“Determinative: Indicating the pointing forward to a subsequent phrase or clause that explains or completes, e.g., ‘such words as…,’ ‘the one that….’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Society: Generally, a group of people who share a common culture, occupy a particular territorial area, and feel themselves to constitute a unified and distinct entity—but there are many different sociological conceptions (see D. Frisby and D. Sayer, Society, 1986).
In everyday life the term society is used as if it referred in an unproblematic way to something that exists ‘out there’ and beyond the individual subject: we speak of ‘French society,’ and ‘capitalist society,’ and of ‘society’ being responsible for some observed social phenomenon. On reflection, however, such a usage clearly has its problems: for example, is British society a clear unity, or can we talk also of Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish societies? And, even within England, are there not wide cultural differences between (say) north and south? Is there one capitalist society—or many? Nor is a society the same thing as a nation-state. The former Yugoslavia clearly contained several societies: Croat, Slovenian, Serbian, and so on.
While many sociologists use the term in a commonsense way others question this use. Some symbolic interactionists, for example, argue that there is no such thing as society: it is simply a useful covering term for things we don’t know about or understand properly (see P. Rock, The Making of Symbolic Interactionism, 1979). Others, such as Emile Durkheim, treat society as a reality in its own right (see The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895).”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Virginia Woolf, Part I: To the Lighthouse
“Her work is poetry; it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it.”
New York Evening Post
Virginia Woolf Part II: The Waves
“This chamber music, this closet fiction, is executed behind too firmly closed windows…the book is dull.”
H.C. Harwood, Saturday Review of Literature
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Taxonomy: A taxonomy (or typology) is a classification. To classify social phenomena is not to explain them. For example, sociologists of religion commonly use a taxonomy of religious organizations which embraces the categories of church, denomination, sect, and cult. This classifies religious groupings according to their organizational structure (for example, bureaucratic or informal), adjustment to the prevailing order (world-rejecting, world accommodating, and so forth), and principal mode of recruitment (ascribed membership by birth or achieved membership by voluntary attachment). This particular classification does not explain why certain individuals practice religion, while others do not, nor does it offer a theory of how religious organizations arise or develop. In practice, however, many sociological taxonomies are implicitly etiological (causal). A well-known example is Durkheim’s classification of the types of suicide—egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic—a taxonomy which also embodies a theory about why people kill themselves intentionally.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. [Branch] Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”
I Never Had It Made introduction (1972)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Annie Allen: (1949) A book by Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Its three parts fom a connected sequence about a black girl growing to womanhood. ‘Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood’ includes eleven poems which provide glimpses of Annie’s birth, her practical and didactic mother, and her response to racism, killing, and death. ‘The Anniad,’ a mock heroic poem in forty-three stanzas, and three ‘Appendix’ poems, reveal Annie’s dreams of a gallant lover who goes off to war, returns home, marries her, leaves her, and returns home to die. The fifteen poems of ‘The Womanhood’ show how Annie looks bravely at a world she would like to reform. By the end, her outlook on life has changed from egoistic romanticism into realistic idealism.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
What is novelist Ralph Ellison’s middle name? Waldo
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged black history, fiction/literature, united states history
“For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?”
Manchild in the Promised Land Foreword (1965)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Manchild in the Promised Land: (1965) An autobiographical novel by Claude Brown. Set in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, the novel is a coming-of-age story in which Sonny, the author, escapes the ghetto and the drugs, prostitution, and violence that plague it. Having sought refuge in higher education, the author conveys a sense of warmth toward the Harlem ghetto while simultaneously contributing to the spirited social criticism of the time.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.”
“How to Keep Young,” Colliers, 13 June 1953
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged black history, games/sports, humor, united states history
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