The General Prologue To Canturbury Tales

The most popular part of the Canterbury Tales is the General Prologue, which has long been admired for the lively, individualized portraits it offers. More recent criticism has reacted against this approach, claiming that the portraits are indicative of social types, part of a tradition of social satire, "estates satire", and insisting that they should not be read as individualized character portraits like those in a novel. Yet it is sure that Chaucer's capacity of human sympathy, like Shakespeare's, enabled him to go beyond the conventions of his time and create images of individualized human subjects that have been found not merely credible but endearing in every period from his own until now.

It is the General Prologue that serves to establish firmly the framework for the entire story-collection: the pilgrimage that risks being turned into a tale-telling competition. The title "General Prologue" is a modern invention, although a few manuscripts call it prologus. There are very few major textual differences between the various manuscripts. The structure of the General Prologue is a simple one. After an elaborate introduction in lines 1 - 34, the narrator begins the series of portraits (lines 35 - 719). These are followed by a report of the Host's suggestion of a tale-telling contest and its acceptance (lines 720 - 821). On the following morning the pilgrims assemble and it is decided that the Knight shall tell the first tale (lines 822 - 858).

Nothing indicates when Chaucer began to compose the General Prologue and there are no variations between manuscripts that might suggest that he revised it after making an initial version. It is sometimes felt that the last two portraits, of Pardoner and Summoner, may have been added later but there is no evidence to support this. The portraits do not follow any particular order after the first few pilgrims have been introduced; the Knight who comes first is socially the highest person present (the Host calls him 'my mayster and my lord' in line 837).

The Knight is the picture of a professional soldier, come straight from foreign wars with clothes all stained from his armour. His travels are remarkably vast; he has fought in Prussia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain, North Africa, and Turkey against pagans, Moors, and Saracens, killing many. The variety of lords for whom he has fought suggests that he is some kind of mercenary, but it seems that Chaucer may have known people at the English court with similar records. The narrator insists: "He was a verray, parfit, gentil knight," but some modern readers, ill at ease with idealized warriors, and doubtful about the value of the narrator's enthusiasms, have questioned this evaluation.

His son, the Squire, is by contrast an elegant young man about court, with fashionable clothes and romantic skills of singing and dancing.

Their Yeoman is a skilled servant in charge of the knight's land, his dress is described in detail, but not his character.

The Prioress is one of the most fully described pilgrims, and it is with her that we first notice the narrator's refusal to judge the value of what he sees. Her portrait is more concerned with how she eats than how she prays. She is rather too kind to animals, while there is no mention of her kindness to people. Finally, she has a costly set of beads around her arm, which should be used for prayer, but end in a brooch inscribed ambiguously Amor vincit omnia (Virgil's "Love conquers all"). She has a Nun with her, and "three" priests. This is a problem in counting the total number of pilgrims as twenty-nine: the word 'three' must have been added later on account of the rhyme, while only one Nun's Priest is in fact given a Tale and he is not the subject of a portrait here.

The Monk continues the series of incongruous church- people; in this description the narratorial voice often seems to be echoing the monk's comments in indirect quotation. He has many horses at home; he does not respect his monastic rule, but goes hunting instead of praying. The narrator expresses surprisingly strong support for the Monk's chosen style of living.

The Friar follows, and by now it seems clear that Chaucer has a special interest in church-people who so confidently live in contradiction with what is expected of them; the narrator, though, gives no sign of feeling any problem, as when he reports that the "worthy" Friar avoided the company of lepers and beggars. By this point the alert reader is alert to the narrator's too-ready use of 'worthy' but critics are still unsure of what Chaucer's intended strategy was here.

The Merchant is briefly described, and is followed by the Clerk of Oxenford (Oxford) who is as sincere a student as could be wished: poor, skinny like his horse, and book-loving.

The Sergeant at Law is an expert lawyer, and with him is the Franklin, a gentleman from the country whose main interest is food: "It snowed in his house of meat and drink." Then Chaucer adds a brief list of five tradesmen belonging to the same fraternity, dressed in its uniform: a Haberdasher, a Carpenter, a Weaver, a Dyer and a Tapestry-maker. None of these is described here or given a Tale to tell later. They have brought their Cook with them, he is an expert, his skills are listed, as well as some unexpected personal details. The Shipman who is described next is expert at sailing and at stealing the wine his passengers bring with them; he is also a dangerous character, perhaps a pirate.

The Doctor of Physic is praised by the narrator, "He was a verray parfit praktisour," and there follows a list of the fifteen main masters of medieval medicine; the fact that he, like most doctors in satire, "loved gold in special" is added at the end.

The Wife of Bath is the only woman, beside the Prioress and her companion Nun, on this pilgrimage. Again the narrator is positive: "She was a worthy womman al hir live" and he glides quickly over the five husbands that later figure in such detail in her Prologue, where also we may read how she became deaf. She is a business woman of strong self-importance, and her elaborate dress is a sign of her character as well as her wealth.

From her, we pass to the most clearly idealized portrait in the Prologue, the Parson. While the previous churchmen were all interested in things of this world more than in true christianity, the Parson represents the opposite pole.

He is accompanied by his equally idealized brother, the Plowman, "a true swinker" (hard-working man) "Living in peace and perfect charity." If the Parson is the model churchman, the Plowman is the model lay christian, as in Piers Plowman, one who is always ready to help the poor. It is sometimes suggested that the choice of a Plowman shows that Chaucer had read a version of Piers Plowman.

The series then ends with a mixed group of people of whom most are quite terrible: the Miller is a kind of ugly thug without charm. The Manciple is praised as a skillful steward in a household of lawyers; they are clever men but he is cleverest, since he cheats them all, the narrator cheerfully tells us. The Reeve is the manager of a farm, and he too is lining his own pocket.

Last we learn of the Summoner and the Pardoner, two grotesque figures on the edge of the church, living by it without being priests; one administers the church courts, the other sells pardons (indulgences). Children are afraid of the Summoner's face, he is suffering from some kind of skin disease; he is corrupt, as the narrator tells us after naively saying "A better fellow should men not find." But it is the Pardoner who is really odd, and modern critics have enjoyed discussing just what Chaucer meant by saying: "I trowe he were a gelding or a mare". With his collection of pigs' bones in a glass, that he uses as relics of saints to delude simple poor people, he is a monster in every way, and he concludes the list of pilgrims.

The narrator of this Prologue is Chaucer, but this pilgrim Chaucer is not to be too simply identified with the author Chaucer. He explains that in what follows, he is only acting as the faithful reporter of what others have said, without adding or omitting anything; he must not then be blamed for what he reports. Neither must he be blamed if he does not put people in the order of their social rank, "My wit is short, ye may well understand." This persona continues to profess the utter naivety that we have already noted in his uncritical descriptions of the pilgrims.

It is in this way, too, that we should approach the conclusion of the Prologue. Here the Host of the Tabard Inn (Harry Bailey, a historical figure) decides to go with them and ironically it is he, not Chaucer, who proposes the story-telling contest that gives the framework of the Tales. He will also be the ultimate judge of which is the best: "of best sentence and most solas." He is, after all, well prepared by his job to know about the tales people tell! One model for the literary competition would seem to be the meetings of people interested in poetry, known in French as puys, with which Chaucer would have been familiar.

(Totally quoted from http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/)

Geoffrey Chaucer

Of al this world the large compas
Hit wol not in myn armes tweyne -
Whoso mochel wol embrace,
Litel therof he shal distreyne.1

- Attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was the greatest English poet of the later Middle Ages. Working in the language now called Middle English, he was a contemporary of the anonymous author of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and a friend of the man behind 'Confessio Amantis', John Gower. Chaucer is generally considered to be second only to William Shakespeare in terms of his contribution to English Literature.

Chaucer's Life

The year of Chaucer's birth is not known with any accuracy but is guessed to be sometime in the first half of the 1340s. The traditionally accepted date of his death - the date engraved on his tomb in Westminster Abbey - is 25 October, 1400. Information about his life has been gleaned from surviving legal records: lawsuits, wills, lease records, royal pension records and marriage records, for example. Between his birth and death, Chaucer rose from being the son of an obscure minor bureaucrat and wine merchant to being a court official and royal ambassador. Among his acquaintances were the greatest poets of the age and the originals of some characters from Shakespeare's History Plays2. From the records that have survived it seems that Chaucer achieved a state of semi-retirement in the last decade of his life. It was during this decade that he did most of his work on his unfinished masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's Works

Chaucer is primarily remembered for the long and complicated collection of poems collectively known as The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer wrote some other works, including other, long, narrative poems and shorter lyrics, as well as a number of prose works.

Prose

Readers of The Canterbury Tales might be familiar with Chaucer's prose from 'The Parson's Tale'. Chaucer composed two other major prose works: Boece, a translation, and A Treatise on the Astrolabe, a scientific work.

Boece

Boece is a translation of The Consolation of Philosophy originally written in Latin by the late Roman senator and philosopher Boethius. Boethius's work was exceptionally influential throughout the European Middle Ages and was translated into many languages. Boethius was also a great influence on Chaucer's thought, but the prose of his translation is, by modern standards, poorly structured and disjointed.

A Treatise on the Astrolabe

Chaucer's scientific paper, an explanation of the use of the Astrolabe, an astronomical instrument, is written with more clarity. Perhaps this clarity is a function of the work being a product of Chaucer's own thoughts rather than an attempt to translate the thoughts of someone long dead.

Poetry

Chaucer's poetry is written in forms of verse derived from Continental traditions rather than the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tradition of poems such as Beowulf. Unlike in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, Chaucer's verse uses consistent rhyme, often in couplets, as in The Canterbury Tales, or in more complicated stanzaic structures, as in 'Troilus and Criseyde' and the love visions. As well, Chaucer's verse has regular meter (usually Iambic), a prosody fundamentally different from the Anglo-Saxon3.

Short Poems

A very small number of short poems by Chaucer have survived, although it is suspected that he wrote a great many. A small majority of the surviving short poems are love lyrics, for example, 'The Complaint to his Lady'. A number of others are in the ballade form and are humorous or religious. In these short poems Chaucer shows a great concern with the technicalities of metrics. As well as being of more general interest, the short poems are of help in understanding the development of English metrical types.

'The Book of the Duchess'

'The Book of the Duchess' is generally considered an occasional poem on the death, in September 1369, of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster and the first wife of John of Gaunt. The poem is a highly original adaptation of the traditional love vision form to the purposes of an elegy. The result is a touching consolation to the widower that breathes new life into a staid traditional form.

The poem describes the meeting between a dreamer and a knight who is depressed over the way Fortune has treated him. The knight has been the lover of the perfect lady, but death has taken her from him.

'The House of Fame'

'The House of Fame' is also a somewhat conventional love poem that draws heavily on Latin authors such as Ovid and Virgil (it contains a summary of part of the Aeneid). Also Chaucer refers to the works of Italian poet Dante in 'The House of Fame'.

In the dream that structures the poem, Chaucer journeys to two Temples, 'The House of Fame' and 'The House of Rumour', where various aspects of truth and falsehood are revealed by allegorical classical divinities. The poem is unfinished.

'Anelida and Arcite'

'Anelida and Arcite' is a strangely diffuse unfinished retelling of an old Roman story previously retold by the Italian, Boccaccio. The poem begins with two invocations, the first to Mars and Bellona, divinities of War, and the second to the Muses. The irregular stanzaic verse form is the most complicated Chaucer ever used. The story is the unheroic tale of a faithless knight named Arcite who has a habit of abandoning ladies. This narrative seems to serve mainly as a prologue to the unfinished lament of the lady Anelida.

'Parliament of Fowls'

'The Parliament of Fowls' is yet another love vision. In a dream, Chaucer wanders into the Garden of Nature on St Valentine's Dayand there witnesses the birds coming together to choose mates. There is a conflict between a flock of male eagles for the female eagle on the Goddess' hand. The males hold a debate and Nature is the judge, but she defers the decision to her eagle. The female eagle judges that she must have a year to decide.

'Troilus and Criseyde'

'Troilus and Criseyde' is a rarity in the works of Chaucer in that he managed to finish it. As well, the poem captures Chaucer at the height of his artistic power. He achieves great elegance and fluidity in the difficult Rhyme Royal4 measure while depicting vivid characters and emotions within a coherent plot.

The story was an old one when Chaucer took it over, but not as old as it pretends to be. Chaucer took the story over from Boccaccio'sIl Filostrato, making some changes to characters, lengthening the story, and vastly improving it. Boccaccio himself borrowed the story from an earlier Italian, Guido delle Colonne. Guido got his version from the Frenchman Benoit de Ste-Maure in the Roman de Troie, who pretended that he got it from the Romans Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis. The works of Dares and Dictys do not mention anything approaching the story of 'Troilus and Criseyde' (although the character Troilus is mentioned, as referenced inHomer's Iliad - which also contains a similarly named Cressida). In fact, the story of 'Troilus and Criseyde' bears only the most superficial of links to the Classical legends of the Trojan War; for the most part it is a wholly medieval invention.

But what a story it is! Troilus, a prince of Troy, has fallen in love with Criseyde, the daughter of a Trojan seer, Calchas. Calchas has fled Troy to the enemy Greek camp, taking his daughter with him. Troilus's uncle, Pandarus, arranges for the couple to exchange letters and, finally, for them to share a night in the privacy of his house. Calchas convinces the Greeks to demand his daughter in exchange for the release of a Trojan prisoner. Both young lovers are distraught, but Criseyde promises to return to Troilus in ten days. On the tenth day, she is seduced by a Greek prince, Diomedes and remains with the Greeks. Through dreams and prophecies from his sister Cassandra, Troilus learns rumour of Criseyde's betrayal, but is only convinced when he sees Criseyde's brooch on Diomedes' armour. Troilus then runs into battle in a rage, fighting Diomedes whenever he can, and finally being killed by the great Greek warrior, Achilles. The story was picked up by Robert Henryson in The Testament of Crisseid and retold by Shakespeare inTroilus and Cressida. The tale of separated lovers and ensuing tragedy is arguably a source for the plot of Romeo and Juliet, and the lover's facilitator, Pandarus, is immortalised in the modern English verb 'to pander'.

The Legend of Good Women

'The Legend of Good Women' is yet another unfinished love vision. In the prologue, Chaucer wanders out on a May morning and falls asleep in the meadows. And he dreams. He dreams that he meets the god of love and Queen Alceste, a metamorphosed daisy. These two dream figures berate Chaucer for writing 'Troilus and Criseyde' and for translating The Romaunt of the Rose5. They argue that men have been turned away from courtly love because he has depicted unfaithful women. Chaucer sets out to balance his previous work with a tribute to good women. The rest of the poem is the beginning of a catalogue, gleaned from myth and literature, of such women.

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 tales, mostly in verse, introduced by 'The General Prologue'. The collection closes with a short prose piece known as 'Chaucer's Retraction' in which the author asks that the reader ascribe all that is good in the work to the Lord. All that is bad in the Tales should be ascribed, not to the author's will, but to his lack of skill, for he would 'ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge.'

'The General Prologue' introduces the structure of the collection. While on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas in Canterbury, Chaucer falls in with a number of pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark. The pilgrims come from all walks of Medieval English life, and their appearances and characters are vividly described in the 'Prologue'. As the pilgrims set out together in the morning, they come to an agreement to entertain each other on the long road by telling two tales each on the way to and from St Thomas' Shrine. Sadly, Chaucer was never able to complete even one tale for each of the described pilgrims. But the existing 23-verse tales with their prologues, together with the prose 'Parson's Tale' and 'The General Prologue' present a rich and varied pageant of Medieval life, and the verse tales offer examples of most Medieval poetic genres.

The Canterbury Tales grows out of a continental tradition of tale collections that reached its pre-Chaucerian height with Boccaccio'sDecameron. Chaucer, however, in The Canterbury Tales, takes the original step of carefully matching the tales to their tellers, so that the teller's personality is expanded by the tale he or she tells. Chaucer was continuing to struggle with this matching at the time he died, as evidenced by the fact that parts of a tale told by a woman seem to be being told by a man. Obviously some parts of the Taleswere far from their final form when Chaucer took his leave.

While The Canterbury Tales remains unfinished (like so much of Chaucer's work), we know from internal evidence that he intended 'The Knight's Tale' to follow 'The General Prologue' at the beginning of the collection and 'The Parson's Tale' to close. Even in this incomplete form, the knight's tale of courtly love, the parson's dry sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins, and all the tales in between give us an hilarious and unparalleled view into a world far away in time and yet so very, very close to who we are today.

(Totally quoted from http://www.bbc.co.uk/)

DREAMS

THE BEAUTY OF FRIENDSHIP

UNREQUITED LOVE

LOVE'S ETERNAL SEAL

NATURE

FATE

HAPPY NEW YEAR

A RED RED ROSE BY ROBERT BURNS

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/)

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.

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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.

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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.

In 1956, Murdoch married John Oliver Bayley, the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford and also a successful novelist and critic. In 1963, she became an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College. She served as a lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London from 1963 until 1967.

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.

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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.

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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.

1. Historical fiction - a "made up" story which has as setting a specific and recognizable historical time period which could not have been during the author's lifetime. These novels and stories often include characters and places which are historically accurate, and many include historical documents as well. Examples of historical fiction are: Dragonwings, The Whipping Boy,Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver.
2. Documentary fiction - a "made up" story which uses a collage of documents, in addition to dialogue and narration, to help to tell the story. Some documentary fiction you will read as an adult uses actual news stories, letters, diaries, etc., but the story is the author's invention. Example: Nothing But the Truth.
3. Science fiction - originally, a story which used the science of the future as a major element of plot or setting. This meaning has been stretched to include all future or utopian, time travel, space, alien contact, and dimension travel stories, as well as to include some elements of fantasy.  Examples: A Wrinkle in Time, The Giver, many stories by author Ray Bradbury.
4. Folklore, folk tale, fairy tale - originally "oral tradition stories,"  memorized and passed from person to person through the telling, these tend to have messages for the listener to decipher and definite similarities in plot, characters, and settings. You study these stories in Lower School. In Middle School, you need to remember them and watch for "folklore" elements to appear in your reading. Examples of books rich in folklore references: The 13 Clocks, The Magic Circle, Haroun, The Other Side of Silence.
5. Realistic Fiction - novels and stories which are "real" in that they take place in a time and place like a present, or recent past, time and place, have plots which are possible, and have characters which are believable as real people. Examples: Hatchet, Shabanu.
6. Fantasy - fantasy novels and stories cover a wide range of "real-unreal" plots, characters and settings. Some identifying characteristics are: animals as characters, magical events, imaginary beings as characters. Fantasies often involve a search or quest of some type and ask the reader to temporarily believe in the possibility of events and characters.  Examples: Alice in Wonderland, The Story of the Amulet, The Wizard of Earthsea, The Hobbit, Watership Down.
7. Mystery - a mystery novel contains a puzzle and challenges the reader to join the detective character who eventually solves the puzzle. Collecting clues is a vital skill for mystery readers. Examples: The House of Dies Drear, The Westing Game, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Techniques of the Writer or Story Teller

• The Rule of 3 - Things happen in 3's. You should be on the lookout for: 3 related events, 3 connected characters, 3 rules, 3 punishments, 3 objects, 3 relationships which are compared and contrasted.
• Types of characters:
  • Major or Minor:
    Major characters appear throughout the novel, or in a major section of it - they are involved in the important actions and conflicts.
    Minor characters enter the novel for a specific reason and may then not be heard of again - or they may exist throughout the novel "in the shadow" of the major character - they may be involved in a conflict with a major character and are essential to the plot, but only so that something can be learned or shown about the major character.
  • Round or Flat:
    Round Characters have many sides - they grow or change in several ways - they think and react on many levels - they are central to the story, its conflicts, and its final message - we care about them and tend to react along with them to the things that happen.
    Flat Characters have only one side - they may be major characters, but they do not change - flat characters are important to a story because the round character(s) interact with them - we often see them only as the round characters see them and care about them because a round character does - we may feel strongly about a flat character because he/she is a strong and consistent representative of Good or of Evil.
• Narrative Focus - The character around whom the story moves - we often see only those events which this character witnesses - if we see events which do not involve the narrative focus, we are anxious about how the events will impact upon this character. 

• Narration - There are 3 ways of telling a story:
  • 1st person - "I" tells the story and is a character in the story; this can be present tense or past tense.
  • 2nd person - "You" is used to tell the story; these tend to be like Choose Your Own Adventure stories or computer games and are usually in the present tense.
  • 3rd person - "He, she, it, they" - the story is told by someone, usually not identified by name, who knows it. Usually in the past tense.
• Types of Narration - An author has to decide how much the narrator knows about the people and events in the story.  A narrator, 1st or 3rd person, can be:
  • Limited - The narrator only knows what he/she experiences or learns about in some way- the narrator's knowledge grows as the story unfolds; at times, the reader may know more than the narrator.
  • Omniscient - The "all knowing" narrator knows all of the details about events, characters, etc. and reveals them to the reader as the story unfolds.

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:

• Metaphor - the comparison of two unlike things to suggest things which they have in common - for example: Joe is a lion on the playing field would compare Joe to a lion in how he moves, his aggression, his animal-like actions, his skill and strength, his leadership.  When you identify a metaphor, you have to dig deeply to find all of the layers of possible meaning.
• Simile - a comparison of two unlike things using like or as - for example: Sue flits through life like a moth in a room of candles compares Sue to a delicate, fluttering moth which is drawn to fire and raises an image of both delight and confusion, perhaps also mindlessness and upcoming death or failure.  Like a metaphor, a simile can seem obvious, but it is usually telling you something about a character or setting if you are willing to dig a little deeper.
• Personification - the description of an inanimate object as if it were a human being or an animal - for example: The kite tugged and pulled at the string, longing for the freedom of the skies gives the kite human actions and a motive for them. In using personification the author asks the reader to identify with the object or character viewing it more deeply than would be possible in a simple description.
• Extended metaphor - a paragraph or longer of description which builds upon an initial metaphor, often bringing several of the senses (sight, sound, touch, hearing, taste) into play. This is often used by an author seeking to make a point in a setting description or seeking to create a character for the narrator or narrative focus (e.g.: imaginative, naive, fanciful, terrified)
• Hyperbole - an obvious and unrealistic exaggeration - for example: His gaping jaw could hold a flock of the King's fattest sheep indicates excess and perhaps a fearful or highly imaginative narrative focus. A good way to identify hyperbole is to ask yourself the old tall-tale question: Just how [tall, wide, hungry, lazy, angry...] was he/she/it?
• Onomatopoeia - use of a word which sounds like it means - for example: plunk, zip, buzz, bong, zap all have meaning which is reinforced by the sound of the word. Repetition of onomatopoeic words is used by authors to create a mood or tone and to convey sense impressions (e.g. motion, touch, sound)
• Pun - a word which has several meanings, all of which apply; puns are often based on sound, so homophones and homonyms have to be though of as well - for example: In Induction I of Taming of the Shrew the bum Sly states "I smell" when testing to see if he is awake; he can smell, but he also does smell. Puns are generally a source of humor, but they can also be cruel or unkind. Lewis Carroll is very fond of puns and uses them to good effect in Alice.
• Oxymoron - a phrase which contains opposite elements or words with opposite meanings, yet which expresses one idea when taken as a whole - for example:  Bottom says in Midsummer Night's Dream, "I'll speak in a monstrous little voice."

Literary Vocabulary

• Setting - time (date, time of day, season) and place - a piece of writing will generally have many settings and each setting will generally carry with it a mood or atmosphere.
• Plot - what happens, concretely, as though it were placed on a history time line.
• Incident - one specific thing which happens in a plot.  Many short stories are basically one incident described in detail.
• Theme - the answer to this question: What is this all about?   Themes tend to be the author's message about important human conditions or problems, such as Good and Evil, Death, Freedom, Bondage, Hope, the Quest, Heritage, Believing, Family, Relationships, The Role of Women in Society. The Theme Statement is your one sentence summary of what the author or the work (novel, story, poem, play) has to say about an overall theme - for example: A theme of the novel Dragonwings is that the support of family is essential in a good life.Stories, plays and poems will have more than one theme about which you can formulate more than one theme statement. But be careful - you must be able to support a theme statement with specific evidence from the story, play or poem itself. Another expression for theme of a poem is the abstract meaning.
• Mood or atmosphere or tone - the overall feeling created by a piece of writing. Mood can often be described in a few words, such as scary, lonely, empty, triumphant, anxious, but you must be able to refer to specific details in the description, setting, or passage to defend your word or words.
• Dialogue - a discussion or conversation between two or more characters.  Most dialogues follow the rules of punctuation. Do not confuse dialogue with a play script. Dialogue is part of, or sometimes all of, a story or novel and this is what you should write when you asked to write a dialogue.

• Monologue - one character alone  talking to the reader/audience/to himself. A monologue in a play is called a soliloquy and finds the character alone on the stage, often speaking about a decision, plan, or other internal conflict.
• Interior monologue or internal monologue - a character thinking to himself. The author will often begin this by saying: He thought, he was thinking, she imagined...
• Malapropism - substitution of "fancy" or "pompous" words, often opposite to the intended meanings or meaningless, for a correct word - for example:  in Midsummer Night's DreamBottom says, "We will rehearse most obscenely (seemly?) and courageously." 
• Character traits of a character - what type of person is this? Character traits are revealed through actions, dialogue, internal monologue, and by the author or narrator directly.
• Motive - why a character does what he/she does. Motives are often feelings or logical conclusions, but can be also impulse based upon the actions or words of another. Every action has a motive.
• External Conflict - a fight, argument, disagreement or simply opposition in which 2 sides are present. Characters, themes, ideas, forces can all be in conflict. Conflicts are stated this way:Joe vs. Sue, man vs. nature, love vs. hate, freedom vs. bondage, free vs. caged, beautiful vs. ugly. Be sure that both sides of the vs. are the same part of speech and that they are, in fact, nearly opposite or in opposition in the book. An external conflict is shown through actions (fight, argument, physical struggle), character traits (a good and a bad character), dialogues, descriptions - just about anything.  Identification of conflicts will lead you to theme. The resolution of the external conflict will advance the plot toward the climax and the end.
• Internal Conflict - an argument or decision-making process within one character's mind. An internal conflict is stated this way: Should I swallow my pride and go visit my son, or should I wait until he comes to me with an apology? An internal conflict has a motive and its resolution is important to the development of the plot.
• Plot diagram
  1. Introduction or Exposition - setting, characters, main conflicts are introduced to the reader; this is the beginning of a novel or story and may be short or long, but is always flat (little action or emotion).
  2. Rising Action - the round characters are developed, the conflicts are increased and acted out in many ways, motives are introduced, things happen; generally, the major part of a novel or story.
  3. Climax - the "high point" of a story in which the major conflicts erupt in some kind of final showdown (fight, argument, violent or physical action, very tense emotional moment...); at the end of the climax, the "winner" will be clear (there is not always a winner!).
  4. Falling Action - what events immediately follow the climax; a kind of "cleaning up."
  5. Resolution - where everything ends; the reader may have some sense of "closure" or may be asked to think about what might come next; in fairy tales, the Happy Ending; in some novels, you will read about the characters many years later.
• Irony - There are 3 types of irony which you need to know:
  • Irony of situation - when the reverse of the expected happens or when the person you least expect to do something, does it - for example: It is ironic that Cinderella gets the prince; it is ironic in Dragonwings that the Chinese own and are able to rebuild houses upon the land denied to them by the Demons; it is ironic in Dragonwings that Black Dog dies in the same manner that he tries to kill Moon Shadow.
  • Dramatic irony - when the viewer or the reader is aware of a situation of which the character(s) are not aware - for example: In Romeo and Juliet the reader knows that Juliet is not really dead, but Romeo does not know this. Another example is when the audience knows that Lysander is "drugged" into loving Helena, but he does not know this.  Dramatic irony can be a source of tragedy, of comedy, or of tension.
  • Irony of language - when a name or description refers to or suggests the opposite of truth - for example: In Dragonwings the leader of a fierce brotherhood/gang is called Water Fairy. The irony is not just that the name is inappropriate, but that it was earned in an inappropriate way. Irony of language is often used for humor, but it can also be cruel or sarcastic. The name of the character Lefty, in Dragonwings, is as ironic as his situation.
• Coincidence - something which happens by chance. Authors use coincidence to advance the plot, to create and resolve conflicts, and sometimes just for humor or to startle the reader.
• Mirroring or parallels - A character or incident mirrors another character or incident when the two follow similar plots, act in similar ways or contain similar elements or traits. Remember, though, that a mirror image is also opposite - left is right. So one mirror character may be rich, the other poor; one relationship may end happily, the other unhappily. Authors use mirrors to add depth to stories and to increase the reader's interest in and appreciation for the characters and their situations. Mirrors are used frequently on situation comedy shows - watch for them!

• concrete meaning - in a poem or story, what happens, in one sentence if possible. For example:

  • Upon my bed
    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.

• abstract meaning - the theme or message of the poem or story. This has to be based on the concrete meaning, upon what is actually in the poem, and should also take conflicts into consideration.  For example:

  In the poem above, the abstract meaning might be: Loneliness and homesickness are cold feelings, but we are warmed by our memories 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.

Terms more specific to the way poets use words: see also John McIlvain's Introductory Poetry Terms

• The Form of a poem - The elements of form are number of lines, rhyme, rhythm, number of stanzas, and (for us) rules of grammar (standard or nonstandard).
• Stanza - a group of lines of poetry, like a paragraph, set off usually by a blank space. Poets create stanzas for a reason. The lines belong together.

• Rhyme - The repetition of sound, almost always to achieve an effect or to create a rhythm. 
  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.
• Rhythm - is the beat or pattern of stressed and unstressed lines.  We will try to identify patterns this year.  For example, read the following lines out loud.  The pattern is shown under the words.
  
  Many poems do not use rhythm.

• Free verse - poetry which does not have a regular rhythm, rhyme scheme, or form. Some free verse poems also do not use punctuation or capitalization, or they otherwise break the rules of grammar.
• Fulcrum of a poem - Poems, like stories, are built upon contrast and conflict. The fulcrum is that point in the poem in which the contrasting or conflicting ideas, images, or moods are resolved - one wins out.   A fulcrum is often the most emotional line or lines and often carries the clue to meaning.
• Alliteration - The repetition of sound within a line of poetry (or prose).  We will watch for two types of alliteration:
  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."
• Couplet - two lines of poetry which are a self-contained unit, often rhyming and often one sentence (but not always).

                       (Source: http://www.leasttern.com/)