“In The Red and the Black, what do the colors stand for? In Stendahl’s 1830 novel, the red refers to Napoleon’s colors or the military life, the black to the clergy or religious life.”
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
“The first novel (1963) by Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), an author of such reclusive habits that the only known photograph of him was taken in 1955. The title initial is the name under which a mysterious woman manifests herself at key moments of disaster that have contributed to the formation of modern Europe and America. V appears in various guises, including Victoria Wren, Victoria Meroving, Venus, Virgin, and Void. (The shape of the letter V many also symbolize the collision course between two otherwise unrelated chains of events.) The two protagonists, amont 200 named characters, are Herbert Stencil, obsessed with finding V, which he never does, and Benny Profane, an accident-prone realist. As Stencil’s father notes in his journal: ‘There is more behind and inside V than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she.’
V is also the title of a long poem (1985) by Tony Harrison (b. 1937), representing a kind of updating of the miners’ strike in Gray’s Elegy. The V of the title is a symbol of conflict (‘versus’). Harrison’s television broadcast of the poem in 1987 was controversial for its unflinching use of ‘four-letter words.'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“A novel (1957) by the Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). Set against the background of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war, it tells the story of poet and physician Yuri Zhivago, whose love for the beautiful Lara causes pain for all involved. In Russian, zhivago means ‘the living’, and the word has strong religious connotations: the Russian version of ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead’ (the question the angels ask the women who come to see Christ’s tomb in the Gospel of St. Luke) is ‘Chto vy ischyote zhivago mezhdu myortvykh?’ In addition, Yuri is the Russian version of George–the dragon-slaying saint.
The book brought Pasternak himself little happiness. Following his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was pilloried by literary rivals, who accused him of plagiarizing other works, and his companion Olga Ivinskaya, on whom Lara was based, was thrown into prison by the Soviets. The first Russian publication of the novel did not take place until 1987.
David Lean’s epic film version (1965) lasts over 190 minutes, and stars Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara. Maurice Jarre’s haunting ‘Lara’s Theme’, played on the balalaika, has become a favorite in all places where muzak is played.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Miss Nin’s usual rather sensitive and lyrical writing on her usual theme of erotica interlarded with psychoanalytic interpretations… Miss Nin is distinctly caviar to the general public but I’m afraid it’s only red caviar at that…”
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, women's history
“How are Gargantua and Pantagruel related? In Rabelais’s French satire Gargantua and Pantagruel (1533), Gargantua is Pantagruel’s father. Both are giants who go on humorous adventures.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“(Russian title: Odin den Ivana Denisovicha). A novel (1962; English translation 1963) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), first published outside the USSR. Live on one of Stalin’s labour camps in 1950 is seen through eyes of an inmate; the author was himself in such a camp from 1950 to 1953. A film version (1971), directed by Caspar Wrede and starring Tom Courtenay, was a fairly faithful adaptation of the original, with all its harrowing detail.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here is a reading on Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, with the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. This novel was part of the curriculum in the school in which I served the longest, though it may in retrospect have been for Advanced Placement English.
In any case, this is both an introduction and an overview of the novel–and its critique of colonialism belongs in every classroom, I submit.
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.
“Thirteen is a famously unlucky number in the Western world. I certainly grew up with the belief that to invite thirteen guests to sit around the table doomed the last to some nameless dread–so, to avoid that fate, out table was always laid to include fourteen. It was a belief shared by Napoleon, F.D. Roosevelt and John Paul Getty, and concern over the number 13 is the most common form of Western superstition. Hotels often have no room 13, tower blocks tend to avoid a 13th floor, and travel agents know that the thirteenth of a month (especially if it falls on a Friday) will be short of bookings.
The most common explanation of unlucky thirteen is the Last Supper, where thirteen sat down to eat, one of whom was a traitor plotting the arrest and judicial murder of his host and master. But similar stories can be found in many other cultures, such as the Viking Norse, who remembered how Loki stumbled into a gathering of twelve gods (from which he had been excluded) and in his envy started plotting the events that would lead to the end of the world.
Robert Graves enthusiastically listed in The White Goddess the various mythological companies of thirteen that tend to lead to the betrayal, if not sacrificial death, of one of their members: be they Arthur and his twelve nights, Odysseus and his twelve companions, Romulus and the twelve shepherds, Roland and the twelve peers of France, Jacob and his twelve sons, of Danish Hrolf and his twelve Berserks. Not to mention the thirteen dismembered portions of Osiris’s body recovered by Isis from the Nile.
The ultimate cause of our attitude to thirteen may be that the thirteenth month of the year was always weak and withered. For, although twelve lunar months almost fill up our solar year (to produce 360 days from twelve sets of 29 and a half days), there was always the issue a left-over period of five days. This was considered in ancient cultures to be the thirteenth month, a five-day oddity, often believed to be a period of immensely bad luck where the world was not policed by the normal powers, and evil spirits held brief reign. Some cultures made this into a Saturnalia-like carnival, where the norman roles of society were reversed; others deemed it a needful time for sacrifice.”
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.
Happy New Year! Here, for the first blog post of the New Year, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Beowulf.
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.
“An epic novel (published serially, 1864-9) by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). He originally planned to call it 1825, then, as he realized the core of his story lay during the Napoleonic Wars, he called it 1805, and this was the title used in the initial published episodes. At one point he re-titled it All’s Well That Ends Well, conceiving at that point that it would end happily. But as Tolstoy became more and more immersed in developing his philosophy of history, and his theories on the nature of war, he settled on the final sweeping title.
There have been two film versions. The first (1956) is a Hollywood production, directed by King Vidor, and lasts nearly three and a half hours. The second (1967) is a much-admired Soviet production directed by Sergei Bondarchuk; it was originally in four parts, totalling nearly nine hours, and was shown in the UK in two parts totalling over seven hours, reduced to something over six hours for the USA. The BBC TV serial of the novel, adapted by Jack Pulman and with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, was broadcast in 1972-3. Tolstoy’s novel also formed the basis of the opera, opus 91 (1941-53), by Prokofiev (1891-1953) to a libretto by the composer and Mira Mendelson.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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