Shared Flashcard Set

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American Literature
Spring Semester Midterm
68
English
Undergraduate 2
03/10/2011

Additional English Flashcards

 


 

Cards

Term
In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
Definition
Henry Adams from the Education of Henry Adams
Term
In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley..."
Definition
Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"
Term
However, lacking both time and inclination. I did not wait to hear about the afflicted cow, but took my leave.
Definition
Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"
Term
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115.
Definition
Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
Term
They require that the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk...But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
Definition
Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
Term
In his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices, for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go.
Definition
Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
Term
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
Definition
Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
Term
It was the last autumn and first day of winter coming together. All day long the ploughmen on their prairie farms had moved to and fro on their wide level fields through the falling snow, which melted as it fell...
Definition
Hamlin Garland "Under the Lion's Paw"
Term
I think you're a thief and a liar, ...A black hearted houn'!
Definition
Haskins from Under the Lion's Paw
Term
Butler backed away from the man in wild haste, and climbing into his buggy with trembling limbs, drove off down the road, leaving Haskins seated dumbly on the sunny pile of sheaves, his head sunk into his hands.
Definition
Hamlin Garland "Under the Lion's Paw"
Term
Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be.
Definition
Jane from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
Term
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. "I've got out at last....in spite of you and Jane!..."
Definition
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (Jane speaking)
Term
All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!
No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river.
the river is a metaphor for reading
Definition
Mark Twain - Old Times on the Mississippi
Term
Her face and her voice all at his service now, worked the miracle - the impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-jets.
Definition
Henry James - The Beast in the Jungle
Term
Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got most things rather wrong. It hadn't been Rome - it had been Naples...
Definition
Henry James - The Beast in the Jungle
Term
You know you told me something I've never forgotten and that again and again has made me think of you since; it was that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze...Have you forgotten?
Definition
May from James' The Beast in the Jungle
Term
Of course what's in store for me may be no more than that.
Definition
Marcher from The Beast in the Jungle
Term
...the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt.
Definition
James - The Beast in the Jungle
Term
No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?
Definition
James - The Beast in the Jungle
Term
The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived.
Definition
James - The Beast in the Jungle
Term
He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast...he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.
Definition
James - The Beast in the Jungle
Term
It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative - much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius - it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.
Definition
Henry James - the Art of Fiction
Term
Cooper’s proudest creations in the way of “situations” suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer’s protecting gift.
Definition
Mark Twain - Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
Term
What is character bu the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Definition
James - The Art of Fiction
Term
this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience...'Write from experience and experience only' ...careful to immediately add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'
Definition
James - The Art of Fiction
Term
..the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.
Definition
Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
Term
The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in American neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force - at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.
Definition
Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
Term
No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.
Definition
Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
Term
And comes the other fall we name the fall..../The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Definition
Robert Frost - The Oven Bird
Term
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars-on stars where no human race is./I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places.
Definition
Robert Frost - Desert Places
Term
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,/On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Definition
Robert Frost - Design
Term
What but design of darkness to appall?-/If design govern in a thing so small.
Definition
Robert Frost - Design
Term
The land was ours before we were the land's.
Definition
Robert Frost - The Gift Outright
Term
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,/Such as she was, such as she would become.
Definition
Robert Frost - The Gift Outright
Term
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;/I'll only stop to rake the leaves away..../I shan't be gone long.-You come too.
Definition
Robert Frost - The Pasture
Term
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place.
Definition
Robert Frost - The Figure a Poem Makes
Term
They thought all chopping was their of right./Men of the woods and lumberjacks,/They judged me by their appropriate tool./Except as a fellow handled an ax/They had no way of knowing a fool.
Definition
Robert Frost - Two Tramps in Mud Time
Term
Only where love and need are one,/And the work is play for mortal stakes,/Is the deed ever really done/For Heaven and the future's sakes.
Definition
Robert Frost - Two Tramps in Mud Time
Term
make it new
Definition
Ezra Pound
Term
poetry is meant to purify the dialect of the tribe
Definition
Ezra Pound
Term
bear the brunt of our America...You an Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts/Show us there's chance at least of winning through.
Definition
Pound - To Whistler, American
Term
You have been second always. Tragical?/No. You preferred it to the usual thing;/One dull man, dulling and uxorious
Definition
Pound - Portrait d'une Femme
Term
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,/Nothing that's quite your own./Yet this is you.
Definition
Pound - Portrait d'une Femme
Term
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman - / I have detested you long enough.
Definition
Pound - A Pact
Term
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals an a wet, black bough.
Definition
Pound - In a Station on the Metro
(no abstraction)
Term
Why should I climb the look out?
Definition
Pound - The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter
Term
And I will come to meet you./As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Definition
Pound - River Merchant's Wife: A Letter
Term
In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.
Definition
T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Term
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,/The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,/Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Definition
T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Term
Do I dare/Disturb the universe?/In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Definition
T.S. Eliot - Prufrock
Term
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
Definition
Eliot - Prufrock
Term
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,/And in short, I was afraid.
Definition
Eliot - Prufrock
Term
I do not think that they will sing to me.
Definition
Eliot - Prufrock
Term
pastness of the past
Definition
Eliot - Tradition and the Individual Talent
Term
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Definition
Eliot - Tradition and the Individual Talent
Term
This: were we led all that way for/Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,/We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen a birth and death,/But had thought they were different;this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.../I should be glad of another death.
Definition
Eliot - Journey of the Magi
Term
Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past./If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable.
Definition
Eliot - Burnt Norton
Term
They enter the new world naked,/cold, uncertain of all/save that they enter./ All about them/the cold, familiar wind--
Definition
William Carlos Williams - Spring and All
Term
No ideas but in things.
Definition
William Carlos Williams
Term
Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain.
Definition
Fitz - Babylon Revisited
Term
I lost everything I wanted in the boom.
Definition
Charlie from Fitz's Babylon Revisited
Term
he suddenly realized the meaning of the word "dissipate" - to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.
Definition
Fitz - Babylon Revisited
Term
momentary stay against confusion
Definition
Frost - The Figure a Poem Makes
Term
For a long time they continued to sit side by side without speaking. It seemed as though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them.
Definition
Edith Wharton - Roman Fever
Term
I cared for that memory.
Definition
Mrs. Ansley from Wharton's Roman Fever
Term
After all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn't write.
Definition
Mrs. Slade from Wharton's Roman Fever
Term
I had Barbara.
Definition
Mrs. Ansley from Wharton's Roman Fever
Term
Go in fear of abstractions
Definition
Ezra Pound
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