apprehensions. "I am sorry to bother you with the news but I think it is for the best."
The novelist painfully manipulates the reader's emotions. Among so many deaths, the possible death of this eight-year-old boy, whom we know only through the character's intense affection for him, is the one that affects us. When Jack receives a subsequent letter from his wife, he keeps it unopened during his next mission, as if keeping his son alive that bit longer. Of course the child is dead, and his father's every reason for imagining his own survival dissolves.
Marching to the front on the day before the Somme offensive, Stephen Wraysford leads his company down a track across farmland and comes upon something odd: "two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path". What could be its agricultural purpose? "Then he realised what it was. They were digging a mass grave." A moment later, his men see it too. "The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds." Someone higher up knows what is coming. Songs "die" and men will, almost as readily.
Birdsong has to imagine mechanised slaughter. In the description of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, death comes so thick that the narrative cannot pause for individuals. "Bodies were starting to pile and clog the progress." Stephen watches as a line of troops comes forward "in extended order" into the range of German machine guns, "which traversed them with studied care until every man had gone down in a diagonal line from first to last."
Characters often die in novels, but in this novel deaths cannot be handled in any conventional novelistic manner. The soldiers at the front have learnt not to be shocked, not even to be emotional, at any particular person's death, and the manner of narration has to reflect this. Deaths are narrated through the eyes of particular characters with a numbed factuality. From Stephen's original platoon, only three men remain alive at the front. "The names and faces of the others were already indistinct in his memory." Sometimes he recalled "a voice, a smile, a habitual trick of speech", but these are like dismembered aspects of personality rather than clues to any distinct individuals. This is a war in which explosives can reduce men "to particles so small that only the wind carried them". Tens of thousands of men simply go missing, their names recorded on monuments such as the arch at Thiépval, which so shocks Stephen's grand-daughter Elizabeth in the section of the novel set in the 1970s: "names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone". The novel kindles indignation by imitating this oblivion.
It is not just a matter of realism, it is also a manipulation of the reader's sympathies. At the front, anyone can die at any moment. In one battle, Stephen finds himself fighting desperately alongside a fellow officer called Ellis, and trying to talk him out of despair. Reinforcements arrive just in time, and Stephen retires with his men to their own trench. "Ellis had been killed by machine gun fire." We heard him speaking a few lines earlier, but his death is noted in passing. Caring about a character will not save him. One of the other characters into whose thoughts we are taken is Michael Weir, whom Stephen befriends. In one chapter we accompany Weir on home leave, and painfully witness his faltering attempts to describe his experiences to his father, who wants to hear nothing about his son's ordeal. The novel carefully acquaints you with this nervous, intelligent, fearful man, but then it kills him almost casually. As Weir walks towards him one day, Stephen notices that some parapet sandbags have become misplaced and is about to warn him. "Weir climbed on to the firestep to let a ration party go past and a sniper's bullet entered his head above the eye, causing trails of his brain to loop out on to the sandbags of the parados behind him."
After all the deaths that he has seen around him, Jack Firebrace thinks himself "immune to death". He imagines that he will inevitably survive, but also that death cannot any longer touch him. No sooner does he have this thought than something happens to change it. He receives a letter from his wife, Margaret, in which she mentions that their only child, John, "has been very poorly indeed and the doctor says it is diphtheria". The very wording of the letter heightens his – and our – apprehensions. "I am sorry to bother you with the news but I think it is for the best."
The novelist painfully manipulates the reader's emotions. Among so many deaths, the possible death of this eight-year-old boy, whom we know only through the character's intense affection for him, is the one that affects us. When Jack receives a subsequent letter from his wife, he keeps it unopened during his next mission, as if keeping his son alive that bit longer. Of course the child is dead, and his father's every reason for imagining his own survival dissolves.