Skip to main content

Home/ APLit2010/ Group items tagged House

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Aubrey Arrowood

Henrik Ibsen Literary Analysis - 3 views

Aubrey Arrowood Mrs. Sejkora AP Literature-0 20 February 2011 Henrik Ibsen Views on Societal Issues throughout His Plays The Norwegian play writer, Henrik Ibsen, illustrated societal flaws as the ...

started by Aubrey Arrowood on 23 Feb 11 no follow-up yet
VIctoria Fernandez

Unsettling accounts in The House of the Seven Gables - 0 views

web.ebscohost.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...detail

House of Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne Puritianism Salem Witch trials guilt

shared by VIctoria Fernandez on 26 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • VIctoria Fernandez on 26 Jan 11
     
    In her criticism Johnson argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the House of Seven Gables because of his own ancestry and guilt he felt for his ancestor's involvement in the Salem Witch Trials. She claims the book is Hawthorne's personal form of vengeance against his ancestor and his actions. The author's organization is clear and focused and very effective. In order to support her perspective, Johnson provides quotes from the text and facts about Nathaniel Hawthorne's background and beliefs. Her argument is strong and makes a great case. She concludes that although Hawthorne claims "vengeance against Salem is the farthest thing from his mind," this is in fact the case and romantic language is used to distract the reader from this truth. She uses his hate for his ancestor, evident by his legal name change to break the association, the similarities between his judge ancestor and a character in his novel and his detest for Salem in other works to prove evidence. She also concludes that there are parallels between Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables and his own family guilt.
Shelli Smoll

Literary Analysis #4 - 0 views

galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov

shared by Shelli Smoll on 27 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Shelli Smoll on 27 Jan 11
     
    Argument: John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat is a nihilistic novel filled with loneliness and death. The paisanos have destruction following them one step at a time and believe in a God that only brings more destruction to their lives. Fire from a holy candle burned down one home, and the irresponsible personalities of each paisano ultimately ruined the second house along with the relationships that were contained inside it. Evidence: "The people of Tortilla Flat melted into the darkness. Danny's friends still stood looking at the smoking ruin. They looked at one another strangely, and then back to the burned house. And after a while they turned and walked slowly away, and no two walked together" "The paisanos start to put out the accidental fire but then, "struck with a celestial thought," let the house burn, looking at each other and smiling "the wise smiles of the deathless and hopeless ones." "Ah the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God." "In the sky, saints and martyrs looked on with set and unforgiving faces. The candle was blessed. It belonged to Saint Francis. Saint Francis will have a big candle in its place tonight." Thoughts: The author, Bethea made several solid points during her analysis. She had a high amount of direct quotes from the novel along with quotes from past criticisms. She organized her thoughts very efficiently and in an easy to understand format. I do not agree with her belief on all the men burning the second house down after their friend died as a way of ending the group friendship. I think the companionship between the men was very close knit however after Danny died they payed their respects to him by letting his home pass away with him. Danny allowed each paisano stay at his home for free, therefore once he died the house had the right to die as well, as respect to Danny from his fellow room mates.
Aubrey Arrowood

A Doll's House - 1 views

web.ebscohost.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...detail

Criticism Literary A Doll's House Ibsen

shared by Aubrey Arrowood on 20 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Aubrey Arrowood on 20 Jan 11
     
    This literary criticism shows how Ibsen used Nora in A Doll's House to reveal a societal issue in his play. Ibsen displays the role of women in society through A Doll's House. Another topic in my criticism will talk about how each of the characters display each societal issue presented. This literary criticism breaks down the role of each character in the play.
Ashley Cox

My Name Was Salmon, Like the Fish': Understanding Death, Grief, and Redemption in Alice... - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...retrieve.do

Alice Sebold lovely bones Kenneth Womack

shared by Ashley Cox on 28 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • As with so many other works of contemporary fiction and film, Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones (2002) fulfills our fundamental and indelibly human desires for establishing vital interconnections with the lost friends and loved ones who adorn our personal pasts.
  • Time and time again, the most cherished works of our literary and popular culture reflect this abiding need to seek out our lost siblings, parents, and grandparents.
  • we long for the opportunity to wade back into the recesses of time in order to enjoy impossible reunions with the people who left their imprints upon our very souls
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • By narrating the events surrounding the Salmon family's tragic dislocation and heart-wrenching reunion, The Lovely Bones deftly taps into our yearnings to eclipse the laws of space and time. Even more powerfully, the novel depicts the many ways in which interpersonal tragedy possesses the capacity for tearing survivors' lives apart at the very moment in which they need familial companionship the most. The parlance of family systems therapy--with its accent upon the interpersonal dynamics that shape literary works as well as our own senses of self--provides us with a useful lens for understanding the Salmon family's trials and tribulations in The Lovely Bones.
  • as an inherently open system, the family must at once provide support for its individual members' integration into a solid family unit, as well as their differentiation, or emotional and psychological separation, into relatively autonomous selves. This mutual developmental process possesses the capacity for producing functional and dysfunctional families. In functional families, individual members evolve into fully realized selves that allow them to act, think, and feel for themselves. In dysfunctional families, however, family members develop pseudo-selves--often fostered by fear and anxiety within the system--and thus, such individuals frequently remain unable to maintain any real equilibrium between their inner feelings and their outward behavior
  • In the novel, Susie can only watch in horror as her family devolves from a functional system into a dysfunctional shadow of its former self. Family therapists describe the fashion in which the Salmons maintain their systemic dysfunctionality as a psychological state of homeostasis, which Barnard and Corrales define as a family's tendency
  • "In order to perceive change in one's life--to experience one's life as progressing--and in order to perceive oneself changing one's life, a person requires mechanisms that assist her to plot the events of her life within the context of coherent sequences across time--through the past, present, and future" (35). These mechanisms--works of narrative therapy--offer cogent methodologies that assist clients (or readers) in simultaneously identifying with and separating from the dilemmas that plague their lived experiences.
  • At the beginning of the novel, the Salmons' interpersonal relationship exists as a functional family system. Jack and Abigail Salmon enjoy a busy, albeit satisfying family life in eastern Pennsylvania, where they raise their three children--fourteen-year-old Susie, her younger sister Lindsey, and their four-year-old brother Buckley. After Susie's rape, murder, and dismemberment in December 1973, the family lapses into a dysfunctional spiral as they attempt to cope with a stultifying sense of grief. The effect of Susie's untimely death is rendered even more painful by the disappearance of her body save for a stray elbow, as well as by Jack's suspicions that a reclusive neighbor, George Harvey, is responsible for her demise.
  • "The reflective awareness of one's personal narrative provides the realization that past events are not meaningful in themselves but are given significance by the configuration of one's narrative," Polkinghorne observes. "This realization can release people from the control of past interpretations they have attached to events and open up the possibility of renewal and freedom for change" (182-83).
  • Told entirely from Susie's perspective, the novel details the post-traumatic experiences of her family as they attempt to make their various ways among the living. Existing in a form of atemporal limbo that she describes as a kind of heaven, Susie observes her family and friends as they try to understand her loss in terms of their own survivorship. In addition to her significant role as witness, Susie must also contend with her own anxieties about her untimely separation from her family unit, as well as her severance from the young life that she was only just beginning to comprehend.
  • "There is no question," they write, "that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability. Security," they add, "seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability"
  • In The Lovely Bones, Susie composes her narrative in an explicit attempt to make sense of her family's dysfunctionality and to explode the homeostasis of her former family system, thus allowing them to effect their own "new levels of functioning." Although feelings of morphogenesis for Susie will always be tempered by the finality of her death, she intuitively realizes that the sublimation of her family's homeostasis will allow both herself and her family to continue their progress toward selfhood--although obviously in decidedly different locales and through highly disparate states of being.
  • The particular manner in which Susie sorts through the tragic events of her family's post-traumatic experiences can be usefully understood by interpreting her act of narrative therapy in terms of the five "attitudes" toward death that Kübler-Ross postulates in On Death and Dying. These attitudes--which themselves mirror the five stages of dying that terminally ill patients undergo--include denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. "The one thing that usually persists through all these stages is hope," Kübler-Ross writes. "It is the feeling that all this must have some meaning, will pay off eventually if they can only endure it for a little while longer" (139).
  • Abigail isolates herself by delving into the workaday world of the suburban housewife. Her obsession with the preparation of the family's meals and her daily chores allows the time to pass more quickly, thus limiting her ability to reflect upon her daughter's ordeal.
  • In The Lovely Bones, the first portion of Susie's narrative highlights the narrator and her family's struggle with denial and isolation as they simultaneously come to grips with and attempt to disavow the unsettling reality of her murder.4 Their feelings of denial and isolation function as "coping mechanisms," according to Kübler-Ross, as well as the result of the "inability of [clients] to look at their situations realistically" (37, 41). Unable to make sense of Susie's sudden disappearance from their lives, the Salmons initially cleave to each other, hoping against hope that somehow she will return to their midst. After the police report to the family that Susie must be dead, given that so much blood had been found at the scene of the crime, they begin the difficult work of having to confront her fate, as well as their own. Like her family, Susie finds herself unable to accept her passing: "I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother," she reports. "That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it" (27).
  • While her father purposefully refuses to allow himself to cry for her loss--to do so, he reasons, would make Susie's death seem all the more real--Jack copes by attempting to establish normalcy in the Salmon household within only a few scant days of her disappearance.
  • Meanwhile, Lindsey and Buckley act as their father's accomplices in his efforts to trap Susie's killer. In one particularly harrowing instance, Lindsey slips into Mr. Harvey's house in order to search for evidence. She narrowly escapes from his clutches, ultimately becoming the object of Mr. Harvey's sociopathic fantasies herself. In each instance, the family members' behaviors serve to exacerbate their ability to come to terms with their grief, rather than to sate their enduring despair.
  • In this fashion, Jack, Abigail, and Lindsey each develop pseudo-selves in order to quell their devastating senses of anxiety and pain. As the youngest member of the family, little Buckley can hardly begin to comprehend his sister's fate. He only begins to understand the extent of her absence from his life during a game of Monopoly, when he realizes that there is no one to play with the shoe, Susie's favorite game piece. Unable to cope with the significance of the moment, Buckley hides the shoe in his bedroom. As with the rest of his family, Buckley can only consider the depth of her absence in isolation from the rest of the unit. To do anymore, it seems, would force them to contend with the awful reality of a world in which Susie simply no longer exists.
  • In the second stage of their confrontation with Susie's death and the slow, almost imperceptible collapse of their family system, the Salmons experience the anger about which Kübler-Ross remarks in On Death and Dying. "When the first stage of denial cannot be maintained any longer," she writes, "it is replaced by feelings of anger, rage, envy, and resentment." According to Kübler-Ross, people in such situations often find it difficult to control their anger or to differentiate logically between the various objects of their animus. "The reason for this," Kübler-Ross observes, "is the fact that this anger is displaced in all directions and projected onto the environment at times almost random" (50).5 In The Lovely Bones, the family's anger takes many
  • forms. Susie's own anger reaches a fever-pitch when she learns the maddening extent of her killer's depravity. As she recognizes that her own death was just the latest in a series of unsolved homicides, Susie seethes as she realizes that Mr. Harvey's house exists as a "town of floating graves, cold and whipped by the wind, where the victims of murder went in the minds of the living. I could see his other victims as they occupied his house--those trace memories left behind before they fled this Earth" (182).
  • While Susie's anger rages in heaven, her father's inability to come to terms with her death pushes the Salmon household to the brink of psychological disaster. His suspicions about his daughter's killer begin to emerge after he visits Mr. Harvey's home and assists his reclusive neighbor in the construction of a backyard bridal tent. Mr. Harvey's bizarre behavior--including his odd remark that "the neighbors saw us. We're friends now"--culminates in Jack's nearly round-the-clock surveillance of the murderer's behavior. Egged on by another neighbor's advice that he should find a covert way of avenging his daughter's homicide, Jack begins casing the cornfield where his daughter died. After he mistakenly accosts a young couple in the field, an altercation ensues that nearly results in Jack's own death. "
  • I wanted my father's vigil," Susie reports, "but also I wanted him to go away and leave me be" (140).
  • Having sublimated her grief for so long and with her husband's increasingly risky behavior testing the boundaries of her patience, Abigail indulges in an extramarital affair--with the local homicide detective, no less--in order to stave off her guarded emotions.
  • Lindsey and Buckley respond to their mother's departure by rallying around their father, whose physical deterioration in the wake of his daughter's murder has rendered him into a shadow of his former, pre-trauma self. Yet by opting to become their father's protector and ally, Lindsey and Buckley also succeed in erecting complicated emotional walls between themselves and their estranged mother.
  • In the third stage of their post-traumatic experiences, the Salmons engage in the act of "bargaining," the grieving phenomenon that Kübler-Ross describes as the product of a given client's irrational fears about the future and his or her "attempt to postpone," if only temporarily, the inevitable processes of life and death
  • In the Salmons' case, the third stage involves very explicit efforts to delay their acceptance of the finality of Susie's death. In so doing, they postpone their capacity for achieving morphogenesis and become typecast in their familial roles.6 Such self-imposed constraints inevitably lead to identity diffusion.
  • Abigail, the overwhelming anxiety over her daughter's loss and the psychological disintegration of her surviving family prompt her to seek refuge by fleeing the Salmon household. When the first anniversary of Susie's death arrives, Abigail can simply no longer fathom the mind-numbing flow of the grieving process:
  • After spending the winter in her late father's cabin in New Hampshire, Abigail drives across the country to California, where she finds a job as a day laborer in a winery. As Denis Jonnes notes,
  • Abigail seeks to empower--or, perhaps more accurately, re-empower--herself by effecting her escape from the larger Salmon family system.7 Yet mere distance can hardly provide her with the emotional sustenance that she so desperately desires:
  • Lindsey attempts to lose herself in the business of living. Opting to go to school the first Monday after Susie's death, Lindsey begins steeling herself against the world. In class, Susie observes, "my sister did not look at Mrs. Dewitt when she speaking. She was perfecting the art of talking to someone while looking through them. That was my first clue that something would have to give" (30).
  • Buckley's youth is understandably complexified by his psychological over-identification with his father, and their intensely close relationship results in Abigail's triangulation after her return from the west coast.
  • About Literature Resource Center Contact UsCopyrightTerms of UsePrivacy Policy
  • Ashley Cox on 28 Jan 11
     
    This article takes the coping mechanisms in the lovely bones and is connecting it to real life and gives more insight to why the acted the way they did and also how their different ways of coping lead to a divided family. 
Lexie James

Review - A Doll's House - 1973 Production with Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins - 0 views

womenshistory.about.com/...dolls_house.htm

shared by Lexie James on 14 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Lexie James on 14 Feb 11
     
    References Dolls house, which describes "Women on a pedestal" and views of women.
Lauren Regester

Literary Analysis #3 - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...retrieve.do

Gender Social Class

shared by Lauren Regester on 25 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Lauren Regester on 25 Jan 11
     
    Argument: The author, Foote, argues that the novel "Little Women" wasn't in fact about gender but about class. The "little women" in the novel are present in an ambiguous class position. Foote gives examples of why she feels there isn't a presence of solely gender issues but that of social class too. The March family lives by the Laurences' which in contrast is a very large estate. The fact that all the girls work also lends significance to the idea of the March family struggling in the economic aspect. Also, Foote brings attention to the fact that the market and the home were slowly starting to mix. Evidence: "The garden separated the Marches' house from that of Mr. Laurence. Both stood in a suburb of the city, which was still country-like, with groves and lawns, large gardens and quiet streets. A low hedge parted the two estates. On one side was an old brown house, looking rather bare and shabby, robbed of the vines that in summer covered its walls, and the flowers which then surrounded it. On the other side was a stately stone mansion, plainly betokening every sort of comfort and luxury, from the big coach-house and well-kept grounds to the conservatory and the glimpses of lovely things one caught between the rich curtains (Alcott 1993, 42)." Thoughts: It was very interesting to reexamine Little Women. When first read through the book takes on an aura of a children's book but when unearthed it is actually much more. There is the forefront of the gender roles in the novel that can easily be understood but it is the social class struggle that captivated me. The time period of this novel was around the time when women had to be more proactive in certain households in order to stay afloat. This was a sign of economic instability and was for the lower classes.
Aubrey Haggarton

Literature Resource Center - Document - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...retrieve.do

Mary Higgins Clark mystery suspense

shared by Aubrey Haggarton on 08 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Aubrey Haggarton on 08 Dec 10
     
    Argument:As Clark started developing more mystery novels in the 1970's, she became more successful and found her strength in writing.  Claim:Edward D. Hoch states that Clark's form of mystery is not simple murder or crime cases, but rather suspenseful plot lines that keep the tone of the book like something that cannot be put down. Hoch also claims that Clark's use of characters and victims that are somewhat related to real life people bring a different atmosphere to the novel. Clark's use of a heroine throughout her characters brings in an audience of women, and allows her books to be more successful with this specific audience.  Evidence: "But it is the suspense rather than the mystery that makes the book so compulsively readable."  "The idea of children in jeopardy strikes a responsive chord with women readers.." "The plot and its motivation are somewhat reminiscent of the sort of hospital thrillers Robin Cook excels at, but clark produces a few new twists of her own." "The story of a young woman who marries a man without really knowing him, and then goes off to live in an isolated house, is one of the classic themes of fiction." 
Shelli Smoll

Literary Analysis #3 Tortilla Flat - 0 views

www.suite101.com/...flat-by-john-steinbeck-a326164

shared by Shelli Smoll on 24 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Shelli Smoll on 24 Jan 11
     
    Argument: Though John Steinbeck claimed to have written his book with sympathy toward the paisanos he had known and lived with his portrayal of the Spaniard characters in the novel "Tortilla Flat" unintentional came off as racist. Evidence: "They hold no jobs, drink wine excessively, and live in houses that were gifted in a will." "Upon publication of the novel, he was surprised to find out that many people thought his characters were bums - lovable and eccentric, but bums nonetheless." "Life at the two houses basically revolves around procuring free wine, and trying to get money without working." "Reading the novel today, it's hard not to draw the same conclusion, that the paisanos of Steinbeck's novel are down-and-outs, living in a capitalist society but yet powerless to create a better future for themselves." Reflection: The author, Chris Saliba, made an effective argument on the racial stereotypes presented in Steinbeck's novel. He organizes his ideas in a reader friendly layout making his analysis simple to follow. He could improve the critique by including quotes from the book to support the racism claim of the novel. Overall, Saliba created a worthy argument however could have gone more in depth with his proposal instead of going with the bare minimum and skimming the surface.
Colten Sammons

Critical Analysis of "'What Do You Play, Boy?': Card Games in Great Expectations - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...i.do

Criticism Dickens Great Expectations

shared by Colten Sammons on 28 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Colten Sammons on 28 Jan 11
     
    From a young age, Pip went to the Satis House and played cards with Estella. That's where he fell for her and where his desire for nobility began. Parkinson submits that while games are typically played for enjoyment, Pip did not enjoy playing cards, or his life as a gentleman. Pip's approach to his life as a nobleman is similar to his approach to cards. He does neither for enjoyment, he does both to impress Estella, and in the end fails to do either. Pip's wealth brings him no happiness, only discomfort and debt. Parkinson suggests that economic standing is determined by chance in addition to skill, which is accurate in Great Expectations, Pip and Estella get rich through luck, while Magwitch gets rich through mostly hard work and only a little help from luck. In addition, Pip loses at every game, no matter how hard he tries, and he blows through his fortune and ultimately loses it all. Life is just one big game, and playing for the wrong reasons can leave you destitute.
Elizabeth Tuttle

Literary Analysis #4 A Streetcar Named Desire - 4 views

Argument: In A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams portrays the role of women as a traditional house wife. Williams does this in order to teach women who read the play how they should act ...

started by Elizabeth Tuttle on 27 Jan 11 no follow-up yet
Ashley Cox

The Almost Moon - 0 views

www.bookpage.com/books-14685-The+Almost+Moon

Almost Moon Alice Sebold Coping illness Amy Scribner

shared by Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11 - No Cached
    • Ashley Cox
      Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11
       
      The main character has to not only deal with that but try to hide the evidence of what she has done
    • Ashley Cox
      Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11
       
      Her having to cope with her mothers illness let her to the action that took place
  • Helen Knightly has spent her life coping with her mother's mental illness. Often cruel and distant, her mother suffers agoraphobia so severe she can't leave the house without being wrapped head to toe in blankets. When Helen gets her first period, her mother—who can't bear not to be a part of this rite of passage—accompanies her to the drugstore fully cloaked in blankets.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  •   After her father's death, Helen spends years taking care of her aging mother, driven by a toxic mix of duty, guilt and resentment.  
  • "For years I had done my penance for blaming someone who was essentially helpless," says Helen. "I had warmed baby food and fed it to her with long pink spoons pilfered from Baskin-Robbins. I had carted her to doctors' appointments, first with blankets and then with towels to hide the world from her."
  • Finally, Helen snaps. During the next 24 hours, she grapples with what she's done, and what she should do next. Her still-devoted ex-husband flies in from across country to help her cover her tracks, but ultimately, Helen has to decide whether to face up to her mother's death.
  • The Almost Moon is incredibly fast-paced; it's the jittery, forceful story of a woman who sifts through her past to discover what brought her to such desperation.
  • Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11
     
    This article tells you a little more about the author and also some about the story of The Almost Moon. It show how the main character has to deal with her mothers sickness after her fathers death and that leads her to the action that she does which is killing her mother. Unlike in Lovely bones how someones actions leads to people having to cope with the situation at hand but in The Almost Moon the main character having to cope with her mothers illness leads her to take action
1 - 12 of 12
Showing 20▼ items per page