Here are a reading on magic realism and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet if they are of any interest to your students or you.
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.
“Largely a record of sordid realism.”
Athenaeum
“Its ethics are frankly pagan.”
The Independent
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
“In what language was the Bible originally written? The Old Testament was written in Hebrew; it dates from the thirteenth to the first century B.C. The New Testament was written in Greek in the first century A.D.”
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature
“(Czech title Nesmesitna lekhost byti). A novel (1984) of the magic realism school by Milan Kundera (b. 1929). The fates of two couples are played out against a background of communist rule in Czechoslovakia. In such circumstances, there is an unbearable foreboding even when the ‘sweet lightness of being’ rises ‘out of the depths of the future.’ A film version (1987) was directed by Philip Kaufman.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“What is the name of the stockyard district where main character Jurgis Rudkis lives and works in The Jungle? It is known as Packingtown, in Chicago. The 1906 book led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.”
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, Social Sciences
“There is a thorough-going vulgarity in this book, characteristic of its class, which is a symptom of a lack of knowledge of the novelist’s real art…I mean an insufferable vulgarity, which has crept into so many of our supposedly advanced novels that someone not squeamish, not unread in earlier literatures, must protest against what is cheapening American fiction…what has happened to these young Americans? Do they think that living in a county the most vigorous, the most complex, the most problematical, the most interesting bar none in the world, we are going to be content with sour pap like this? And the tragedy is that they are clever; if they could see, they could write.”
H.S. Canby, Saturday Review of Literature
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
Over time, I’ve posted several items like this learning support of basic literary terms. This one is something I assembled for a specific class that was dealing with the terms outlined. Like everything else here at Mark’s Text Terminal, it’s a Microsoft Word document, so you can manipulate the text for your classroom needs.
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.
“A novel (1922) by James Joyce (1882-1941), regarded by many as the 20th century’s most important work of fiction in the English language. The novel is famous for its innovative use of language and its experimental use of stream-of-consciousness techniques. T.S. Eliot commented: ‘James Joyce has no style but is the vacuum into which all styles rush.’ The book was published by a small press in Paris in 1922, after three US judges banned further publication of chapters in the United States, and it was immediately acclaimed as a work of genius.
The narrative centres on a single day, 16 June 1904, the day on which Joyce had his first formal date with Nora Barnacle (1884-1951), a barmaid with whom he shared the rest of his life. The book tells of the day in the life of its Jewish-Irish hero, Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of the author’s A Portrait of the Artist as as a Young Man (1916). The structure of the book is intended to parallel that of Homer’s Odyssey, with Odysseus’s decade of wandering compared to Bloom’s single day of roaming in Dublin. Bloom thus represents Odysseus (whom the Romans called Ulysses), Molly answers approximately to Odysseus’s wife Penelope and Dedalus corresponds to his son, Telemachus. Joyce described his Homeric parallel–which he worked out in considerable detail–as a bridge across which he could march his 18 episodes, after which the bridge could be ‘blown skyhigh.’ 16 June is now often known (and celebrated), especially in Ireland, as ‘Bloomsday.’
Ulysses was eventually cleared for publication in the United States, the judge concluding: ‘Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.’
It was published in the United States in 1934, and in Britain in 1936.
In 2001 The Bookseller magazine reported that a bookshop assistant had been asked for a copy of James Joyce Is Useless.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research
“You have no idea how many problems an author has to face during those feverish days when he is building a novel, and you have no idea how he solves them. Neither has he.”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
The Left Hand of Darkness ch. 3 (1969)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, women's history
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