Reading Literary Texts: Unit Review

It turns the dead winter landscape into an image of the dying century (The Century's corpse), so the poem becomes a meditation on the end of an era and the uncertain hope of a new one.

Left: an exact short quotation with its line (And I was unaware, last line). Right: a response (The poem ends in doubt: the speaker sees hope but cannot share it).

Challenging, rich enough to discuss (layers, symbols, open questions), and adding variety (a new period, country, culture, or Canadian or Indigenous voice).

A claim is an arguable interpretation supported by evidence; an opinion states personal feeling without evidence.

The painter actively looks, paints and feeds upon her face, while the woman never speaks and is frozen as his ideal, so the poem exposes a male gaze that erases the real woman (Not as she is).

A woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction. Limitation: it can overlook women who created without money or privacy, such as working-class or enslaved women (Alice Walker's critique).

A narrator looking back from a later time; foolish is the older narrator's judgment of his younger self.

That his romantic quest was driven by vanity: he sees himself driven and derided by vanity and feels anguish and anger.

The dead priest's room with its curling books develops decay and paralysis; or the English voices at the stall suggest the colonial presence in Dublin.

Third-person narration that takes on a character's thoughts and words. It lets us share Laura's generous feelings while noticing how easily privilege distracts her (the hat).

The wealthy family lives above, the workers in cottages below the lane: class division made physical.

One sees a poor family from outside (through the wealthy Sheridans); the other is told from inside the narrator's own family and community. It shows how point of view shapes whose experience is given depth.

That her insight is too large and confused to put into words; Mansfield leaves the meaning open.

Octave (abbaabba) and sestet (here cdcdcd); the volta is at line 9, And for all this, turning from the problem (a world smeared by labour) to the answer (nature is never spent).

19 lines, two rhymes, two refrains (five tercets and a quatrain). The refrains keep returning, like a thought the speaker cannot escape.

Hopkins's method of counting stressed syllables only, allowing any number of unstressed syllables, so lines can crowd stresses together.

Any two: fragmentation, allusion, free verse, irony and doubt, shifting voices, clashing images.

Bethlehem is Christ's birthplace; instead of Christ's promised return, a rough beast is coming: an inversion of the Christian promise.

He took Things Fall Apart as the title of a 1958 novel about an Igbo community torn apart by colonialism, turning the poem's European centre around.

Any two: everyday prose; one ordinary room; middle-class characters; believable social problems; meaning carried by stage directions and props.

A small secret and lie that foreshadow Nora's big secret (the loan) and show how she survives by performing innocence.

It completes Nora's development and the play's argument about becoming a person; the alternative contradicts her own words in the discussion scene for the sake of audience comfort.

To narrow the range of thought by shrinking vocabulary.

un- (not) + person: someone officially erased, as if they never existed.

Any two: control of the past; control of language; the fragile inner self; hope in the proles.

A fragile piece of the past and of the lovers' private world; it is smashed during the arrest.

Julia rebels for pleasure and survival, uninterested in theory; Winston rebels from ideas, wanting to understand and overthrow the Party.

That the Party eventually fell and Newspeak became history (an inference argued by critics including Margaret Atwood).

The flat final sentence applies love, which Winston kept for Julia, his mother and the past, to the Party: total victory over his inner self.

Julia is seen only through Winston and defined by body and pleasure rather than ideas; resistance is imagined as male and intellectual.

They echo the residential school system, which removed Indigenous children from their families; a dystopia for some readers is history for others.

Lear asks his daughters to declare their love publicly for shares of the kingdom; Cordelia says Nothing and that she loves him According to my bond, no more nor less.

A change to intimacy or, in anger, contempt; Lear's Thy truth then be thy dower pushes Cordelia away.

There are two early texts, the 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio, which differ by hundreds of lines.

The violent weather mirrors the chaos in Lear's mind, his family and the kingdom.

He pities the poor for the first time and admits he took too little care of them as king.

Lear's real madness, Edgar's feigned madness (Poor Tom) and the Fool's professional folly.

Recognition; Lear's awakening in 4.7, when he recognizes Cordelia and calls himself a very foolish fond old man.

She is innocent, and she dies because of a delay, not because of her own error: suffering is not matched to fault.

Five trochees reverse the normal iambic rhythm, so the line sounds broken, like Lear's world.

He gave the play a happy ending (Cordelia lives, Lear is restored); after civil war and the restoration of the monarchy, audiences wanted poetic justice and a restored king.

With an all-Indigenous cast and a setting in 17th-century Canada at early contact, it connected the play's themes of divided land and broken kinship to the history of colonization.

Any three: concept/interpretation, use of the text and cuts, key staging choices, performance, effect on the audience.