“Commonplace Book: A personal notebook for recording literary passages, quotations, special thoughts, memories, etc.
‘In any case, Trapnel’s was still and unexplored period. Gwinnett added another item. ‘Did you know he kept a Commonplace Book during his last years?’ Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings’
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones died’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Jane Eyre. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four simple sentences and four comprehension questions. A basic, symmetrical, introduction to this landmark novel by Charlotte Bronte.
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.
“Christa Wolf: (1929-2011) German novelist and essayist. Wolf’s major theme is the individual damaged and crippled by society. Der geteilte Himmel (1963; tr Divided Heaven, 1983), a critical account of East German society, established her as a major writer. Her highly acclaimed novel Nachdenken uber Christa T. (1968; tr The Quest for Christa T, 1970), both a requiem for a dead friend and an analysis of the limits of individual development set by society, caused a debate about new modes of narration in East German literature. The novel Kindheitesmuster (1976; tr Patterns of Childhood, 1984) is an attempt to come to terms with the National Socialist past. In Kein Ort Nurgens (1979; tr No Place on Earth, 1982), Wolf Depicts a fictional meeting between Kleist and Karoline von Gunderrode, two alienated individuals, both poets and both suicides, who longed for a different society. With this and other works, Wolf contributed to a reevaluation of Romanticism in the German Democratic Republic. Reverting to mythological sources in Kassandra (1983; tr 1984), Wolf finds in the story of Cassandra a foreshadowing of what was to become reality for subsequent centuries: the exclusion of women as subjects of history. Written in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Storfall, Nachrichten eines Tages (1987; tr Accident. A Day’s News, 1989) deals with Western civilization’s potential for destruction. Wolf’s short story, Was bleibt (1990; tr What Remains and Other Stories, 1993) led to a controversy about the status of literature by former East German authors. Selections in English of Wolf’s other writings include The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories (1977), and The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays (1993).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
On this, the penultimate Friday of Women’s History Month 2024, here is a reading on Mrs. Dalloway, the novel by Virginia Woolf, and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I rather doubt anyone is teaching this book at the secondary level. I confess I have found this book, at which I’ve taken several passes, more than a bit of a challenge. Still, these materials introduce the novel, and in so doing introduce Virginia Woolf herself, a significant figure in women’s history.
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.
Moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on George Sand, nom de plume of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin. This is a half-page document with a reading of two sentences and two comprehension question. A short, symmetrical, introduction to this important nineteenth-century author.
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.
“Margery (Louise) Allingham: (1904-1966) British detective story writer. She published her first story at 8, her first novel at 19, and her first detective story in her early 20s. Her stories about the fictional detective about the fictional detective Albert Campion became very popular, and such novels as Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and The China Governess (1962), with their intellectual style and psychological insight, helped win detective fiction consideration as a serious literary genre.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Did Zelda Fitzgerald write any novels? One, Save me the Waltz (1932).
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
Tagged fiction/literature, united states history, women's history
Moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the novel Frankenstein. This is a full-page document with a reading of five sentences and four comprehension questions.
How has what is ostensibly a horror story (which I’ve always read as an allegory on the naivete of Enlightenment notions about the perfectibility of man) to do with Women’s History Month? Well, this novel’s author is Mary Shelley, who was also known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley after her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who was a pioneering feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
And while I am conflicted about using these women’s husbands to identify them, the two men are important for understanding the milieu in which Mary Shelley and her mother lived. Mary Shelley came by her name through her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley, the major English romantic poet. Mary Wollstonecraft married William Godwin, the British journalist, political philosopher, and novelist who, if he were alive today, would be quickly dismissed by the far right wing of the Republican Party as a man of the “woke left.”
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.
“Speaking of Hollywood money, Mrs. Parker said: ‘It’s congealed snow; it melts in your hand.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, poetry, women's history
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