Up to Snuff

Up to Snuff #123:  Close reading of literature list

By, Afua Serwah Osei-Bonsu

A slow detailed examination of a text

-Form

-Content

-Figurative content

-Characters

-Time

-Ironic/sentimental

-Humorous

-Context

-One section, larger work

-Relate to definition of larger work

-Context

-Historical

-Cultural events

-Image, similes, meaphors

-Diction

-Etymology

-Secondary definition

-Literal content

-Structure organized

-Style

-Pattern, rhythm, sentence, form, rhyme

-Unconventional grammar

-Stanza

-Equal weight

Works cited:

Richard Abercarian, Marvin Klotz and Samuel Cohen, eds. Literature:  The Human Experience:  Reading and Writing.  New York:  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, Print

Up to Snuff #122:  Dissecting a piece of literature list

by, Afua Serwah Osei-Bonsu
-Textual evidence

-Literary devices

-Literature in general

-As a study of a technique for improving one’s writing

-Sources of effectiveness

-Language of the essay

-Energize abstract ideas

-Details moving experience

-Use figurative language

-Metaphor and similes

-Physical and emotional language

-In the prose

-Tone of voice

-Stylistic choices it creates

-How author moved to point of view

-Thesis, tone, style

-Rhetorical strategies

-Major visions

-Transitions

-Begin and conclude

-Comment

-Narration

_-Description

-Classification

-Comparison

-Contrast

-Analogy

-Cause and effect

-Definition

-Unifying ideas

-Structures

-Unwrite

-Thesis

-Means

-Technique

-Type

-Narrative

-Descriptive

-Expository

-Argumentative

-Function

Serve authors purpose

Works extracted/cited from:

Richard Abercarian, Marvin Klotz and Samuel Cohen, eds. Literature:  The Human Experience:  Reading and Writing.  New York:  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, Print

Book Review:  Shakespeare Sonnet 130

By, Afua Serwah Osei-Bonsu

Shakespeare, perhaps responding the 16^th century Elizabethan “sonnet craze,” wrote Sonnet 130. (grin.com) Negated lines, contrasting the periods classical themes of ideals for beauty love and desire appear in his traditional iambic pentameter.  At the finish, the satirical poem reveals a “tenor,” or “target domain” and Shakespeare’s beauty becomes a man.  (grin.com)

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 utilizes many literary devices including alliteration, assonance, and repetition.  Some words use consonants close together (alliteration), other lines use words that have similar vowels as in “assonance,” and lastly for emphasis the writer employed repetition where he repeats actual words like “red” or “wire.” (Owlcation)  Most delectable is Shakespeare’s use of “anastrophe,” which highlights the inversion or order of words and draws the reader into to its midpoint.  Anastrophe may have conveyed a secondary meaning where the writer has inverted the sentence structure and fundamentally the traditional subject or ideals of the age-inverting woman for man.  (owlcation/humanities)

The piece was compared to Petrarch and the conventional Italian Sonnet, as well as English poet Edmund Spenser. (grin.com) Other poets have been cited in comparison or as he their disciple, such “Thomas Watson, Michael Drayton, Barnabe Barnes, Richard Linches and Sir Philip Sidney.”(Mowat 1)  Where traditional themes for hair, lips, skin were employed and common comparisons were meant to seem as if “falsified” or unworthy of comparison.  Shakespeare’s “tenor” eventually emerges, full of contrast, with love perhaps unimaginable, without praising beauty but suggesting inadequacy or contrary.  The poem is typical of an English love sonnet with 14 lines, three quatrains and concluding with a heroic couplet. (owlcation/humanities) It uses an “abab cdcd efef gg structure.”  It ends in “stopped lines and has breaks in syntax.” (owlcation)  Lines appear as similes with consistent negative comparison.  The poem utilizes an overt “lyric I,” and is written in the first person singular.  (grin.com)

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 has meter and rhyme and relates strongly to the history of the love sonnet. Shakespeare perhaps challenging an Elizabethan status quo which had become predictable, wrote sonnets 127-154 to this “mysterious dark lady.” (owlcation) The mysterious dark lady may have possibly been a real-life lover. (owlcation) Sonnet 130, is meant to be a radical in a time period where traditional poets are often alluding to the ideal woman who is compared to sunlight and roses, and who in this case, may not have had a soft gait, but a thud.

Works cited:

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 130,” Abcarian, Richard, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen, eds. Literature: The Human Experience: Reading and Writing. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016. Print. p.838

Abcarian, Richard, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen, eds. Literature: The Human Experience: Reading and Writing. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016. Print.

https://www.grin.com/document/372431 An Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. The concept of love and beauty, Bergische Universität Wuppertal  (Anglistik und Amerikanistik) Introduction to Literary Studies,  2017

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Sonnet-130-by-William-ShakespeareNorton Anthology, Norton, 2005

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_130

Up to Snuff #121:  Literary Device Notes

By, Afua Serwah Osei-Bonsu

Plot-

Rising action, climax, falling action

Arrangement connective sequence of narrative events

Series of events

Character-

Usually one main protagonist, usually 3, not more than three characters, short stories limit number of characters, one fleshed out or round character, many other two dimensional or flat, depends on tone, plot, theme, setting, characters rendered, how character is revealed through eg. litanies, draws on what?

Setting

“~Time, place and mood, when and where and under what circumstances “

“restricted geographical setting.”  “In a single place within a short period of time”

“Within a social situation.”

Tone

“~Specific attitude or perspective one adopts with regards to a specific character or place or development”

Theme-Meaning of subject, underlying idea or statement about its subject

Prose-ordinary unrhymed language

Narrative-Has to do with actual stories or writings that include narration

Point of View-eg. First person narrative singular- (I,my)

First person plural (we, are)

Third person point of view-(she, he, they)

Omnipresent narrator-moves around in space and time

Limited omnipresent narrator-expresses emotions single character

Second person-(you)

Irony-manipulation of narrative perspective, authors decisions, gaps, overstatement verbal irony, dramatic irony

Figurative-non-literally, in order to achieve a special effect

Metaphor-one thing compared to another

Simile-one thing is like another

Personification-human qualities to ideas or things

Allusion-associations to persons, places or events

Symbols-Anything that stands for something else

Rhyme-sound patterns of stressed vowels

Alliteration-repetition of a consonant sound

Rhythm-relationship stressed and unstressed syllables, recurrent or similar rhythm is poems meter.

Most literary device notes extracted from:

Richard Abercarian, Marvin Klotz and Samuel Cohen, eds. Literature:  The Human Experience:  Reading and Writing.  New York:  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, Print