A Cards Flashcards
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Epic poem in terza rima (tercets or groups of three lines with interlocking rhymes: aba, bcb, cdc, etc.). Italian original. A trilogy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Each volume divided into sections called Cantos.
Dante sets himself as the narrator and main character of this epic poem. The Inferno is an account of Dante’s own journey, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil, through the nine levels of hell. During this journey Dante encounters and holds conversations with the souls of the damned. At the end of the journey, at the bottom of hell, Dante must face Satan and confront the problem of how to escape from the underworld.
Beatrice serves as Dante’s muse and inspiration. In The Divine Comedy it is Beatrice who, out of love for the poet, initiates Dante’s journey because she believes that he has strayed from a righteous path and she thinks that this divine journey will save him from himself. Thus, she leaves her seat in Heaven to descend to Hell where she asks Virgil to serve as Dante’s guide. Beatrice meets Dante in Earthly Paradise (Purgatorio) and acts as his guide through Heaven.
Sherwood Anderson: (1876-1941)
Writer whose prose style, derived from everyday speech, influenced American short story writing between World Wars I and II. Anderson made his name as a leading naturalistic writer with his masterwork, WINESBURG, OHIO (1919), a picture of life in a typical small Midwestern town, as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. Anderson’s episodic bildungsroman has been compared often to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. “primal forces cannot be denied even though the machine-age wants them to be.” Encouraged both Faulkner and Hemingway.
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold
The most poignant image is the sea. The sea includes the visual imagery, used to express illusion, as well as the auditory imagery, used to express reality. A vivid description of the calm sea in the first eight lines allows a picture of the sea to unfold. However, the next six lines call upon auditory qualities, especially the words “Listen,” “grating roar,” and “eternal note of sadness.” The distinction between the sight and sound imagery continues into the third stanza. Sophocles can hear the Aegean Sea, but cannot see it. He hears the purposelessness “of human misery,” but cannot see it because of the “turbid ebb and flow” of the sea. The allusion of Sophocles and the past disappears abruptly, replaced by the auditory image, “But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar/ Retreating to the breath/ Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world” (Lines 24-28). The image is intensely drawn by Arnold to vividly see the faith disappearing from the speaker’s world. The image of darkness pervades the speaker’s life just like the night wind pushes the clouds in to change a bright, calm sea into dark, “naked shingles.”
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (Quote)
In the final stanza, the speaker makes his last attempt to hold on to illusion, yet is forced to face reality. John Ciardi affirms, “Love, on the other hand, tries to imagine a land of dreams and certitude” (196). Humanitarian sympathy becomes distinct in the spiritual image of love, even though the love which the speaker refers to is the unseen second person to which he communes.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!…
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light..
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
Arnold is probably most famous for this book, and the GRE is most likely going to ask you to identify a passage. Praise for the Greek/Hellenic cultures. A typical passage will include either the words “sweetness and light” or the word “philistine,” a term he popularized.
Kingsley Amis
“Lucky Jim”…Set sometime around 1950, Lucky Jim follows the exploits of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university. The tone is often truculent and plain-spoken, but its diction and style are wide-ranging and finely modulated. The novel pioneers the characteristic subject matter of the time: a young man making his way in a post-war world that combines new and moribund attitudes.
Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart (1958)
Things Fall Apart explores the forces that drive the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a leader in the Umuofia clan and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Ibo (also spelled Igbo) community.
Things Fall Apart is considered one of the major works in African postcolonial literature because it presents the life, culture, and complexities of a traditional African people with breathtaking honesty, dignity and humanity. The story of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart has been compared in western countries to Greek tragedy, as the very characteristics that make Okonkwo a great leader in his clan (strength, inflexibility) lead ultimately to his death.
The title of the book comes from a poem, “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats, and is quoted in the frontpiece of the book:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
