Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Monday, July 21, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Amir lives with his father, Baba, in Kabul, Afghanistan. His mother, who had died during childbirth, had left behind a collection of Sufi literature. From early childhood, Amir likes to read stories from her books to his servant and playmate, Hassan. While Amir is privileged and able to go to school, Hassan is busy with housework. However, in their free time they are good friends. To commemorate these happy times, Amir carves their names on a pomegranate tree.
Living in a single-parent home, Amir yearns for his father’s attention and gets jealous of Hassan when his father bestows favors on Hassan, favors like arranging cosmetic surgery for his harelip. Amir’s desire for his father’s affection also stems from his father’s indifference toward his son’s interest in books. When it is time for the local kite-flying contest, Amir gets excited because he knows that his father will be watching him with genuine interest.
Hassan is excited about the contest, too, and after Amir wins, Hassan runs and catches the prizewinning kite for his friend. Unfortunately, the neighborhood bully, Assef, and his companions stop Hassan and demand the kite from him. Hassan does not surrender the kite and is physically assaulted and raped by Assef. Amir sees the assault but, fearing confrontation with the bully, does nothing—an act of betrayal that will affect Amir into adulthood and forever change his relationship with Hassan.
Both Amir and Hassan know the social gap that defines their identities. In Afghan culture, Amir is a Pashtun and Hassan is a Hazara, which makes him a servant. Religious difference also sets them apart, even though they both are Muslim: Amir is Sunni, and Hassan is Shia. Pashtuns, the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, make fun of Hazaras, a minority ethnic group, treating them as pariahs. Children taunt Hassan’s father, Ali, as “a slant-eyed donkey,” and Assef insults Hassan as a “flat-nosed” Hazara who does not belong in Afghanistan.
Amir is not disturbed with his servant-master friendship until the kite incident. Even as a twelve-year-old kid, he is old enough to know that he has not been good. Hassan’s presence reminds him of his own guilt, so he asks his father to get new servants. Baba refuses but, instead, frames Hassan, accusing him of theft; Hassan and his father leave Kabul. A few years later, because of the Russian invasion, Baba and Amir secretly leave Kabul, too. They cross the border into Pakistan after a difficult journey and emigrate to the United States.
Baba adjusts to the cultural and economic challenges of living in the United States and is happy with Amir’s educational success. Amir had majored in English to pursue a writing career, his childhood dream. On weekends, he helps his father sell at the local flea market, where he meets Soraya, the daughter of an expatriate Afghan general. Amir and Soraya soon fall in love, and Amir’s father makes lavish arrangements for a grand wedding. Baba, who has been suffering from cancer, dies one month after the wedding.
Amir and Soraya are happy together, but they remain childless for many years. Twenty years later Amir is a successful novelist in the United States. An old friend of his father, Rahim Khan, calls Amir on the phone and invites him to Pakistan. Amir meets him and soon learns that Baba had sold his home to Rahim. Rahim had then brought back Hassan and his family to live with him. Unfortunately, in Rahim’s absence, Talibs had come to the house and shot Hassan and his wife; their son, Sohrab, ended up in an orphanage.
Rahim also reveals that Hassan was actually Baba’s son, and Amir’s half-brother. Amir is outraged by this belated discovery, but he also recalls his own guilt. Thus, he embarks on a dangerous journey to Afghanistan to atone his past sins and to rescue Sohrab, his nephew.
Afghanistan is now under the oppressive control of the Taliban. After a great deal of searching, Amir meets a Talib, who agrees to arrange a meeting with Sohrab. Amir goes to the appointed place and recognizes Assef, the neighborhood bully from their younger days, who is now a Talib; Assef practically owns Sohrab. Assef says he will release Sohrab only if Amir will engage in one-on-one physical combat with him, and win. In this mismatched fight, Amir is seriously injured. Sohrab hits Assef in the eye with something fired from his slingshot, and Amir and Sohrab manage to escape.
Sohrab and Amir flee to Pakistan, and Amir is hospitalized. He plans to return to the United States with Sohrab after he recovers from his injuries, but because he is not a legal guardian of the child, he cannot obtain a U.S. visa for him. A lawyer advises Amir that to legally adopt Sohrab, it would be necessary to place Sohrab in an orphanage. When Amir reveals this plan to Sohrab, the child is devastated and feels betrayed; Amir had promised him that he would never send him to an orphanage. Sohrab attempts suicide, and Amir finds his nephew’s body in the bathroom, covered with blood. Amir screams for help and vows to become a devout Muslim if God will spare Sohrab’s life. Sohrab lives, but he no longer talks or smiles.
Finally, Amir is able to return to the United States with Sohrab after Soraya obtains a humanitarian visa for the child. The couple do their best to make Sohrab happy in his new home, and Amir forbids his father-in-law from ever referring to Sohrab as a Hazara. Later, Sohrab shows signs of a faint smile as Amir runs after a prizewinning kite.
(source: http://www.enotes.com/)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Mariam and her mother, Nana, a former housekeeper for Mariam’s wealthy father, Jalil, have been banished to a hut near a small Afghan village to avoid humiliating Jalil’s three wives and nine children in Herat. Nana bitterly disparages both Mariam and Jalil, who visits his daughter weekly. Even though the village mullah urges Nana to send the girl to school, she refuses, insisting that the only skill a woman needs is endurance.
To celebrate her fifteenth birthday, Mariam begs Jalil to take her to a cinema in Herat, but both parents strenuously object. When Jalil fails to meet her, Mariam walks alone to the city, only to be told that her father is not at home. On her return she discovers that Nana has killed herself.
Reluctantly, Jalil takes Mariam into his home. The three wives, who wish to get rid of her permanently, inform her that they have found a suitor, Rasheed, a forty-five-year-old shoemaker from Kabul, whom she will marry tomorrow. At the wedding, she is ignored by her father. She mopes in Kabul until Rasheed instructs her to behave like a wife. His only son had drowned, and he wants another son. Waiting at the communal oven, Mariam encounters Fariba, a politically and socially liberal neighbor, whose husband, Hakim, is a teacher.
Conservative Rasheed buys Mariam a burka, a floor-length garment that covers her completely; he orders her to wear the garment in public. He also thoroughly disapproves of Fariba, who merely covers her hair with a scarf. Rasheed takes Mariam to a restaurant, buys her a beautiful shawl, and shares her bed that night, but when she miscarries in the public bathhouse, his attitude changes. After four years of marriage and six more miscarriages, which he regards as personal insults, he believes Mariam is a useless nineteen year old; he frequently beats her.
Meanwhile, Hakim and Fariba have a daughter, Laila. Fariba is full of fire until their two sons go on jihad against the invading Soviets. Then, blaming Hakim for permitting them to leave, she retreats to her bed. After the brothers are killed, Laila becomes a caregiver for her parents, preparing her father’s dinner while he helps her with schoolwork. A calm and patient scholar, Hakim urges her to get an education before marrying.
When the Soviets are finally driven from Afghanistan, unrest returns to Kabul, as local warlords turn against each other. Fariba supports the Mujahideen, the Islamic militia that her sons had joined, but Hakim fears them and wants to leave Kabul. As ethnic violence continues, Laila is forced to drop out of school after a fellow student is blown to bits in the street.
Laila’s closest friend, the neighbor boy Tariq, has an artificial leg because of a Soviet land mine. Tariq and Laila become intimate after Tariq announces that his family is going to a refugee camp in Pakistan. Although he begs Laila to come with them, she cannot leave her father, who seems lost without Fariba’s support. Hakim and Fariba are killed when their home is shelled, and Rasheed finds Laila injured in the rubble. Mariam reluctantly tends her as she recovers. Later, Laila is informed that Tariq has died in a Pakistani hospital. Observing her husband with Laila, Mariam realizes that Rasheed, now sixty years old, is courting the fourteen-year-old girl. Mariam attempts to dissuade him, but she is at his mercy, as is Laila, who accepts his marriage offer because she is pregnant with Tariq’s baby. She hopes to deceive Rasheed.
Rasheed keeps his new bride at home, and Mariam serves them both. The two women resent each other until Laila’s baby girl, Aziza, brings them together. In time, Mariam becomes another mother to Laila and a grandmother to the child. Laila begs her to escape with them to Pakistan. They prepare to flee but cannot travel without a male relative. A young husband offers to help but betrays them, keeping their money. They are questioned by police and returned to Rasheed, who hurls Aziza across the room and imprisons the women for three days.
The fundamentalist Taliban seizes Kabul, leading Rasheed to view them as liberators. They distribute strict rules: All men must have beards; no school for girls; no jobs for women, who must stay in their homes unless with a male relative. The university is closed, books other than the Qur՚n are burned, and musicians are imprisoned. Rasheed threatens to send Aziza away or to lie about Laila’s behavior to the authorities. Then Laila discovers she is pregnant with Rasheed’s child.
In labor, Laila goes to the former women’s hospital and is turned away because the hospital now accepts male patients only. She is sent to a small hospital without medicine, clean water, or electricity. She requires a caesarean section and must suffer through the surgery without anesthetics. Her female doctor, who is required to perform her duties while wearing a burka, is unable to properly see through the garment, so a nurse guards the door to warn of any approaching Taliban. Laila gives birth to a boy, Zalmai.
Two-year-old Zalmai loves both parents but favors Rasheed, who is gentle with him while holding his wives in contempt. Although in debt, Rasheed brings home a television for his son, but decides that daughter Aziza, who is six years old, will beg on the streets. Laila objects, and Rasheed slaps her. They struggle, then he shoves a gun barrel in her mouth. Mariam ends up digging a hole to hide the forbidden television.
Rasheed’s shop burns, and he must sell nearly everything. He steals food, but the family begins to starve. Finally, Aziza is sent to an orphanage so she will get some food. The director seems kind and comforts Laila, who is weeping, but Aziza panics when her mother leaves. Laila is permitted to visit her daughter but cannot travel without Rasheed, who often deliberately stops and turns back, forcing her to do the same. Without him, she risks a beating from the Taliban, but she quickly learns to use padding to cushion the potential blows.
Tariq suddenly appears at Laila’s home; the story of his death was false. Son Zalmai, although still an innocent, throws a tantrum, luring his mother away from Tariq. Furious, Rasheed beats her with his belt, but she retaliates. He begins to choke her. Mariam, realizing he will murder both of them if he can, hits him with a shovel. Laila revives from the beating, horrified, but Mariam is very calm. Together they dispose of Rasheed’s body, and Laila tells Zalmai his father has gone away. While Laila, Aziza, and Zalmai disappear, Mariam refuses to escape; she will accept the blame. She is sent to a women’s prison and publicly executed for murdering her husband.
Arriving with the children in Pakistan, Laila and Tariq marry. Once the Taliban are driven from Afghanistan, the family returns to contribute to the rebuilding.Kabul has changed—a seeming normalcy—although the local warlords responsible for so many deaths have also returned. Laila teaches at the orphanage where Aziza once lived, and she is once again pregnant.
(source:http://www.enotes.com/)
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevski treats the problem of crime and the criminal mentality. He is not interested in the social aspects of criminal behavior, and there is little said in the novel about the legalities of crime. Dostoevski has an interior view of criminality, a conviction that crime and its inevitable punishment are deeply seated aspects of the human spirit.
Raskolnikov (the novel’s hero) is presented from the inside. The reader knows what he did before knowing why he did it, and the story is told as a gradual revelation of the hero’s motives. That accounts for the uncanny suspense of the first several chapters: The reader continually searches for the reason that Raskolnikov has murdered the pawnbroker. Intertwined with the reader’s suspense is the slowly dawning realization that Raskolnikov himself does not know his motive. This “double suspense” creates a dense texture that gives the novel its complexity, a complexity laid over the relative simplicity of the plot.
As the novel progresses, Raskolnikov’s possible motives become ever more bizarre. The consistent notion behind his behavior is revealed in his confession to the innocent prostitute, Sonia, after the crime, when he blurts out that he did it because he only wanted to see if he could go beyond a normal person’s revulsion against such an act. This admission seems to suggest that Raskolnikov is an egotist, a self-styled superman who wants to see if he can get away with transgressing the law. The reader comes to find, however, that Raskolnikov’s impulses go more deeply than that: Raskolnikov wants to see if he can overstep the limits of evil itself, if he can exert ultimate power over another person. That is what the murder means to him.
Dostoevski’s brilliant unfolding of Raskolnikov’s deepest motive really begins after the confession to Sonia. Before this point in the novel, the reader is puzzled by a welter of seemingly conflicting evidence about the hero’s personality. Raskolnikov says he does not believe in God and that there is no arbiter of absolute good and evil. Yet he is numb with self-doubt. In spite of his logical decision to commit murder, he is troubled and hesitant. His horrible dream of the peasants beating a horse to death causes him to awake trembling at the very thought that he himself might be so cruel. As he later walks along the banks of the Neva, his obsession with committing an evil act alternates with a loathing for the very idea. Then, after the deed has been done, something curious occurs that turns out to be the key to understanding his true motive and the rest of the novel. It becomes clear that Raskolnikov’s response to having committed murder is merely puzzlement. In other words, he shows neither remorse nor joy. He realizes that he feels the same way that he has always felt.
Finally, the reader understands that the loathsome criminality of Raskolnikov’s motive lies in its amorality. He had decided to murder the old woman pawnbroker on strictly logical grounds, but the unease that he continues to feel is not a guilty conscience stemming from a too-strict logicality. Had he murdered for money or out of anger and then been caught, his punishment would have been easier than that which comes to gnaw at him. Having made a cold-blooded sociopathic decision to assert himself at the expense of another’s very identity, he finds his feelings locked into the conventional morality that his intellect so despises. He is thus caught in an emotional vacuum, the most inescapable kind of punishment. Raskolnikov has murdered an old woman, but the inability to have an authentically strong feeling about it has murdered him spiritually. In a dream, he tries to kill her repeatedly, slicing at her skull with an ax, but as he looks closely into her face he can see her laughing horribly. Raskolnikov has really killed himself with the ax of cold-blooded self-assertion. He has no clearly definable motive because he is a sociopathic personality.
In the end of the story, Dostoevski makes clear how problematic such a personality is for society. Once again, the author’s meaning is revealed in a dream sequence. Raskolnikov is ill in Siberia and dreams that he and the rest of the world have been devastated by an infestation of highly intelligent germs. The infestation causes insanity. The infected believe themselves to be logical, scientific, progressive, and morally sound; yet they get sick and go mad from the infection. Anarchy results, and human society disintegrates. Dostoevski’s point is that sociopathic personalities are like these microbes, able to kill everything that they touch.
The sickness of cold-blooded amorality is shown against a background of conventional, commonsensical standards that define the boundaries of good and evil. The relationship between them is seen in the novel’s other characters. Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, is about to be married to Luzhin, a manipulative businessman, and the morally grotesque Svidrigailov hovers around them, while the prostitute, Sonia, and the policeman, Porfiry, attempt to maneuver the hero into a confession. Each relationship is flawed by the characters’ tendency toward self-serving logicality, none more self-indulgent than that between Svidrigailov and Dunya, caused for the most part by Svidrigailov’s profligacy. Years of cold philosophizing have left Svidrigailov with no heartfelt values, not even the common sense to distinguish between the most fundamental kinds of good and evil. In order to escape his emotional wretchedness, he fills his days with a sinister kind of debauchery. When his love for Dunya is rejected, he is able to shoot himself with a cool detachment. Sonia, although kindly and sensitive, is nevertheless a prostitute; like the others, she has murdered herself by becoming a tool of the dissoluteness of other people. She, like the others, has defined herself by coolly deciding on a course of action that indulges others in their weaknesses. It is the ultimate punishment that results from sociopathic attitudes and behaviors: Like the crime, the punishment is cold, wretched, impersonal, and ultimately without any satisfaction.
(source: http://www.enotes.com/)
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney was born into a Roman Catholic farming family in rural Country Derry, Northern Ireland (Ulster), the predominantly Protestant and industrial province of the United Kingdom on the island of Ireland. Much of his boyhood was spent on a farm, one border of which was formed by a stream that also divided Ulster from Eire, the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland. As a schoolboy, he won scholarships, first at the age of eleven to St. Colomb’s College, a Catholic preparatory school, and then to Queen’s University, Belfast, from which he graduated in 1961 with a first class honors degree in English. There he joined a group of young poets working under the direction of creative writers on the faculty.
He began his professional career as a secondary school English teacher, after which he went into teacher education, eventually joining the English faculty of Queen’s in 1966. In 1965, he married Marie Devlin; they would have two sons and a daughter. When civil dissension broke out in Ulster in 1969, eventually leading to martial law, Heaney, as a Catholic-reared poet, became increasingly uncomfortable. In 1972, he relocated to a manor in the Eire countryside to write full time, although he also became a faculty member of a college in Dublin. Beginning in 1979, he adopted the practice of accepting academic appointments at various American universities and spending the rest of the year in Dublin. In 1986, he was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and in 1989, he became professor of poetry at Oxford University. To accommodate both positions, he split his time between a home in Dublin and one in Boston. In August, 2006, he suffered a stroke but has recovered.
(Source :http://www.enotes.com/)
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch, born Jean Iris Murdoch in Dublin, Ireland, in 1919, was the only child of John Wills Hughes Murdoch, a British civil service employee, and his wife, Irene Alice Richardson Murdoch, who abandoned her hopes of being an opera singer to marry at the age of eighteen. Although the family resettled in England during Iris’s first year and she grew up outside London, in Hammersmith and Chiswick, she maintained a strong allegiance to Ireland and considered herself Anglo-Irish.
Murdoch spent holidays in Ireland with her Gaelic relations. An only child, she fantasized about having siblings, notably about having a brother, although as she matured, she realized that had she had a brother, the family’s limited resources probably would have been spent to send him rather than her to the university.
Murdoch’s early education was in the environs of London. At the age of thirteen, she qualified for a scholarship, one of two awarded, to the Badminton School in Bristol. After finishing Badminton, she received a scholarship to Oxford University’s Somerset College, where she studied classical literature and philosophy. She also was quite involved in drama and the arts during her years at Oxford. She was granted a bachelor of arts degree with first class honors in 1942.
Only twenty years old when Britain was plunged into World War II, Murdoch completed her university studies but then worked for the British Treasury in London. She served as an assistant from 1942 until 1944, and she learned enough about the structure of Britain’s civil service to write about it convincingly in some of her subsequent novels.
Later, she became an administrator for the United Nations National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She served in London and, at war’s end, in Belgium, where she met Jean-Paul Sartre; she also served in Austria, where she worked at an encampment for displaced persons, an experience that helped her create the character of Nina, a displaced dressmaker facing deportation to Eastern Europe, in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956).
Upon her return to England, Murdoch spent a year doing little save for reading philosophical works and exploring London, whose byways she uses effectively in many of her novels. In 1947, she received a fellowship to study philosophy at Cambridge University’s Newnham College. After completion of her studies, she was a tutor in philosophy at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, until 1963.
By 1962, Murdoch had published six novels. Under the Net (1954) was the first of these, followed by The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle (1957), The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), and An Unofficial Rose (1962). She was soon to embark on a project with J. B. Priestley, who collaborated with her on turningA Severed Head into a play that opened in London in 1963, was produced in New York City the same year, and was released as a film by Columbia Pictures in 1971.
Life’s Work
From the beginning of her professional career, Murdoch’s consuming intellectual interest was moral philosophy. Well schooled in the history of philosophy and in ethics, she was as comfortable discussing Plato and Aristotle as she was in writing about Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, which she did in her landmark study Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, published by Yale University Press in 1953. Her novels consistently explore the moral questions with which she grappled as a philosopher and as a university lecturer in philosophy.
During her university days, Murdoch, who leaned to the left politically, went so far as to join the Communist Party briefly, as many intellectuals did in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. Her past membership in the Party resulted in her being denied a visa to study in the United States when she was granted a scholarship in the late 1940’s.
Murdoch was intrigued by the theory, advanced by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, that all people build their own nets, or structural protocols, in their lives. Murdoch had been exposed to the existentialism of Sartre and Albert Camus, with its emphasis on the meaninglessness of human existence. This approach is based on the notion that humans exercise free will and that the individual is all-important.
Although Murdoch denied that she was an existentialist, she imbibed a great deal from this school of thought, which, combined with Wittgenstein’s notion of how people seek to structure their lives, emerges as a dominant theme in many of her novels. The title of her first novel, Under the Net, refers directly to Wittgenstein’s theory that individuals create their own nets or structures. The protagonist, Jake Donaghue, seeks to find a structure for his life, but finally he rejects the net and accepts life as it is, acknowledging the significance of other people while denying the centrality of self. This first Murdoch novel, which reflected much of the hopelessness that Britain experienced following World War II, evoked considerable discussion and resulted in the author being widely recognized as a writer of note. The book was commended by most of the leading critics of the day and brought its creator considerable attention both within Britain and beyond its boundaries.
In Under the Net, which is dedicated to Raymond Queneau, Jake Donaghue displays two novels prominently on his bookshelf: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy(1938) and Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami (1943; Pierrot, 1950). Murdoch publicly acknowledged her considerable debt to both Queneau and Beckett, whose comic ironies are not unlike those in this first Murdoch novel.
(source:http://www.enotes.com/)
Monday, July 14, 2014
A & P by John Updike
“A & P” is a short initiation story in which the young protagonist, in a gesture of empty heroism, quits his job at the supermarket because the manager has embarrassed three girls—and learns just “how hard the world was going to be to him hereafter.”
Most of the action in the story takes place in the short time Sammy stands at his cash register on a summer afternoon watching three girls from the nearby beach colony, dressed in “nothing but bathing suits,” wander the store in search of a jar of “Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream.” By the time the three reach his checkout stand, Sammy is halfway in love with their leader, a girl he nicknames “Queenie,” who has “nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her.” Sammy is attracted to the girl not only by her physical beauty but also by her regal bearing and by her clear disdain for small-town mores. Sammy is highly sensitive to the class differences between “the Point,” where the three are apparently vacationing (“a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy”), and the supermarket where he works (where “houseslaves in pin curlers” push shopping carts up and down the aisles, followed by squalling children).
Sammy’s fantasies are rudely interrupted when Lengel, the officious supermarket manager (and Sunday school teacher), notices and reprimands the girls for their dress: “We want you decently dressed when you come in here.” Queenie blushes, and Sammy jumps to their defense in the only way he can: “I say ’I quit’ to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero.” They do not, and Sammy is left to confront Lengel. “You didn’t have to embarrass them,” he says. Lengel explains, in defense of the town’s provincial mores, “It was they who were embarrassing us.” Lengel reminds Sammy that his impulsive action will hurt his parents and that he will “feel this” for the rest of his life, but Sammy is trapped by his own chivalric gesture, and by the romantic code of which it is a part and by which he swears: “It seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it.” Remembering how Lengel “made that pretty girl blush,” Sammy punches “the No Sale tab” on his register and walks out into the hot and empty parking lot.
(Sourcehttp://www.enotes.com/:)
Friday, July 11, 2014
Literary Terms for English
Literary Forms (fiction) - many novels are written in more than one form, and there are many more forms than we will study in English 6. This is a beginner's sampling.
Figurative Language - In general, this is a way of using words to make imaginative connections in the reader's "inner eye." These connections can be called images. As you learn to recognize and appreciate figurative language, your appreciation and ability to actively read good writing will increase. These are the types of figurative language on which we will concentrate this year:
Plot diagram
Lies the bright moonlight
Like frost upon the earth.
Lifting my eyes,
I see the bright moon.
Closing my eyes,
I see home. (from Dragonwings)The concrete meaning is this: The narrator is in a strange bed at night and the light of the moon makes him think of home.- literal vs. figurative meaning - relates to the meanings of words and phrases or expressions. For example, "She was all ears" has a figurative meaning (She was listening intently) as well as a literal meaning (Her body was composed of ears or she had a huge set of ears). Lewis Carroll and other authors use and confuse the meanings to create nonsense and humor. In some novels, characters who are literal-minded are a source of ridicule.
end rhyme is the repetition of the end sounds of the words at the ends of lines of poetry;
near rhyme or off rhyme or slant rhyme is not quite true or pure - "tree" rhyme with "hurry";
internal rhyme rhymes a word in the middle of a line of poetry with a word elsewhere in the line.
Many poems do not use rhythm.
assonance - the repetition of vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u, ou, ea, etc.) - "I wore a fleecy green jacket easy and tall."
consonance - is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words within a line of poetry - "Slanting silver slits of rain."
(Source: http://www.leasttern.com/)
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Important Books & Authors
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