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Essay on literary devices
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“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.” (1-5)
“Only through time time is conquered.” (92).
(T. S. Eliot. “The Four Quartets” )
Literature is a mirror of the society and it reflects the socio, political and economic conditions of the society. The different genres portray the various events and their impacts on the society at different points of time. Therefore time is an important factor in literature. E.M.Forster emphasizing the importance of clock-time in fiction writing says, “…it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible” (44). Time plays a predominant role in the Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace. He employs it as an effective tool to blend the past, present and the future.
The Glass Palace is a blend of history, fiction, autobiographical records and memories. His historical sense involves a perception, to borrow an idea from T. S. Eliot, not only of the 'pastness of the past', but of its presence and its relevance to future. Many instances in The Glass Palace show his profound interest in the concept of ‘time’. To quote from his interview for World Literature Today:
Time interests me very much. I think it’s the central element in narrative. All narratives are really the unfolding of events in time . . . .In each of my books you’ll see that time as a problem is approached very differently. In Circle of Reason each pa...
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... Blackwell, 1993.
Faber & Faber, 1935.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Glass Palace. Delhi: Harper and Collins, 2000.
---. Aldama, Frederick Luis. An Interview with Amitav Ghosh. World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma. 76.2 2002. 84- 90
Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction, United Kingdom: Secker and Warburg, 1992.
Nietsche, Frederich. The use and abuse of History. Trans. Adrian Collins. New York: Liberal Arts press, 1972.
Punekar, Rohini Mokashi. “Repositioning borders: A reading of The Glass Palace” Critical Practice. vol. x.No.1. Jan 2003.
T. S. Eliot. “The Four Quartets” Collected Poems 1909-1962. London:
Unger, Leonard. T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis: n.p. 1966.
Rubenstein Richard, The Cunning of History. Harper and Row, 1975. Retrieved on December 04, 2013.
In the novel, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls recounts her childhood as a tale of harsh struggle and of conflicting viewpoints. The set of ideals which she developed as an individual along with those instilled within her by her parents seemingly rival those purported by society and the developed world, creating an internal struggle greater than any of her physical conflicts. Examples of such conflicts involve the abstract areas of race, wealth versus poverty, and idealism versus realism.
Prose , Francine. "The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The Glass Castle':Outrageous Misfortune." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 13 Mar 2005. Web. 31 Jan 2011. .
Could the dysfunction of the Walls family have fostered the extraordinary resilience and strength of the three older siblings through a collaborative set of rites of passage? One could argue that the unusual and destructive behavior of the parents forced the children into a unique collection of rites of passage that resulted in surprisingly resilient and successful adults. In moving back to Welch, Virginia, the children lost what minimal sense of security they may have enjoyed while living in their grandmother’s home in Arizona. The culture and climate (both socially and environmentally) along with an increased awareness of their poverty resulted in a significant loss of identity. As they learned new social and survival skills in this desperate environment, there is a powerful sense of camaraderie between the older children. Their awareness, drive and cunning survival skills while living in Welch result in a developing sense of confidence in their ability to survive anything. This transition, while wretched, sets the stage for their ability to leave their environment behind with little concern for a lack of success. As the children leave, one by one, to New York, they continue to support one another, and emerge as capable, resourceful young adults.
The Glass Castle was overall very strange. Written by Jeannette Walls in her point of view, this book is her memoir that she wrote to share her story with the rest of the world. It won the 2005 Elle Readers’ Prize and the 2006 American Library Association Alex Award. The title comes from an unkempt promise from Jeannette’s father, but rather than seeing it as a letdown, Jeannette remembers it as a hope that things will get better, a trait she must have received from her mother. While The Glass Castle focuses mainly on her immediate family, she later wrote another book, Half Broke Horses, about her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith.
As I read the Glass Castle, the way Rose Mary behaves, thinks and feels vary greatly and differently throughout the memoir. The immediate question that pops up in my mind is to ask whether Rose Mary carries some sort of mental illness. Fortunately, given the hints and traits that are relevant to why Rose Mary lives like that in the memoir, we, the readers, are able to make some diagnosis and assumptions on the kind of mental illness she may carry. To illustrate, one distinctive example is when Rose Mary blames Jeannette for having the idea to accept welfare. “Once you go on welfare, it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case.” (188). In my opinion, Rose Mary is being nonsense and contractive in her criticism, because of Rose Mary’s resistances to work and to accept welfare, it often causes a severe food shortage within the family that all four little children have to find food from trash cans or move on with hunger, which could lead to a state of insufficient diet. More importantly, having welfare as a way to solve food shortage, it can certainly improve those young Walls children’s poor nutrition and maintain their healthy diet, but Rose Mary turns it down because she thinks it is a shame to accept welfare despite their children are suffering from starvation. Another example will be when Rose Mary abandons all of her school work for no reason. “One morning toward the end of the school year, Mom had a complete meltdown. She was supposed to write up evaluations of her students’ progress, but she’d spent every free minute painting, and now the deadline was on her and the evaluations were unwritten” (207). This is one of the moments when Rose Mary shifts all of her attentio...
A Wrinkle In Time is an example of great American literature. It is a plot-based novel with something always happening while an obstacle is standing in the way. Most of the conflict occurring in this book is person versus self and person versus supernatural. A certain aspect that is very prevalent in this book is love. This love takes the characters on the trip of a lifetime, for the sole purpose of finding her father. This love in the background is not known by the reader until the last few pages, and ends up encompassing and explaining the whole novel.
In the novel ‘The Circle,’ Eggers use images of glass to foreshadow the ideology of total transparency coined by the Circle. On the other hand, the images of glass are not only introduced by Eggers to illustrate solely the hunger for transparency, but also to draw attention to role in which the company operates as revolutionaries to law and order. The company resides in the ‘fast lane’ and is perpetually growing and as such even transcend above that of law enforcement and into that of a watchful creator. Taking a closer look on the reflective property of glass, one of the less obvious ideas being depicted by Eggers is the reflecting or projecting of the Circle’s belief every member of society that is with its scope of influence. Therefore, at face value, the images of glass within the Circle are purely for aesthetic purposes. However, in essence, the images have an underlying function of revealing some truths about the
It is commonly believed that the only way to overcome difficult situations is by taking initiative in making a positive change, although this is not always the case. The theme of the memoir the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is that the changes made in children’s lives when living under desperate circumstances do not always yield positive results. In the book, Jeannette desperately tries to improve her life and her family’s life as a child, but she is unable to do so despite her best efforts. This theme is portrayed through three significant literary devices in the book: irony, symbolism and allusion.
Anthology of World Literature. Ed. Peter Simon. 3rd. ed. Vol. B. New York and London:
The book The Time Machine has various key elements that connect with literarily terms. Another connection that Wells makes us wonder is the time in this story, whether its human time or geologic time.
Many of our today as “normal” considered values are everything but self-evident. One of the most striking aspects in the novel is time; and our relationship towards it. “ We yearned for the future. How did we learn it that talent for insatiability. ” In this particu...
Puchner, Martin, , et al. The Norton Anthology of World Literature . Third. a. New York: W.W, Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. 230-331. Print.
A wrinkle in time is a novel by Madeleine L’Engle. It is a very fun and thrilling novel set in the entire universe. The story happens in only one autumn day. This is because of time manipulation. You know this because in the novel the main character gets worried that her mom and her brothers will try to find them,
Time travel has been a growing theme in literature and film since the Father of Science Fiction, H.G. Wells, introduced the idea in his 1895 novel, The Time Machine. Since the novels release, writers and movie producers have drawn from Well’s imaginative ideas and expanded it to unexpected hype. Time travel has evolved over time from a dream into something that many believe is possible. The hundreds of successful movies and novels using time travel have caused me to ask the question, what is it about time travel that is so appealing? To answer the aforementioned question, I have categorized all time travel literature and film into four types that I have named “exotic