“Mr. Lowry is passionately in earnest about what he has to say concerning human hope and defeat, but for all his earnestness he has succeeded only in writing a rather good imitation of an important novel.”
The New Yorker
Excerpted from: Bernard, 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
“The smallest distinct sound unit in a given language: e.g. tip in English realizes three successive phonemes realized in spelling by the letters t, i, and p.
Detailed definitions have varied from one theory to another, But, in general, two words are composed of different phonemes only if they differ phonetically in ways that are found to make a difference in meaning. Thus in English i and a are difference phonemes since, for example, tip does not mean the same as tap, nor pit the same as pat. The individual phonemes are then the smallest units in each word that distinguish meanings and, in addition, are realized over distinct time spans. By the same criterion, i and a are single phonemes since they cannot be analyzed into smaller units meeting the criterion, each with its own time span.
Thence phonemic; e.g. a phonemic transcription of a word, etc. is its representation as a sequence or other combination of phonemes.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Education that emphasizes learning from firsthand, personal experiences rather than from lectures, books, and other secondhand sources. Experiential learning my take the form of internships, service learning, school-to-work programs, field studies, cross-cultural education, or training for leadership development.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Churrigueresque (adj): A 17th-century Spanish architectural style named after the Churriguera family of architects and designers. The influence of sculpture most characterizes the style, as structural elements become mere props for ornament. While the style predominates in Castile, the term often refers to the florid, late Baroque architecture of Spain and Latin America.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged art/architecture/design, hispanic history, readings/research
“A dark novel (1939) by the US writer Nathanael West (1903-1940). The work explores the seamy underside of Hollywood (where West himself had worked as a scriptwriter), and shows how it eats away at people’s better selves. At the end Homer, a harmless but unexciting accountant, knocks down a boy who attacks him, and is in turn overwhelmed by a group of people (like a swarm of locusts) who are waiting for the arrival of stars at a a premiere.
‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.’
Joel 2:25
John Schlesinger’s 1975 film of West’s book, with Donald Sutherland and Karen Black, was highly regarded.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“A ‘non-hero’ or the antithesis of a hero of the old-fashioned kind who was capable of heroic deeds, who was dashing, strong, brave and resourceful. It is a little doubtful whether such heroes have ever existed in any quantity in fiction except in some romances (q.v.) and in the cheaper kind of romantic novelette (q.v.). However, there have been many instances of fictional heroes who have displayed noble qualities and virtuous attributes. The anti-hero is the man who is given the vocation of failure.
The anti-hero—a type who is incompetent, unlucky, tactless, clumsy, cack-handed, stupid, buffoonish—is of ancient lineage and is to be found, for instance, in the Greek new comedy (q.v.). An early and outstanding example in European literature is the endearing figure of the eponymous knight of Don Quixote(1605-1615). But perhaps the first anti-heor who fits the modern image is Hylas, in d’Urfe’s very successful Astree (1627). Another notable instance is Tristram Shandy in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767). On can find isolated representatives in European from the 18thcentury onwards, for example Hasek’s Schweik in The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-23). A case could be argued that Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is a kind of anti-hero. Charles Lumley in John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) is another. When Kingsley Amis created Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim (1954) the post-war anti-hero type was established, and the anti-hero Jimmy Porter of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1957) produced a succession of personalities of the same kind. Other examples are Sebastien in J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955). Herzog in Bellow’s Herzog (1964), and Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961). The principal male characters in several of Graham Greene’s novels are also anti-heroes.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“The many old provinces and parlements of France were swept away by the French Revolution. On 4 March 1791, France was divided into 83 new department units, named after unitary geographic units such as valley or mountain range. Each was to be governed by and official, the all-powerful Intendant, appointed by the central government. These officials were instructed to establish a departmental capital so that no area should be more than a day’s ride from the head office. At the height of the conquests of Napoleon, the efficient bureaucratic Empire of Departements expanded to 130, but it later reverted to 86. In 1860, the seizure of Nice and Savoy from Italy took the number up to 89, whilst victory in the First World War allowed for the Alsatian fortress of Belfort to become number 90. Further reorganization and the addition of five overseas departements brought the number to its current tally of 101.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
“Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.”
James Madison (1751-1836)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Pure melodrama. There is not a touch of characterization that goes below the skin.”
George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review 1897
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
“Morphology: The study of the grammatical structure of words and the categories realized by them. Thus, a morphological analysis will divide girls into girl and –s; singer into sing and –er, which marks it as a noun referring to an agent.
A category is ‘morphological’ if it is realized within words. This morphological case is case as realized by different elements within nouns or words of other classes as opposed to an abstract case which might be realized differently or not at all. A morphological causative is a causative form of a verb as opposed to a causative construction, and so on.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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