Tag Archives: fiction/literature

Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazabal

“Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazabal: (1945-) Colombian writer and political figure. Growing up during La Violencia, the civil strife that took over 300,000 lives between 1946 and 1959, he developed a black sense of humor. His early novel, Condores no entierran todos los dias (1971) is the riveting story of a conservative who becomes a death squad leader. El bazar de los idiotas (1974; tr. Bazaar of the Idiots, 1991), a vicious satire on intolerance and religious gullibility, is one of Colombia’s most read novels. Pepe Botellas (1984) is a hilarious political fable about a Cuban exile who tries to become President of Colombia. Alvarez Gardeazabal’s recent fiction has dealt with the corrosive effects of the drug trade on Colombian society.”

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

Octavio Paz

“Octavio Paz: (1914-1998) Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat. Educated at the University of Mexico, Paz published his first book of poetry, Luna Silvestre (“Savage Moon”) in 1933. He later founded and edited several important literary reviews. Influenced in turn by Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, his poetry uses rich imagery in dealing with metaphysical questions, and his most prominent theme is the human ability to overcome existential solitude through erotic love and artistic creativity. His prose works include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), an influential essay on Mexican history and culture. He was Mexico’s ambassador to India 1962-68. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1990.”

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

Mateo Aleman

“Mateo Aleman: (1547-after 1613) Spanish novelist. The son of a prison doctor, Aleman studied in Seville, Salamanca, and Alcala, and spent some twenty years as a government accountant. He was twice imprisoned for debt. In 1608 he went to Mexico in the company of Archbishop Garcia Guerra, whose life he published in 1613.

Aleman is remembered chiefly as the author of Guzman de Alfarache, the second great picaresque novel, after Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). The first part appeared in 1599, and, after Juan Jose Marti, a Valencian lawyer, produced a spurious sequel (1602), Aleman himself wrote a continuation (1604), in which he good-naturedly lampooned Marti. Aleman also wrote a biography of Saint Anthony of Padua (1604) and Ortografia castellana (1609), a treatise on spelling.”

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

The Weekly Text, 19 September 2025: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on John Brown

On Monday of this week, Hispanic Heritage Month 2025 began. This observance runs from 15 September to 15 October every year. This year, as with last, I report with considerable chagrin that I have no materials that would rightfully–in the editorial view of this blog–constitute a proper Weekly Text to observe the contributions and achievements of United States citizens of Hispanic descent.

Like last year, I had every intention of preparing a unit on the infamous Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943. I imagine, or imagined, such a unit would become part of a sociology class I taught a few years ago. Alas, I have never been asked to teach that course again. Last year I co-taught four English classes. It happens that I found a copy of Thomas Sanchez’s novel Zoot Suit Murders in one of the local Little Libraries. So, alternatively, I thought I might work up an English Language Arts unit on that book. It appears to be in print, and Luiz Valdez adapted his play on the Zoot Suit trial into a film that would probably complement cogently a reading of Thomas Sanchez’s novel.

But, since I am at the most eighteen months from retirement and little more than a body (I’m co-teaching two biology classes this year, not a subject in which I possess any expertise whatsoever) in the school in which I serve, if I do this work, it will be after I am no longer a full-time classroom teacher.

In any event, this week’s Text is this reading on John Brown with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

Cultural Literacy: Sarcasm

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on sarcasm. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences (the second of which is longish, but not insurmountable for emergent and struggling readers) and three comprehension questions. Just the bare facts about this often corrosive form of irony.

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.

Absurdity

“absurdity: The experience of absurdity is a common theme in the work of novelists such as Dostoevsky and Kafka, as well as in the many varieties of existentialism. The early essays of Albert Camus and his first novel The Outsider are classic modern expressions of this experience. The realization that existence is absurd arises from the sense of futility and meaninglessness provoked by the perception that there is a divorce between the human aspiration towards infinity and the finite nature of actual human experience, or between the intellectual desire for rationality and the irrationality of the physical world. The world is experienced as something unintelligible, and as the product of random combinations of events and circumstances. Although the experience of the absurd can induce s suicidal despair, the realization that there is no God and that human beings are not immortal can also produce an exhilarating sense of freedom and inspire a revolt against the human condition. There is a somewhat tenuous connection between the literary-philosophical notion of the absurd and the themes of the Theater of the Absurd.”

Excerpted from: Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Cultural Literacy: Realism

This Cultural Literacy worksheet on realism might be of some use in an English classroom, though I admit I’ve never heard the term uttered in any English class I’ve co-taught. In any event, this is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences, the second of which is longish, but not unwieldy, and three comprehension questions. A solid, but basic, introduction to this concept in the fine arts.

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.

Elizabeth Hardwick on Reading

“Reading—what sort of subject is this? There are ‘reading scores,’ and ‘my early reading,’ and ‘reading the future.’ There are neurology and pedagogy and linguistics and dyslexia and lipreading. And then there is plain reading for information and pleasure—neither very plain indeed….”

Elizabeth Hardwick

[If you’d like to read the rest of this important essay, you can find it here transcribed as a Microsoft Word Document.]

Excerpted from: Hardwick, Elizabeth. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. New York: New York Review of Books, 2022.

The Weekly Text, 8 August 2025: Lesson Seven of a Unit on Writing Reviews

OK–after eight weeks of drafting these posts, this week’s Text is seventh and final lesson plan of a unit on writing reviews. Since this lesson concludes the unit and turns students loose to write their reviews, I have included four Cultural Literacy worksheets as do-now exercises with the idea that students will need at least four days to write and revise their compositions. So here are those documents on hyperbole, nuance, analogy, and paraphrase. Each of these worksheet is a half-page long with short readings and three or fewer comprehension questions.

At this point in the unit, students should have their thoughts on their review outlined, and, therefore, in a final state of organization. So this short organizer is the worksheet for this lesson, and simply asks students a few final clarifying questions on their planned paper. This is for their benefit, and one final clarifying exercise.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

Cultural Literacy: Pun

This Cultural Literacy worksheet on the pun as a literary device seems to me particularly useful if one is writing about literature, but may apply to other cultural forms as well–e.g. song lyrics and titles. This is a half-page document with a reading of four sentences and two comprehension questions.

A word about the reading: these sentences are long and complicated and may present significant challenges to struggling or emergent readers. I think you’ll see what I mean when you look at it. In fact, for the students I have historically served, this document is probably inappropriate; in the event that I wanted to teach kids about puns (and incidentally, here in New York City, I’ve never seen this done for the simple reason that knowledge of puns isn’t something that Regents Examinations test for; and yes, this is how idiotic this has become), I would probably significantly rewrite this is I were planning to administer it to struggling or emergent readers, or for students for whom English is a second language.

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.