Tag Archives: fiction/literature

Cultural Literacy: Gertrude Stein

Posted on March 31, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Gertrude Stein. This is a full-page document with a reading of three sentences and five comprehension question. It’s a curiously asymmetrical page, far from perfect. But is anyone teaching Gertrude Stein’s work? She is presented here as a historical figure and the coiner of the term “Lost Generation,” which perhaps is all high school students need to know about her.

But what do you think?

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Ivy Compton-Burnett

Posted on March 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Ivy Compton-Burnett (later Dame Ivy): (1887-1967) British novelist. She graduated from the University of London and published her first novel, Dolores, in 1911. Her second, Pastors and Masters (1925), introduced the style—employing clipped, precise dialogue to reveal her characters and advance the plot—that made her name. Her novels often dealt with struggles for power: Men and Wives (1931) featured a tyrannical mother. A House and Its Head (1935) a tyrannical father. She was created Dame of the British Empire in 1967.”

­­­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Cultural Literacy: Eudora Welty

Posted on March 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

If you can use it–for I doubt she’s taught much below the post-secondary level–here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Eudora Welty. This is a half-page document with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Mabel Luhan Dodge

Posted on March 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Mabel Luhan Dodge: (1879-1962) American patroness of the arts and memoirist, Famous for her salons in Italy and New York in the early 20th century, Luhan cultivated close associations with D.H. Lawrence, John Reed, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Van Vechten. She had three husbands before she married a Pueblo Indian and settled in Taos, New Mexico, where she was a vital force behind the art colony there. She also wrote Lorenzo in Taos (1932) about her relationship with Lawrence, and a four-volume autobiography, Intimate Memories (1933-1937).”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference

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Cultural Literacy: Agatha Christie

Posted on March 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Agatha Christie. This is a half-page document with a reading of two sentences and three comprehension questions. A spare, but useful, introduction to this prolific and highly influential novelist. Your students might find it interesting, as I did after learning of it in, of all places, an episode of Doctor Who called “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” that Dame Agatha disappeared for eleven days in December of 1926.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Bessie Head

Posted on March 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Bessie Head (originally Bessie Amelia Emery): (1937-1986) South African-Botswanan writer. Born in South Africa of an illegal union between a white mother and a black father, she suffered rejection and alienation from an early age. She described the contradictions and shortcomings of pre-and postcolonial African society in morally didactic novels and stories, including When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971), A Question of Power (1973), The Collector of Treasures (1977), Serowe, Village of the Rainwind (1981), A Bewitched Crossroad (1984) and The Cardinals.”

­­­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Toni Morrison on Living

Posted on March 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

“I know what every colored woman in this country is doing…. Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

Toni Morrison

Sula (1973)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Cultural Literacy: Alex Haley

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Alex Haley. This is a full-page document with a reading of three sentences and six comprehension questions. The reading doesn’t mention Mr. Haley’s role in the production of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (a salient fact in any writer’s career, I would think), focusing instead on Roots: The Saga of an American Family and its commercial and artistic success.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Alice Childress

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Alice Childress: (1917-1994) American novelist, playwright, and actress. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Childress was well aware of racism and used her writing as an attempt to change social conditions. Childress joined the American Negro Theater as a young woman and became a prolific playwright. In the 1950s, she wrote Trouble in Mind, one of the first plays with black themes to be produced, and was a peer of such notable black writers as Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry. Other notable plays by Childress include Florence, Gold Through the Trees, and Wedding Band (collected, 1971), which was produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival and later broadcast on television. Childress’s novels include When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975), Rainbow Jordan (1882), and Those Other People (1989). She is best known for the young adult novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973), a blistering account of black urban life.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Cultural Literacy: Native Son

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. This is a half-page document with a one-sentence reading and one comprehension question. A tiny document, of limited utility, I suppose–unless you are teaching the novel and need something to use as a do-now to settle the class after a change of periods. If that.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Worksheets

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