Miscellaneous Author&Work Info

Question 1

Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy (style)

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy (Inferno)

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy (Beatrice)

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Sherwood Anderson (intro)

Answer 4

(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.

Question 5

Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)

Answer 5

“The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint his dreams of his manhood.” (from Winesburg, Ohio)

Question 6

Matthew Arnold - “Dover Beach” (the sea)

Answer 6

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.”

Question 7

Matthew Arnold - “Dover Beach” (last stanza)

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Matthew Arnold - “Dover Beach” (quote)

Answer 8

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..

Question 9

W. H. Auden - “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (quote)

Answer 9

1. He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

[…]

2. He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

[…]

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

3. Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

[…]

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise

Question 10

Honore de Balzac (intro)

Answer 10

French journalist and writer, one of the creators of realism in literature. Balzac’s huge production of novels and short stories are collected under the nameLa Comedie humaine, which originated from Dante’sThe Divine Comedy. Among the masterpieces of The Human Comedy are Le Pere Goriot, Les Illusions Perdues, Les Paysans, La Femme de Trente Ans, and Eugenie Grandet. In these books Balzac covered a world from Paris to Provinces. The primarly landscape is Paris, with its old aristocracy, new financial wealth, middle-class trade, demi-monde, professionals, servants, young intellectuals, clerks, criminals… In this social mosaic Balzac had recurrent characters, such as Eugene Rastignac, who came from an impoverished provincial family to Paris, mixed with the nobility, pursued wealth, had many mistresses, gambled, and was a successful politician. Henry de Marsay appeared in twenty-five different novels.

Question 11

Honore de Balzac (work list)

Answer 11

An Old Maid
Bureaucracy
Juana
The Country Doctor

Question 12

Samuel Beckett (intro)

Answer 12

Samuel Beckett was born to a Protestant family near Dublin, Ireland. He moved to Paris and become good friends with Joyce. Samuel Beckett’s first play,Eleutheria,mirrors his own search for freedom, revolving around a young man’s efforts to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations. His first real triumph, however, came on January 5, 1953, whenWaiting for Godotpremiered at the Theatre de Babylone. He wrote all his major plays in French even though English was his native language. Other notable play: Endgame

Question 13

Samuel Beckett (play characters)

Answer 13

Characters from Godot:

Estragon

Vladimir

Lucky

Pozzo

a boy

Characters from Endgame:

Hamm…

Clov…

Nagg…

Nell…

Question 14

Aphra Behn (intro)

Answer 14

(1640-1689)
The first professional woman writer in English, lived from 1640 to 1689. After John Dryden, she was the most prolific dramatist of the Restoration, but it is for her pioneering work in prose narrative that she achieved her place in literary history.

Question 15

Aphra Behn “Satyr on Doctor Dryden” (intro)

Answer 15

HerSatyr on Doctor Drydenis a harsh, reflexive critique on Dryden’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. A Satyr on Doctor Dryden is the Protestant rebuttal to Dryden’s anti-Protestantism seen in MacFlecknoe. Behn begins the poem by getting right to her point, “Scorning religion all thy life time past, / And now embracing popery at last.

Question 16

Aphra Behn “Oroonoko” (characters)

Answer 16

Oroonoko, an African prince and later a slave to the English who called him “Caesar”;Imoinda, his lover, also enslaved and sometimes called “Clemene”;Jamoan, an opposing warrior chief who, conquered by Oroonoko, becomes his vassal; theKing of Coramantien, whom Oroonoko serves and later betrays, and who betrays him; the slave-running Englishship captain; and various English colonists, especially the supposedly sympathetic plantation overseer namedTrefrey, the colony’s deputy governor namedWilliam Byam, the gallantColonel Martin, and “Bannister, a wild Irishman”

Question 17

Aphra Behn “Oroonoko” (synopsis)

Answer 17

The prince, who has gotten to know Behn while he is a slave in Guiana and she is a sympathetic listener, tells her his story. Successful in battle, he falls in love with a young woman who also catches the eye of the king. Having pursued their love surreptitiously, the couple is discovered and Imoinda is sold into slavery. Oroonoko, a slave-owner himself, despairs and nearly is defeated in battle by Jamoan’s army, but he is roused to martial prowess by the pleas of his own troops. Lured upon an English ship by a captain with whom he previously had bought and sold slaves, Oroonoko and all his men are betrayed and taken as slaves to Guiana. There he is reunited with Imoinda, and his noble bearing attracts the praise of all who know him. However, circumstances force him to rebel against his masters and to lead an army of ex-slaves to seek their freedom. His capture, his murder of his own wife, and his torture and execution by the English slave-owners end Behn’s narrative.

Question 18

Robert Browning (intro)

Answer 18

English poet, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue. Browning was long unsuccesful as a poet and financially depenent upon his family until he was well into adulthood. He became a great Victorian poet. In his best works people from the past reveal their thoughts and lives as if speaking or thinking aloud.

Question 19

Robert Browning (quote)

Answer 19

A man can have but one life and one
death,
One heaven, one hell.