The Handy Literature Answer Book

Deborah G. Felder, Daniel S. Burt

Description

Get the most out of reading with this an engaging and fun guide to the deeper meanings in great works of literature!


From the epic of Gilgamesh to Aristotle and Cicero, and from Shakespeare and the King James Bible to Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Nobel-winning lyrics of Bob Dylan, the world of literature is an integral part of our lives. Great literature can shape and form thoughts and opinions as well as influence politics and predict the future. Reading can truly enrich our lives, but it can sometimes be daunting to get the most out of a great work of literature.

The Handy Literature Answer Book: Understand and Enjoy Meanings, Symbolism, and Signs in Great Works is an engaging, easy-to-read look at literature basics such as themes, symbols, context, and other literary devices. Different literary forms, including novels, poems, plays, short stories, memoirs, and literary nonfiction are analyzed. Hundreds of important stories and great works are used as illustrative examples. Learn about the five basic questions for any work of literature, including “What is the significance of a title?” “What is conflict?” “What is character development?” “What is point of view?” “How does a setting affect a story?” “What are the different schools of literary criticism?” and many more.

Bringing the most out of the reading experience, The Handy Literature Answer Book deciphers and analyzes stories, novels, and verses through insightful in-depth answers to nearly 400 common questions. You will also read about such fascinating tidbits as …

What are the key components of literature?

How is reading literature different from other kinds of reading?

Why is artful reading so hard?

What do poems do?

How should a poem be read for its comparisons—metaphors and similes?

What, according to Poe, should be the method of the short story writer?

How do you recognize the difference between story and plot in a short story?

How can you recognize a symbol?

What are the defining characteristics of the novel?

How did the novel evolve from a popular literary entertainment to the modern novel?

What is the difference between drama and theater?

What is the best way to understand and appreciate Shakespearean drama?

What approaches should you take in reading an essay?

What are characteristics of a memoir?

This handy primer from two highly regarded experts also includes a glossary of essential literary terms, a timeline, a helpful bibliography, and an extensive index, adding to its usefulness. Making reading more enriching, rewarding, and enjoyable, The Handy Literature Answer Book is a wonderful, eye-opening read!
How do you Read Artfully? A Checklist

Slow down your reading: Speed-reading great works of literature is a mistake! The goal should be not to finish a work of literature as soon as possible, but to slow down your reading so that you attend to what is being said. Think about taking a hike along an unfamiliar trail. You can push through and try to get to the end as quickly as possible, but you will miss the point of the hike: to notice and appreciate the scenery around you as you walk.

Reread: It has been said that the great works of literature cannot be read, they can only be reread! Reading a poem, play, story, novel, or essay a second time tends to open up the work and more fully display what it is about. A first reading of any literary work will provide an overview; subsequent readings allow you to examine it closely and see more about how it works and what it means.

Read critically: that is, thoughtfully and actively: Reading literature is not, as we have said, a passive activity in which you expect to have the key information delivered to you as directly as possible (as in everyday reading). Literature’s meanings are multiple and the questions it raises require your active pursuit of meaning. You need to function almost like a co-creator in a work of literature, actively attending to all the evidence you are present and formulating interpretations based on that evidence (more on this later).

Engage in a dialogue with the work: ask it questions: The very best way to be an artful reader of literature is to continually ask questions of the text: Why did the author provide this detail? Why did a character react this way? What would have resulted had this happened and not that? Asking questions like this forces you to engage with the work of literature at a deep level in which its significance becomes clearer.

Annotate: The best way to engage in the kind of dialogue suggested above is to read with a pen in your hand. By underlining and writing in the margins, you will slow your reading and pose the kinds of questions that will help you to understand a work of literature. You will also have identified key passages and issues to raise in discussions and to consider when writing about the work.

Summarize: Write a brief summary of each poem or story, the acts of a play, chapters of a novel. This serves as a useful way of keeping the work fresh in your mind and helps to convert your memory from short-term to long-term. Summaries are often the basis for any analysis or writing about literature, so get in the habit of writing summaries to aid your understanding of exactly what happened in a story, poem, novel, or play.

Ask critical questions: Beyond summarizing what happens in the literary work you are reading, consider other essential questions, such as, how does the literary form (poem, play, story, or novel) help determine what the work is and its methods. What about knowledge of the author? Does that help you to understand what is intended? How about the cultural context? Do you need to know something about the time in which the work was written, the historical era, the cultural values that are expressed here? Posing these kinds of questions can help in important ways with your understanding about a writer’s intentions and the effect the work of literature is intended to have.

What Are the Five Key Questions to Ask When Reading a Work of Literature?
Question 1: What is the title?

The title is sometimes the only explicit suggestion by the author what the work is about and what should focus the reader’s attention. Ask yourself: why this title and not some other? What does the title suggest in terms of what the focus and meaning of the work is? If the work is a novel, how do the chapter titles (if any) suggest what to expect next?

Question 2: Why does it start here?

Like the viewfinder in a camera that frames a picture, the beginning of a literary work reveals a great deal about the focus and purpose of the work. Ask yourself: why does the work start here and not some other place? What is important about the initial information that is given? About the initial situation? It has been said that there are only two plots in literature: setting off on a journey or the arrival of a stranger. In other words, literature often shows a status quo disrupted. Does this concept apply? Is there some routine, habit, condition that is challenged? How and why?

Question 3: What is the conflict?

Drama is conflict: the opposition of desires, goals, ambitions, and this is no less true in poetry and fiction as it is in drama. Find the conflict and find the significance of that conflict. What are the oppositions? Conflict can come between individuals and circumstances (nature, time, etc.), individuals with each other, and individuals with themselves. Isolate the explicit or implied conflict in the work to locate its dramatic center.

Question 4: How is the conflict resolved?

If conflict is the dramatic center of literary works, framing the tensions and movement in a work, how the conflict is resolved is crucial in determining significance. What happens in the confrontation? What change in the initial situation is evident? Does the central character (or speaker) come to a new or different insight, conclusion, or action? What does the resolution tell us about a revealed aspect of human nature or the human experience?

Question 5: Why does it end here?

Think of the conclusion of a work of literature as completing the frame of the viewfinder: what is revealed? Why end here and not some other place? What is resolved or left unresolved? Why? Compare how the work ends with how it began. What’s different; what’s the same? What has changed?
Acknowledgments
Introduction
World Literature Timeline

1. What is Literature and How to Read It
2. Why Read Literature & How NOT to Read It
3. Poetry
4. Short Stories
5. The Novel
6. Drama
7. Literary Nonfiction
8. Critical Approaches to Literature

Appendix 1—Glossary of Essential Literary Terms
Appendix 2—Listing of Selected Essential Poems, Stories, Novels, and Dramas
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Books
• Reading

Informations

• Publié par: Visible Ink Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781578596782
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 12 Mo

Extrait

Table of Contents
P HOTO S OURCES
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION

WHAT IS LITERATURE AND HOW TO READ IT
WHY READ LITERATURE HOW NOT TO READ IT
Don t Read Literature Like You Do Ordinary Writing
Don t Just Read Literature, Reread It
Don t Read Literature Passively
Don t Speed-Read Literature
Don t Read Literature Only to Identify
Don t Read Literature for Meaning (First)
HOW TO READ POETRY
An Analysis of Emily Dickinson s I Like to See It Lap the Miles
An Analysis of William Butler Yeats s The Lake Isle of Innisfree
An Analysis of Tennyson s Ulysses
HOW TO READ SHORT STORIES
The Gift of the Magi
The Story of an Hour
Nineteenth-Century Short Stories
Anton Chekhov
James Joyce
Analysis of Joyce s Araby
American Short Story Innovations in the Twentieth Century
HOW TO READ THE NOVEL
Moll Flanders
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Women Characters in Early Novels
Jane Austen
Emma
The English Novel after Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Analysis of Charles Dickens s The Pickwick Papers
Serial Novels
Victorian Novels
How Are Novels Constructed?
George Eliot s Middle-march
The Modern Novel
James Joyce s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Novel and Modernism
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Toni Morrison s Beloved
Subgenres of the Novel
HOW TO READ DRAMA
Greek and Roman Drama
Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare
How to Read a Shakespearean Play: Analyzing A Midsummer Night s Dream
Early European Drama
Reading Neoclassical Drama-Moli re s Tartuffe
Reading Neoclassical Drama-Racine s Ph dre
Seventeenth-Century Theater Continued
Reading a Modern Drama-Ibsen s A Doll s House
Reading a Modern Drama-Checkhov s The Cherry Orchard
Modern Drama
Reading a Modern Drama-Brecht s Mother Courage
Reading a Modern Drama- Beckett s Waiting for Godot
Contemporary Drama
Reading Contemporary Drama-Wilson s Fences
Reading Contemporary Drama-Kushner s Angels in America
HOW TO READ LITERARY NONFICTION
Analysis of Montaigne s Of Smells
Essays
Autobiography and Memoir
Analysis of Langston Hughes s Salvation
Analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston s The Woman Warrior
Creative Nonfiction
CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
Critical Approaches to Literature
Psychological and Psychoanalytical Criticism
Marxist Critical Approach
Structuralism
Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
Historical Criticism and New Historicism
Gender Studies
Cultural Studies and Post-Colonial Criticism
Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory
Choosing an Approach

G LOSSARY OF E SSENTIAL L ITERARY T ERMS
L ISTING OF S ELECTED E SSENTIAL P OEMS , S TORIES , N OVELS , AND D RAMAS
F URTHER R EADING
I NDEX
Photo Sources
Annie Dillard s Official Website: p. 368 .
BabelStone (Wikicommons): p. 47 .
Bachrach (Wikicommons): p. 409 .
Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Akademie der K nste: p. 315 .
Biblioth que Nationale de France : p. 317 .
Gustav Borgen: p. 302 .
British Museum: p. 359 .
Calidius (Wikicommons): p. 262 .
Mark Coggins: p. 101 .
Nancy Crampton: p. 158 .
Oliver Dixon: p. 76 .
Folger Shakespeare Library: pp. 272 , 276 .
Gallica Digital Library: p. 319 .
German Federal Archives: pp. 310 , 312 .
Glyptothek, Munich: p. 251 .
Albert Greiner, Sr. and Jr.: p. 236 .
Chris Hakkens: p. 49 .
Heritage Auction Gallery: p. 184 .
Houghton Library, Harvard University: p. 181 .
Internet Archive Book Images: pp. 153 , 164 .
Hansueli Krapf: p. 253 .
The Laura Flanders Show: p. 331 .
LeeRA (Wikicommons): p. 363 .
Library of Congress: p. 201 .
Loboda.linux (Wikicommons): p. 406 .
Lonpicman (Wikicommons): p. 267 .
Robie Macauley: p 397 .
Michael Maggs: p. 188 .
Larry D. Moore: p. 35 .
Walter Mori (Mondadori Publishers): p. 26 .
National Museum of Western Art: p. 378 .
National Portrait Gallery, London: pp. 30 , 67 , 172 , 174 , 202 , 239 , 279 , 381 , 382 , 386 , 388 .
New York Public Library Digital Gallery: p. 111 .
New York World-Telegram Sun Collection, Library of Congress: pp. 327 , 364 .
Ortsmuseum Zollikon: p. 70 .
Otterbein University Theatre Dance: pp. 334 , 336 .
Project Gutenberg: p. 82 .
Royal Museums Greenwich: p. 162 .
Scottish National Gallery: p. 231 .
David Shankbone: p. 357 .
Shutterstock: pp. 3 , 7 , 10 , 15 , 18 , 20 , 24 , 29 , 33 , 39 , 42 , 50 , 57 , 59 , 62 , 71 , 72 , 106 , 108 , 114 , 118 , 211 , 215 , 221 , 244 , 247 , 256 , 258 , 261 , 268 , 285 , 306 , 343 , 345 .
Gage Skidmore: p. 45 .
University of Texas Libraries Portrait Gallery Portraits of Humanists: p. 393 .
U.S. Information Agency: p. 224 .
Carl Van Vechten collection, Library of Congress: p. 355 .
West Point, The U.S. Military Academy: p. 227 .
Zane Williams: p. 155 .
Public domain (via Wikicommons): pp. 13 , 54 , 64 , 79 , 85 , 91 , 94 , 98 , 102 , 120 , 124 , 128 , 131 , 133 , 135 , 138 , 143 , 147 , 159 , 167 , 169 , 171 , 177 , 179 , 186 , 191 , 193 , 197 , 198 , 205 , 206 , 209 , 229 , 233 , 241 , 263 , 273 , 281 , 283 , 288 , 290 , 292 , 295 , 299 , 305 , 341 , 346 , 350 , 376 , 384 , 390 , 399 , 402 , 404 .
Acknowledgments
The origin and orientation of this book can be traced to several sources: our parents, for having instilled in us a love for literature; the English teachers and literature professors who taught us how to love literature even more by teaching us how to read it; and the many students for whom it has been a privilege to teach the art of reading literature. We are grateful to all for the many contributions (intended or otherwise) to this book. Samuel Johnson famously declared, When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Add to hanging: teaching a course and writing a book. We are grateful for the privilege afforded us in asking and answering questions about how to read literature and hope that the result of all that concentration proves to be a benefit to our readers.
Our thanks to Kevin Hile for his editorial insights during the course of this project; Roger J necke for his much-valued advice and many courtesies; and our agent, Roger Williams, for introducing us to Visible Ink Press.
Introduction
Few would contest the truism that what we deem literature is one of the greatest achievements of human civilization. A culture is defined and judged by the buildings and monuments it constructs, by the laws it makes, but especially by the literature it produces. Prehistoric cave paintings, the first and oldest surviving reflections of the world created some 40,000 years ago, include hand stencils, a prototype of literature itself, powerfully communicating the essence of literary expression: This is me. I was here. I matter. Remember me. Long-dead voices and vanished cultures retain their ability to speak to us in the present only through literature. Literature alone confirms William Faulkner s famous assertion: The past is never dead. It s not even past. To hear what an age thought and felt most directly and intimately, we must read the literature that it has left for us. But our interest in literature is not just antiquarian. More than precious cultural artifacts, literature provides the most fundamental service ever devised. It teaches us how to be human. At a basic level, we learn to function as human beings by intuition and by imitation, by the earliest examples and instructions of those closest to us-our parents, relatives, friends, and teachers. At the deepest level, however, to learn what human nature is and the multiple dimensions of human experience in all times and places, literature becomes our principal and most valuable guide and instructor.
If civilization and culture recognize literature as a singular human achievement, as our window into the past, the world, and ourselves, literature s hold on the individual is no less esteemed or revered. Can you imagine a home without some books? Why are they not as disposable as most of the consumables that enter and exit our dwellings? Why do we throw out yesterday s newspaper but hold on to that novel read in college long after we know whodunit and why? Test your devotion to literature by imagining purging your bookcase. Do you send the unwanted or battered copies to the landfill? Most likely not. You recycle by donating to your local library or some other exchange to provide the book with a new home and a new owner. Why? Because you know at some visceral, intuitive level that those books continue to be relevant and to have persistent value, not on the commercial exchange perhaps but on the human one. That s the essence of what literature is, and that s why we value it so highly. So much of what we possess is time stamped with an inherent obsolescence: clothes wear out, appliances break down, electronics must be replaced by newer models. Not literature.
However, recognizing the cultural and personal benefits of literature does not necessarily mean that our encounters with literature are either continual or do not meet with some resistance. We may acknowledge literature s importance, but the challenge of reading what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said can often mar our experience with literature. Ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short), as the saying goes. We know that literature is good for us, but how much relish do we have for most things in our lives that are good for us: sensible diet, exercise, self-assessment? Like fine art and cultural treasures consigned to the museum to be visited and admired on occasion, volumes of great literature await activation on our bookshelves, but the call doesn t come. We know it s there; we know its value, but the remote is easier and the social media feed is irresistible. Moreover, somehow we have convinced ourselves that a now-dimly recalled encounter with a literary classic sometime in high school or college means that we have definitively extracted its treasures and transferred all the meaning it possesses to memory. Not