How to Read Literature Like a Professor
By the end of this unit you should be able to:
* Determine the difference between escape and interpretive fiction
* Analyze a work in terms of literary basics and symbolism
Link to book by Thomas Foster
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Introduction: How'd He Do That?
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Chapter 4: If It's Square, It's a Sonnet
Sonnets
* A poem of fourteen (14) lines that rhyme in a certain pattern
* Every other line rhymes (Lines 1-12)
* Lines 13 and 14 rhyme with each other
* Four lines then a period. Next four lines and period. Last six lines then period.
* Starts with a setup and follows a story intro form. Usually first 8 starts story and last 6 wrap it up.
* Form does matter in a poem.
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Chapter 9: It's Greek to Me
Pieter Bruegel, the Elder: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
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"Musee des Beaux Arts"
by W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
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