“Homophone: (Greek ‘same sound’): A word which is pronounced the same as another but has a different spelling and meaning, e.g.: foul/fowl; wood/would; pearl/purl.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Figurative (adjective): Characterized by or using figures of speech, and hence having meaning beyond the explicit or literal; rhetorical or metaphorical; imaginative or ornate in language; elaborately expressed. Adverb: figuratively; noun: figurativeness.
‘The metonymy red tape for the routine of bureaucracy, synecdoche mercury for thermometer, the antithesis Man proposes and God disposes, the famous Dickens syllepsis (used preferably for humor only) Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair…, the allusion He is the Croesus of the community, the analogy Chemical elements are to compounds as letters are to words, and the editor’s innuendo Flames, James, written to an assistant named James, on the margin of a contribution with the request that it be printed entire or consigned to the flames—all are illustrative of the possibilities of figurative language in the cause of economy.’ John B. Opdyke, Say What You Mean”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Yet even as I wince at the terrible risk we all took, I remember thinking at the time that it was the right decision—because it it felt as though the hand of fate was ushering us forward.”
Melba Pattillo Beals on the Integration of Little Rock Schools, Warriors Don’t Cry (1994)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“To what poem is Joan Didion referring in the title of her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968)? She refers to the last line of ‘The Second Coming‘ (1921) by William Butler Yeats: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem.'”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Magdalena Abakanowicz: (1930-2017) Polish sculptor. A descendant of nobility, she graduated from Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955. She became the pioneer and leading exponent of sculpture made of woven fabrics, calling her three-dimensional weavings ‘Abakans’ (from her surname). She produced series of fabric forms called Heads (1975), Backs (1976-80), Embryology (1980), and Catharsis (1986). She has also exhibited paintings, drawings, and sculptures in other media internationally, and has been widely imitated in Europe and the U.S. Beginning in 1965, she taught at Poznan.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Clare Boothe Luce: (1903-1987): American playwright and diplomat. Following her divorce from George T. Brokaw in 1929, Luce worked as an editor at Vogue and Vanity Fair. She published a novel, Stuffed Shirts (1933), under the name Clare Boothe Brokaw. In 1935 she married the publisher Henry Luce. She is best known for a series of theatrical successes, including The Women (1936), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), Margin for Error (1939), Child of the Morning (1951), and Slam the Door Softly (1970). Luce’s political interests led her to public service. She served two terms (1943-47) in the House of Representatives from Connecticut and was ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956. She was confirmed as ambassador to Brazil in 1959 but resigned without serving because of controversy surrounding her confirmation.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Nawal El Saadawi: (1931-2021) Egyptian writer. The foremost woman writer of Egypt and the Middle East, el Saadawi has published nearly thirty books of fiction and sociology. She is also an influential activist for woman’s rights and a medical doctor. About half of her work has been translated from Arabic into English, including several novels. Woman at Point Zero (1983) is about a young village girl forced into prostitution and condemned to die for murder. The novel, which has been translated into twenty-two languages, chronicles the sexual exploitation of women in Egypt and examine the narrow range of options available to women in a conformist society. Other novels include God Dies by the Nile (1987), The Fall of the Imam (1988), and The Innocence of the Devil (1992). El Saadawi’s fiction draws on indigenous Arabic narratives, and thus her prose often seems highly stylized and poetic. Death of an Ex-Minister and Other Stories (tr 1987) reveals her experiments with diction, with the various narrative voices usually speaking in a monologue. The Hidden Face of Eve (1980), a sociological work, was the first book to document the horrors of clitoridectomy in northeastern Africa. El Saadawi has also written a travel account and political tracts devoted to women’s causes.
As Health Minister under the Anwar Sadat regime, el Saadawi was imprisoned for her outspoken opposition to that government’s social policies, which produced Memoirs from a Women’s Prison (tr 1986). In 1982 she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), and international women’s organization which has a consultative status with the United Nations and combats state repression and censorship, The Cairo chapter of AWSA was forcibly closed in 1991, though it continues to operate without headquarters.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and him in all the constitutions and laws is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the violation of laws. There is not she or her or hers in the tax laws, and this is equally true in of all the criminal laws.”
Quoted in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1899)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“When was Poetry magazine founded? The forum for works by many of the most influential American poets of the first part of the twentieth century was founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“The invitation from the White House came by telephone on July 3 [1997]. After several years’ erosion of arts funding and hostile propaganda from the religious right and the Republican Congress, the House vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts was looming. That vote would break as news on July 10; my refusal of the National Medal for the Arts would run as a sidebar story alongside in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle.
In fact, I was unaware of the timing. My refusal came directly out of my work as a poet and essayist and citizen drawn to the interfold of personal and public experience. I had recently been thinking and writing about the shrinking of the social compact, of whatever it was this country had ever meant when it called itself a democracy: the shredding of the vision of government of the people, by the people, for the people.
‘We the people–still an excellent phrase,’ said the playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all. And I had for years been feeling both personal and public grief, fear, hunger, and the need to render this, my time, in the language of my art.
Whatever was ‘newsworthy’ about my refusal was not about a single individual–not myself, not President Clinton. Nor was it about a single political party. Both parties have displayed a crude affinity for the interests of corporate power, while deserting the majority of the people, especially are most vulnerable. Like so many others, I’ve watched the dismantling of our public education, the steep rise in our incarceration rates, the demonization of our young black men, the accusation against our teen-age mothers, the selling of health care–public and private–to the highest bidders, the export of subsistence-level jobs in the United States to even lower-wage countries, the use of below-minimum-wage prison labor to break strikes and raise profits, the scapegoating of immigrants, the denial of dignity and minimal security to working and poor people. At the same time, we’ve witnessed the acquisition of publishing houses, once risk-taking conduits of creativity, by conglomerates driven single-mindedly to fast profits, the acquisition of major communications and media by those same interests, the sacrifice of the arts and public libraries in stripped-down school and civic budgets, and, most recently, the evisceration of the National Endowment for the Arts. Piece by piece the democratic process has been losing ground to the accumulation of private wealth.”
Excerpted from: Hunter, J, Paul, Alison Booth, and Kelly J. Mays. The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Ninth Edition. New York: Norton, 2007.
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