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Julia Hahn

Shakespeares Comedic Sequence - 2 views

Argument: Shakespeare writes comedy plays in order to educate the reader. Claim: The reason that Shakespeare creates the characters in his comedies to be somewhat uneducated is to teach the reader...

criticism literary critique

started by Julia Hahn on 15 Dec 10 no follow-up yet
Amanda Beinlich

Literary Reference Center - powered by EBSCOhost: The Kite Runner - 1 views

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    Source#2 Argument: The Kite Runner it a novel of conflict. Claim: The conflicts range from warring armies, factions, worldviews, ethnic groups; as well as individual conflicts and gender. Evidence: Throughout the novel Amir constantly runs into a problem. If the conflict isn't obvious there is always an underlying conflict. For example, the relationship between him and his father and the judgement he recieves from being friends with Hassan.
Allymyr Atrero

Literary Reference Center - powered by EBSCOhost: Jane Austen for the nineties - 1 views

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    Argument: Jane Austen's novels have become popular because of their ability to transcend generations. Claim: Austen's use of irony in character development plays a significant role in the appeal of her characters. Because she highlighted their susceptibilities with moral perspectives, the characters charm the audience more than just a blantant description of a character. Evidence: "Elizabeth Bennet may be prejudiced, but she is also far more perceptive than most of the society around her. Darcy is proud, yet at the same time curiously humble." "How different, how much less effective than the slow unfolding, he almost imperceptible growth of a character like Darcy's, or Elizabeth's, or Emma's." http://search.ebscohost.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=9509236170&site=lrc-live.
Rachel Kaemmerer

Literature Resource Center - Document - 1 views

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    Argument: Although the subject of Steinbeck's novels change overtime, he maintains a view of certain fundamental values and attitudes such as naturalism and romanticism. Claim: Steinbeck's obsessiveness with science/biology as well as the relationship between man and his environment appear throughout his novels. However, he often strays from science and writes off an emotional bias by writing fondly of those that live natural lives and behave naturally. Evidence: In "Sea of Cortez", he states "There would seem to be only one commandment for living things: Survive!" (Sea of Cortez). A majority of this book is about a group of boys who focus on what is occurring during the present time and handle issues with their reactions instead of with 'teleological thinking' (2). In addition, he touches on the subject of the scientific viewpoint that everyone is fighting to stay alive and make it in this world. http://go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort=RELEVANCE&inPS=true&prodId=LitRC&userGroupName=chandler_main&tabID=T001&searchId=R1&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=BasicSearchForm&currentPosition=1&contentSet=GALE%7CH1420074523&&docId=GALE|H1420074523&docType=GALE&role=LitRC
Monica Casarez

This Side of Paradise - 0 views

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    Arugement: Fitzgerald embodys beauty, sex, and aristocracy throughout the novel and portrays how they are linked aswell as how they are contradicting towards one another--order, responsibility, and purposefulness. Claim: Fitzgerald's dominating purpose for this book, as for all his books, illustrates "unity and force," and this book is considered as a traditional bildungsroman:a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character. Amory being the target character for this. Evidence: "But the bar is strong enough to hold them and emerges intact because Fitzgerald does use those things with a "mentality back of them." Amory metamorphosis into the spiritually unmarried man should come as no surprise: from his first instictive attempts to get something definite to his explicit commitment to the struggle to guide and control his life, that is where he is heading."
Joyce Zhang

Literature Resource Center - Document - 0 views

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    Argument: Thomas Hardy is a gifted writer who was able to craft a masterful novel, Jude the Obscure. The novel is plagued with only a few drawbacks, including the drab setting and the overcompensated characters that often render the novel unrealistic. Claim: Thomas Hardy is a gifted writer. Thomas Hardy could have chosen a more interesting setting (Dorsetshire) but instead chose a setting with a limited history and scenery (Wessex). Hardy's novel is overall well-done. Evidence: "Jude the Obscure is an irresistible book; it is one of those novels into which we descend and are carried on by a steady impetus to the close, when we return, dazzled, to the light of common day. The two women, in particular, are surely created by a master. Every impulse, every speech, which reveals to us the coarse and animal, but not hateful Arabella, adds to the solidity of her portrait. We may dislike her, we may hold her intrusion into our consciousness a disagreeable one, but of her reality there can be no question: Arabella lives." http://go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420014281&v=2.1&u=chandler_main&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
Marisa R

Books of The Times; A New Lost Generation Gathers Wool at the Mall - 1 views

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    Argument: Coupland's characters show the apathy and disinterest of teenagers of our times. Their personalities somewhat can be related back to Coupland's own depression problems. Claim: Many of the characters' personalities overlap in Coupland's books as well as the storylines. Evidence: "Many of Mr. Coupland's characters worry that they suffer from the inability to feel. They natter on at length about the emptiness of their lives, their anxieties about the end of the world, their loss of joie de vivre."
Lorynn Cancio

Morality in "The Great Gatsby" - 0 views

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    Argument: Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" has numerous connections to the works of Virgil and Aeneas as a commentary of ethical and moral decay. Claims:-Fitzgerald was a moralist -Fitzgerald is similar to Petronius -Fitzgerald uses Virgil as a moral guide Evidence:-"Like most moralists from Hesiod to C. B. De Mille, he set a moral type (like Nick Carraway) against a moral antitype (Gatsby)." -"Fitzgerald, like Petronius, is interested in the trappings of the wealthy of his day; both Gatsby and Trimalchio have amassed huge wealth by questionable means, and cannot entirely obscure their low origins and gross habits. When both men celebrate their material success by throwing lavish parties for hordes of dissolute neighbors, they are rewarded by being the subject of their guests' gossip." -"The farmers described in Virgil's Georgics are exemplars of Augustan morality, the same kind of values cherished by Nick Carraway." -"At the end of The Great Gatsby Nick concludes the novel by speaking of the effort to escape the past and achieve one's ambition in an image expressing the archetypal element in any struggle for a distantly receding ideal."
Alan Adjei

Arthur Miller's 'Weight of Truth' in The Crucible - 6 views

In Stephen Marino Literary Criticism about Arthur's Miller novel The Crucible, Marino highlights the importance of Miller's use of the word "weight" at crucial moments of The Crucible, claiming tha...

Truth Crucible Miller Arthur

started by Alan Adjei on 20 Jan 11 no follow-up yet
Melanie Reyes

Lit Analysis 2 - 3 views

Parkinson, Edward J. A History of Its Critical Interpretations,1979; http://www.turnofthescrew.com/ch1.htm, [19 Jan 2011]. http://www.turnofthescrew.com/ch1.htm

Austin Joy

The Kite Runner Analysis - 1 views

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    The Kite Runner Analysis Phillip Spires's purpose in his analysis is to examine how The Kite Runner's drama is important to the story that involves, informs, and enlightens the reader. He does a great job of keeping his focus on how Khaled can master a technique that many other writers can't, thus changing how his writing is viewed. His analysis is consistency and coherence is backed up by background from the book. The evidence he uses helps his case because it gives the reader of this analysis some background into what he is trying to prove. For instance, when he is talking about the changes in Afghanistan, "war dominated by the Taliban. Amir tries to uncover his past…his personal experience becomes both painful, taxing and trying." This is the drama that Spires addresses that enlightens the reader. There is plenty of evidence to make his case and prove his purpose. The evidence provided is typical because it helps make sure the purpose is understandable and he uses paraphrased passages in his analysis. Such as "with the arrival of the Russian, part of Amir's family flees to the United States, Amir along with them." Allowing him to conclude that it is a book that will take you on a journey. His beliefs are that he has been on many journeys himself that help contribute to allowing him to analyze the journey within this book. The implicit assumption is that he wants to be as great as Khaled in his writings. The explicit assumption is that he likes to write about journey just drawing the idea from the title of his book.
Kara Danner

Interpreter of Maladies Literary Analysis - 0 views

shared by Kara Danner on 20 Jan 11 - No Cached
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    purpose: Bahareh Bahmanpour wrote her article to identify the struggles of female characters that are caught between Indian culture and the transition into Western culture in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Bahmanpour uses various critical terms such as Self/Other Confrontation, Hybridity, Liminality, Female Subaltern, and Diasporic Identity to classify the roles and transitions of three women's identities, Mrs. Sen, Bibi Heldar, and Miranda, in three separate stories. These terms help solidify Bahmanpour's argument that when confronting a new culture, one undergoes feelings of Diaspora, in which must choose between their culture, called Self, or their new environment's culture, called Other. Evidence: 1."Stories that deal with the suffering, pressure, and possible failure or success in the adaptation-process of these female characters in (re-)constructing their subjectivity, (re-)asserting their agency or negotiating their identities through either silence, resistance, negotiation, acculturation, or assimilation." 2. "Hence, subjects of Diasporas are snared in a process of transformation, and repositioning of new identities-identities which are always in the process of becoming and transition but never complete." 3. "There is no single way of representing the diasporic trauma involved in negotiating female identities either as female immigrant or female natives. Each individual from Mrs.Sen to Miranda has their own means of survival; one resists while the other accepts; one acculturates whereas the other escapes. Female characters of Lahiri's fiction negotiate their new unstable identities through their own different means and their own individual voice." Thoughts: Bahmanpour is logical, focused, coherent, and consistent in her argument; although she uses terms that are at first unknown, she clearly defines them and provides examples of them which recognize how the characters are redefining their identity. While the evidence is understa
Gina Awanis

Literary Analysis #2: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park - 1 views

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    Purpose: The author shows how Lady Bertram's pet Pug is a symbol of society and the role of Women at the time. She argues that Austen demonstrates the indolence and growing modernization of society and its roles by means of the lapdog ever so present throughout the novel (although a subtle presence). Evidence: "she [Austen] also subtly highlights most of the revolutionary issues of the day: women's nature and place, social class, nationalism and the Empire, Darwinian physiognomy, religion and morality, urbanization, and slavery." "She shows Lady Bertram treating her pug like a baby, always in her lap or in her arms…much as a young mother spends her afternoons watching a toddler." "All this, added to the failures of Lady Bertram's children, serves to illustrate the moral that a woman's duty is to mother her children not to waste her time with pets." "Katherine McDonogh's argument that pet dogs in the French Revolution were shown to be superior to kennel dogs, in being pedigreed and therefore elite, and to symbolize the idle and dissolute aristocracy." "Yet the pug also symbolizes the decadence and laziness of the idle rich." "Beth Dixon points out that women being connected to animals in literature shows that women are bodily, natural, and emotional, therefore closer to being animals themselves than men are." "the pug, while an understandable presence, still evokes and symbolizes the evils of modernity which it has been adopted to alleviate" "it also reprimands traditional culture for keeping women like her daughters Maria and Julia repressed to the point where they erupt in rebellion against strictures of all kinds, especially those prescribing lives as human lapdogs for themselves." Thoughts: I agree with the arguments presented in this criticism and I also find it interesting that such a subtle thing as a lapdog can have so much to say about Austen's purpose or at least one of her purposes to Mansfield Park.
Stephen Marley

Literary Criticism #2: Science Fiction - 0 views

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    In the article "Science Fiction," primary contributor Bruce Sterling discusses the history of the literary genre of science fiction, delineating how it came into being and how it has evolved over the years. In addition to this, Sterling analyzes the various themes and ideas that recur throughout science fiction works. Organized both chronologically and by topic, the article begins with a brief explanation of the genre itself before delving into the history and evolution of science fiction as a whole. Examples are provided throughout, creating connotations with which the reader can associate the topic at hand, provided they have read the works of those mentioned by Sterling. According to the article, certain key traits differentiate works of science fiction from those of other genres such as horror and fantasy, both of which are explained to be similar in nature to the science fiction genre. Shared traits such as a dark, dreary mood and plots revolving around the notions of alternative societies, alien encounters, time travel, space travel, and alternate universes serve as distinguishing factors of science fiction novels. Other commonalities involve plot points such as apocalyptic disaster, epic voyages, and prophetic events, as well as a heavy focus on technology. Over the years, authors have begun to use the genre of science fiction as an outlet for social discontent, satirizing society in such a manner as which they cannot be persecuted for. Sterling's assertions appear to be based on factual research, and therefore are unlikely to be influenced by biases or predispositions.
Maria McGilton

Article Analysis #2 - Jane Eyre - 0 views

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    The author of the Bergsonian Critique criticizes and explains the novel, Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte. It says how it could be an example of feminist text because of a women's quest. They critique that it is a mythic and gothic text because they believe the author was "unappealing and unremarkable". The strength of will of the main character allows the novel to develop through the quest. The purpose of this analysis and critique is to show how some of Bronte's life or personality is portrayed through the novel and characters. The author of the analysis gives Bronte credit because of the way she writes due to the autobiographical structure of the novel. The character Jane says in the novel that she will not "announce to the world that she is trying to begin any type of feminist movement". The author of this analysis believes that it is all about feminism and either an example of being "unfeminine" or feminine. The thinking of the main character could have had a movement for women in the 19th century when the novel was written. Most of the time, throughout, the author talks mostly about Jane and her "defiance of authority". They feel like Charlotte Bronte proves that Jane is a part of her and her beliefs. The purpose of this from the article was to show how the main character thinks and questions that may arise from the reader of the novel.
Colten Sammons

The Conversion of Scrooge: A Defense of That Good Man's Motivation - 0 views

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    Critical Analysis of "The Conversion of Scrooge: A Defense of That Good Man's Motivation" The story of A Christmas Carol is one of redemption and change. Yet, the term Scrooge still carries a negative connotation. William E. Morris notes that the public has been reluctant to recognize the change Scrooge experiences. However, Scrooges' change is the foundation for the entire story. Morris submits that the change could have come from within Scrooge, and that the visits were actually dreams, brought about by his desire to change deep down as well as the cold, moist, and dark setting in which Scrooge lives. Throughout his childhood, Scrooge was subject to economic hardship and loneliness, thus affecting his personality. He was originally caring but then grew cold and distant in order to secure monetary stability, but his inner goodness laid dormant chipping at his hard shell from the inside. In Scrooge's dreams, he imagines games of hide-and-seek, possibly shedding light on Scrooge's feelings of loneliness and his desire for companionship, "it must be the case with Scrooge that he is lost yet struggling to be found" (Morris). Morris submits that the change had to originate inside Scrooge for it to be effective and that there was significant reason for him to desire change. Scrooge believed in marriage and Christmas and overall happiness, but became bitter as he aged and alienated himself from the people. "He can no longer find life enough to breathe in isolation; he must break out into the world" (Morris). Subconsciously, he still believed and he had to either change, or else be completely consumed by his cold, hard self.
Robert Gambardella

Steinbeck - 1 views

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    Arugement: His heritage of being german and irish affected his stories characters. Claim: The way he was brought up helped add all different aspects into his novels, having a peice of every charactersitic in his characters. Evidence:"between the romantic and the hardheaded naturalist, between the dreamer and the masculine tough guy, may be partly accounted for by inheritance from the Irish and German strains of his parents"
Robert Gambardella

Steinbeck - 0 views

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    Arguement: Steinbeck choose his characters based on having two people in every story to juxtapose eachother. Claim: Having these opposing characters keeps the readers more interested in the story with more drama/excitment. Evidence: "Every good story must have opposing forces, friends and enemies to keep the conflict moving"
Nicholas Jensen

Jon Krakauer Research Abilities - 0 views

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    Argument: Krakauer does superb research before writing his books, often digging into the past of the people or issues he writes about. This research manifests itself in his writing through an intricate understanding of the subject. Claim: In Under the Banner of Heaven, "proving his capacity for exhaustive research, Krakauer does an impressive job of chronicling the early history of the [Mormon] faith". This research can be seen in other books as well. Evidence: Krakauer chronicles how Joseph Smith went about "receiving a message from an angel named Moroni leading him to a hillside near his home in Palmyra, New York" and he "examines the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, wherein Saints disguised as Indians slaughtered 120 of 137 settlers who ventured onto Mormon turf". All this proves Krakauer's research capabilities. PURL: http://go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort=RELEVANCE&inPS=true&prodId=LitRC&userGroupName=chandler_main&tabID=T001&searchId=R1&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=BasicSearchForm&currentPosition=5&contentSet=GALE|H1100080168&&docId=GALE|H1100080168&docType=GALE&role=LitRC
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