Term
| Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. |
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Definition
| Good Readers and Good Writers- Vladimir Nabokov |
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Term
| So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people. The color of Fanny Price’s eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important. |
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Definition
| Good Readers and Good Writers- Vladimir Nabokov |
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Term
| Another question: Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels? But what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales—and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales. |
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Definition
| Good Readers and Good Writers- Vladimir Nabokov |
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Term
| How shall a man go through college without having been marked for taste and judgment? What will become of him? What will his end be? He will have to take continuation courses for college graduates. He will have to go to night schools. They are having night schools now, you know, for college graduates. Why? Because they have not been educated enough to find their way around in contemporary literature. They don’t know what they may safely like in the libraries and galleries. They don’t know how to judge an editorial when they see one. They don’t know how to judge a political campaign. They don’t know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable. And metaphor is, of course, what we are talking about. Education by poetry is education by metaphor. |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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Term
| But the enthusiasm I mean is taken through the prism of the intellect and spread on the screen in a color, all the way from hyperbole at one end—or overstatement, at one end—to understatement at the other end. It is a long strip of dark lines and many colors. Such enthusiasm is one object of all teaching in poetry. I heard wonderful things said about Virgil yesterday, and many of them seemed to me crude enthusiasm, more like a deafening shout, many of them. But one speech had range, something of overstatement, something of statement, and something of understatement. It had all the colors of an enthusiasm passed through an idea. |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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Term
| I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking. I find some one now and then to agree with me that all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be difficult for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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| The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist, whose latest word to the world has been that the more accurately you know where a thing is, the less accurately you are able to state how fast it is moving. You can see why that would be so, without going back to Zeno’s problem of the arrow’s flight. In carrying numbers into the realm of space and at the same time into the realm of time you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and you are in trouble. They won’t mix. The two don’t go together. |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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Term
| Another amusing one is from—what is the book?—I can’t say it now; but here is the metaphor. Its aim is to restore you to your ideas of free will. It wants to give you back your freedom of will. All right, here it is on a platter. You know that you can’t tell by name what persons in a certain class will be dead ten years after graduation, but you can tell actuarially how many will be dead. Now, just so this scientist says of the particles of matter flying at a screen, striking a screen; you can’t tell what individual particles will collide, but you can say in general that a certain number will strike in a given time. It shows, you see, that the individual particle can come freely. I asked Bohr about that particularly, and he said, "Yes , It is so. It can come when it wills and as it wills; and the action of the individual particle is unpredictable. But it is not so of the action of the mass. There you can predict." He says, "That gives the individual atom its freedom, but the mass its necessity |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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Term
| Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct. |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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Term
| We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties, but we seldom tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just putting this and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky. |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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Term
| The person who gets close enough to poetry, he is going to know more about the word belief than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays |
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Definition
| Education by Poetry- Robert Frost |
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Term
| I got from looking through a pane of glass |
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Definition
| After Apple Picking- Robert Frost |
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Term
| The metaphor at the heart of the interface is that of the desktop, a personalized space where we keep our files and applications. We organize our documents by placing them in metaphoric folders; we discard files in a metaphoric trash can. |
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Definition
| Metaphor Monopoly- Steven Johnson |
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Term
| Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca he bought reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of Avanti. Mantegna he did not like. |
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Definition
| In Our Time- Ernest Hemingway |
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Term
| But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important. |
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Definition
| In Our Time- Ernest Hemingway |
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Term
| In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die. |
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Definition
| In Our Time- Ernest Hemingway |
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Term
| Where ships of purple gently toss
On seas of daffodil,
Fantastic sailors mingle,
And then-the wharf is still |
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Definition
| The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry- Laurence Perrine |
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Term
| Anything referring to angel/monster or Snow White |
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Definition
| The Queen’s Looking Glass- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar |
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Term
| The poet’s pen is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis). |
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Definition
| The Queen’s Looking Glass- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar |
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Term
| Authored by a male God and by a godlike male, killed into a "perfect" image of herself, the woman writer’s self-contemplation may be said to have begun with a searching glance into the mirror of the male-inscribed literary text. |
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Definition
| The Queen’s Looking Glass- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar |
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Term
| To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings, of cities founded, commonwealths begun |
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Definition
| The Prologue- Anne Bradstreet |
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Term
| From schoolboy’s tongue no rhet’ric we expect, nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings, nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect: my foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings |
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Definition
| The Prologue- Anne Bradstreet |
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Term
| Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train |
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Definition
| On Being Brought from Africa to America- Phyllis Wheatley |
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Term
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Definition
| Linkage: To Phyllis Wheatley- Nikki Giovanni |
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Term
| There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” |
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Definition
| 2005 Commencement Address- David Foster Wallace |
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Term
| There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. |
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Definition
| The Yellow Wallpaper- Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
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Term
| I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the all, lying in wait for me on the stairs. |
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Definition
| The Yellow Wallpaper- Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
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Term
| Education and slavery is incompatible. |
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Definition
| The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass- Frederick Douglass |
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Term
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Definition
| The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass- Frederick Douglass |
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Term
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Definition
| The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass- Frederick Douglass |
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Term
| Mrs. Auld corrupted by power. |
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Definition
| The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass- Frederick Douglass |
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Term
| Slave who said he didn't like his master and was sold. |
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Definition
| The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass- Frederick Douglass |
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Term
| In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo |
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Definition
| The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock- T.S. Eliot |
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Term
| That is not it at all, that is not what I meant, at all. |
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Definition
| The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock- T.S. Eliot |
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Term
| Beneath the soft fluttering of red swan wings, and the warm quivering of the red swan’s breast. |
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Definition
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Term
| One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet–not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. |
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Definition
| The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain- Langston Hughes |
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Term
| But I’d rather be dead than to be ugly an’ old |
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Definition
| Young Gal’s Blues- Langston Hughes |
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Term
| When love is gone what can a young gal do? When love is gone, O, what can a young gal do? Keep on a-lovin’ me daddy, cause I don’t want to be blue. |
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Definition
| Young Gal’s Blues- Langston Hughes |
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Term
| Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair, it’s had tacks in it, and splinters, and boards torn up, and places with no carpet on the floor - bare. |
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Definition
| Mother to Son- Langston Hughes |
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Term
| My soul runs deep like the rivers. |
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Definition
| The Negro Speaks of Rivers- Langston Hughes |
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Term
| Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: to make a poet black, and bid him sing! |
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Definition
| Yet Do I Marvel- Countee Cullen |
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Term
| Looks like Elvis didn’t expose himself to much: the Great White American Consumer had no taste at all. |
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Definition
| Who Says A White Band Can’t Play Rap?- Joe Wood |
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Term
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Definition
| Who Says A White Band Can’t Play Rap?- Joe Wood |
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Term
| I won’t surrender my arms until I am in a cell. |
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Definition
| The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez- Américo Paredes |
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Term
| Then said Gregorio Cortez, with his pistol in his hand, “Don’t run, you cowardly rangers, from just one Mexican” |
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Definition
| The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez- Américo Paredes |
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Term
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Definition
| I Am Joaquín: an Epic Poem- Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales |
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Term
| We start to move, La Raza! Mejicano! Español! Latino! Hispano! Chicano! Or whatever I call myself, I look the same I feel the same I Cry and sing the same |
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Definition
| I Am Joaquín: an Epic Poem- Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales |
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Term
| I am Joaquin
Lost in a world of confusion,
Caught up in a whirl of a
gringo society,
Confused by the rules,
Scorned by attitudes,
Suppressed by manipulations,
And destroyed by modern society.
My fathers
have lost the economic battle
and won
the struggle of cultural survival.
And now!
I must choose
Between the paradox of
Victory of the spirit,
despite physical hunger
Or
to exist in the grasp
of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul
and a full stomach. |
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Definition
| I Am Joaquín: an Epic Poem- Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales |
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Term
| The raft floats Huck and Jim and Mark Twain himself into the dark heart of American History: slave country. |
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Definition
| Say It Ain’t So Huck- Jane Smiley |
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Term
| Jim is never autonomous, never has a vote, is always subordinate to Huck, and never minds. |
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Definition
| Say It Ain’t So Huck- Jane Smiley |
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Term
| Ernest Hemingway said all American literature grew out of Huck Finn. It undoubtedly would have been better if it had not. |
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Definition
| Say It Ain’t So Huck- Jane Smiley |
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Term
| Harriet Beecher Stowe never forgets the logical end of any relationship in which one person is the subject and the other is the object. |
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Definition
| Say It Ain’t So Huck- Jane Smiley |
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Term
| One Twain allows Jim a voice, this voice must raise issues that cannot be easily resolved, either personally or culturally. |
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Definition
| Say It Ain’t So Huck- Jane Smiley |
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Term
| I would rather my children read Uncle Tom’s cabin, even though it is far more vivid in its depiction of cruelty than Huckleberry Finn. |
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Definition
| Say It Ain’t So Huck- Jane Smiley |
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Term
| There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. |
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Definition
| Red Wind- Raymond Chandler |
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Term
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Definition
| Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
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Definition
| Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
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Definition
| Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
| Fiction begins where knowledge begins. |
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Definition
| Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
| The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God |
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Definition
| Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
| Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. |
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Definition
| Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
| “Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.” |
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Definition
| A Good Man Is Hard To Find- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
| “Yes’m,” The Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with him as with me except He hadn’t committed one because they had the papers on me.” |
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Definition
| A Good Man Is Hard To Find- Flannery O’Connor |
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Term
| Fire as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity. |
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Definition
| Barn Burning- William Faulkner |
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Term
| Jules: There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you." I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin': it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. .45 here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin, Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd. |
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Definition
| Pulp Fiction- Quentin Tarantino |
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Term
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Definition
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Term
| Main characters: Plum, Sula, Jude, Eva, Shadrack, Nell, Hannah |
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Definition
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Term
| These two criteria, I ask you to notice, are not different from those we bring to the judgment of a new scientific hypothesis. Of such we ask (1) that it satisfactorily account for as many as possible of the known facts without being contradicted by any fact, (2) that it be the simplest or most economical of alternative ways of accounting for these facts. |
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Definition
| The nature of the Proof of the Interpretation of Poetry- Laurence Perrine |
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Term
| Women . . . are considered complete . . . when they marry . . . We have done . . . it is considered . . . our duty . . . when we safely deliver a person from the bondage of Father . . . to the bondage of duty . . . and husband . . . from house slaves who read and write . . . to housewives who have time for neither |
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Definition
| Linkage to Phyllis Wheatley- Nikki Giovanni |
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Term
| She wasn't like Harriet Tubman because she is Tubman . . . with Pen . . . rather than body . . . Leading herself . . . and therefore her people . . . from bondage . . . not like Sojourner Truth . . . she was Truth . . . using words on paper . . . to make the case . . . that slavery is people . . . and wrong to do . . . |
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Definition
| Linkage to Phyllis Wheatley- Nikki Giovanni |
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