# data[].attributes.body
How I pictured the forests on Monkey Beach with the B'gwus and ghosts mentioned by Ma-ma-moo

# data[].attributes.body
Jimmy was feeding the crows and it became a daily routine for good luck in his swimming meets

# data[].attributes.body
Represents how she is going to die by decapitation

# data[].attributes.body
Symbolizes her imminent death without her knowing from the Marquis

# data[].attributes.body
In Monkey beach, Eden Robinson writes the story in the present tense when Lisa is trying to find her missing brother but then flashes back to Lisa's younger life and how she grew up.

Called a tense shift.

# data[].attributes.body
There was plenty of symbolism in the novels.

The Bloody Chamber had plenty of symbols with the white lilies, the red ruby choker, and the fire opal ring.

In Monkey Beach some symbols were the crows, the little man, the oxasuli plant, and the white bucket in the water.

# data[].attributes.body
A person (in later use typically a woman; see note) who practises witchcraft or magic, esp. of a malevolent or harmful nature.

Referred to in "Her Kind" and "Monkey Beach"

In "Her Kind" the woman was considered a witch because she was an outcast and not like anyone else, not fitting into the gender norms. In the time frame with witches they were shunned, she felt like that in her life from society.

In "Monkey Beach" there is a part where Cheese has multiple Voodoo dolls in his room and they play with an ouija board to speak to the dead, some believe it can be witchcraft trying to speak to the dead which can unset the balance of nature.

# data[].attributes.body
Specializes in modern culture and literature

Professor at University of Calgary English Department

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I specialize in early modern literature and culture. My research is on biographies, rhetoric, and the history of reading. I'm writing a book about exemplarity and biography in early modern England, or the ways that famous stories influenced people's self-consciousness about their own future fame. I've published articles on elegies, dedications, modernized Chaucers, and Senecan drama.

Click here for more frequently-updated information on my research, teaching, and general self-definition.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I specialize in early modern literature and culture. My research is on biographies, rhetoric, and the history of reading. I'm writing a book about exemplarity and biography in early modern England, or the ways that famous stories influenced people's self-consciousness about their own future fame.

# data[].attributes.body
Old folk tales Al and Ma-ma-moo told to Lisa and Jimmy

# data[].attributes.body
Symbolic between Lisa, Mick and Ma-ma-moo

# data[].attributes.body
Residential schools ran from 1894 to 1947.
Children of Indigenous families were isolated in Christian churches to assimilate them into Canadian culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Erin Hanson (2009), with updates and revisions by Daniel P. Gamez & Alexa Manuel (September 2020). The original version of this article has been archived, but may be accessed here. To cite this article, we have recommendations at the bottom of the page. Note on terminology: There is constant debate and reflection on the use of specific terms as umbrella categories to designate multiple Aboriginal, Indigenous, or Native peoples. For the most recent version of this article, we have decided to follow the terms Indigenous, First Nations, Métis and Inuit, or alternatively Indigenous Peoples, in the plural, following the guidelines of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the most widely accepted international instrument today. The term Indigenous Peoples can also be found in UBC's Indigenous Peoples Language Guidelines.
In this section:

What Were Residential Schools?

The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Indigenous children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream white Canadian society. The residential school system officially operated from the 1880s into the closing decades of the 20th century. The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages. Children were severely punished if these, among other, strict rules were broken. Former students of residential schools have spoken of horrendous abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological. Residential schools provided Indigenous students with inappropriate education, often only up to lower grades, that focused mainly on prayer and manual labour in agriculture, light industry such as woodworking, and domestic work such as laundry work and sewing.

Residential schools systematically undermined Indigenous, First Nations, Métis and Inuit cultures across Canada and disrupted families for generations, severing the ties through which Indigenous culture is taught and sustained, and contributing to a general loss of language and culture. Because they were removed from their families, many students grew up without experiencing a nurturing family life and without the knowledge and skills to raise their own families. The devastating effects of the residential schools are far-reaching and continue to have a significant impact on Indigenous communities. The residential school system is widely considered a form of genocide because of the purposeful attempt from the government and church to eradicate all aspects of Indigenous cultures and lifeworlds.

From the 1990s onward, the government and the churches involved-Anglican, Presbyterian, United, and Roman Catholic-began to acknowledge their responsibility for an education scheme that was specifically designed to "kill the Indian in the child." On June 11, 2008, the Canadian government issued a formal apology in Parliament for the damage done by the residential school system. In spite of this and other apologies, however, the effects remain.

What led to the residential schools?

The early origins of residential schools in Canada are found in the implementation of the mission system in the 1600s. The churches and European settlers brought with them the assumption that their own civilization was the pinnacle of human achievement. They interpreted the socio-cultural differences between themselves and Indigenous Peoples as "proof" that Canada's first inhabitants were ignorant, savage, and-like children-in need of guidance. They felt the need to "civilize" Indigenous Peoples. Education-a federal responsibility-became the primary means to this end.

Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald commissioned journalist and politician Nicholas Flood Davin to study industrial schools for Indigenous children in the United States. Davin's recommendation to follow the U.S. example of "aggressive civilization" led to public funding for the residential school system. "If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young. The children must be kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions," Davin wrote in his 1879 Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (Davin's report can be read here.)

In the 1880s, in conjunction with other federal assimilation policies, the government began to establish residential schools across Canada. Authorities would frequently take children to schools far from their home communities, part of a strategy to alienate them from their families and familiar surroundings. In 1920, under the Indian Act, it became mandatory for every Indigenous child to attend a residential school and illegal for them to attend any other educational institution.

Living conditions at the residential schools

The purpose of the residential schools was to eliminate all aspects of Indigenous culture. Students had their hair cut short, they were dressed in uniforms, they were often given numbers, and their days were strictly regimented by timetables. Boys and girls were kept separate, and even siblings rarely interacted, further weakening family ties. Chief Bobby Joseph of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society recalls that he had no idea how to interact with girls and never even got to know his own sister "beyond a mere wave in the dining room." ¹ In addition, students were strictly forbidden to speak their languages-even though many children knew no other-or to practise Indigenous customs or traditions. Violations of these rules were severely punished.

Residential school students did not receive the same education as the general population in the public school system, and the schools were sorely underfunded. Teachings focused primarily on practical skills. Girls were primed for domestic service and taught to do laundry, sew, cook, and clean. Boys were taught carpentry, tinsmithing, and farming. Many students attended class part-time and worked for the school the rest of the time: girls did the housekeeping; boys, general maintenance and agriculture. This work, which was involuntary and unpaid, was presented as practical training for the students, but many of the residential schools could not run without it. With so little time spent in class, most students had only reached grade five by the time they were 18. At this point, students were sent away. Many were discouraged from pursuing further education.

Abuse at the schools was widespread: emotional and psychological abuse was constant, physical abuse was metred out as punishment, and sexual abuse was also common. Survivors recall being beaten and strapped; some students were shackled to their beds; some had needles shoved in their tongues for speaking their native languages. These abuses, along with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and severely inadequate food and health care, resulted in a shockingly high death toll. In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Indigenous children across Canada were dying in residential schools. This figure does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Bryce reported that anywhere from 47 percent (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75 percent (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home.

The extent to which the Department of Indian Affairs and church officials knew of these abuses has been debated by some. However, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and John Milloy, among others, concluded that church and state officials were fully aware of the abuses and tragedies at the schools. Some inspectors and officials at the time expressed alarm at the horrifying death rates, yet those who spoke out and called for reform were generally met with silence and lack of support. The Department of Indian Affairs would promise to improve the schools, but the deplorable conditions persisted.

Some former students have positive memories of their time at residential schools, and certainly some might have been treated with kindness by the priests and nuns who ran the schools as best they could given the circumstances. But even these "good" experiences occurred within a system aimed at destroying Indigenous cultures and assimilating Indigenous students.

The Shift Away from Residential Schools

"Sister Marie Baptiste had a supply of sticks as long and thick as pool cues. When she heard me speak my language, she'd lift up her hands and bring the stick down on me. I've still got bumps and scars on my hands. I have to wear special gloves because the cold weather really hurts my hands. I tried very hard not to cry when I was being beaten and I can still just turn off my feelings.... And I'm lucky. Many of the men my age, they either didn't make it, committed suicide or died violent deaths, or alcohol got them. And it wasn't just my generation. My grandmother, who's in her late nineties, to this day it's too painful for her to talk about what happened to her at the school."

- Musqueam Nation former chief George Guerin,
Kuper Island school
Stolen from our Embrace, p 62

Church and state officials of the 19th century believed that Indigenous societies were disappearing and that the only hope for Indigenous people was to convert to Christianity, do away with their cultures, and become "civilized" British subjects-in short, assimilate them. By the 1950s, the same officials were doubting the viability of such project. The devastating effects of the residential schools and the needs and life experiences of Indigenous students were becoming more widely recognized. ² The government also acknowledged that removing children from their families was severely detrimental to the health of the individuals and the communities affected. In 1951, with the amendments to the Indian Act, the half-day work/school system was progressively abandoned, conceding power to the provinces to apprehend children, and transitioning from the school system to a 'child welfare system'. This time is referred to as the 'Sixties Scoop' because of the systematic removal of Indigenous children from their families without consent from their parents or authorities.

In the 1960s the drastic overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the welfare system consolidated, and authorities would constantly place Indigenous children with white middle-class families in an attempt to acculturate them. This practice, as well as the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in 'child welfare systems' continues today. In 1969, the Department of Indian Affairs took exclusive control of the system, marking an end to church involvement in residential schooling. Yet the schools remained underfunded and abuse continued, and many teachers and workers continued to lack proper credentials to carry out their responsibilities. ³

In the meantime, the government decided to phase out segregation and began incorporating Indigenous students into public schools. Although these changes saw students reaching higher levels of education, problems persisted. Many Indigenous students struggled in their adjustment to public school and to a Eurocentric system where Indigenous knowledges were excluded, fostering discrimination by their non-Indigenous peers. Post-secondary education was strongly discouraged for Indigenous students because those who wanted to attend university would have been enfranchised.

The process to phase out the residential school system and other assimilation tactics was slow and not without reversals. The residential school system in Canada lasted officially for almost 150 years, and its impacts continue on to this day. As mentioned above, the system's closure gave way to the 'Sixties Scoop,' during which thousands of Indigenous children were abducted by social services and removed from their families. The 'Scoop' spanned roughly the two decades it took to phase out the residential schools, but child apprehensions from Indigenous families continue to occur in disproportionate numbers today. In part, this is the legacy of compromised families and communities left by the residential schools.

Starting in 1969, residential schools in Canada began to decline in numbers. In 1970, the Department of Indian Affairs calculated fifty-six remaining schools, excluding the Northwest Territories. By 1980, the same institution reported sixteen, and one decade later, eleven. In 1996, Gordon Reserve Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, the last of its kind, was closed and demolished. By 1999, the Department of Indian Affairs registered no remaining residential schools in operation. ⁴

Ongoing Impacts

"So why is it important to understand the history of genocide in Canada? Because it's not history. Today's racist government laws, policies and actions have proven to be just as deadly for Indigenous peoples as the genocidal acts of the past."

-Pamela Palmater, Mi'kmaq lawyer, professor, activist, and politician
(National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Canada) et al. 2019, 53).

The residential school system is viewed by much of the Canadian public as part of a distant past, disassociated from today's events. In many ways, this is a misconception. The last residential school did not close its doors until 1996, and many of the leaders, teachers, parents, and grandparents of today's Indigenous communities are residential school Survivors. Although residential schools have closed, their effects remain ongoing for both Survivors and their descendants who now share in the intergenerational effects of transmitted personal trauma and loss of language, culture, traditional teachings, and mental/spiritual wellbeing.

According to the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba, several generations of Indigenous Peoples were denied the development of parenting skills not only through their removal from communities and families but also from the severe lack of attention paid to the issue by school officials. ⁵ In addition, children were taught that their traditional ways were inferior, including their languages and cultures. The residential schools were operational through several generations of Indigenous Peoples so the process of healing from these damages will also take several generations -a process that has already begun, but has not been easy nor has it been simple.

The historic, intergenerational, and collective oppression of Indigenous Peoples continues to this day in the form of land disputes, over-incarceration, lack of housing, child apprehension, systemic poverty, marginalization and violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA peoples, and other critical issues which neither began nor ended with residential schools. Generations of oppressive government policies attempted to strip Indigenous Peoples of their identities not only through residential schools but also through other policies including but not limited to: the implementation and subsequent changes to the Indian Act; the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families into the child welfare system known as the Sixties Scoop; and legislations allowing forced sterilizations of Indigenous Peoples in certain provinces, a practice that has continued to be reported by Indigenous women in Canada as recently as 2018; and currently, through the modern child welfare systems which continue to disproportionately apprehend Indigenous children into foster care in what Raven Sinclair has called the Millennium Scoop. ⁶

In 2019, BC ended its practice of "birth alerts" in child welfare cases, which allowed child welfare agencies and hospitals to flag mothers deemed "high risk" without their consent -a practice which disproportionately targeted Indigenous mothers and was found to be "racist and discriminatory" and a "gross violation of the rights of the child, the mother, and the community". ⁷ One of the findings of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report (MMIWG) asserts that the Canadian State "has used child welfare laws and agencies as a tool to oppress, displace, disrupt, and destroy Indigenous families, communities, and Nations. It is a tool in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples." ⁸ Child welfare laws and agencies, like the residential schools, effectively aided in the removal of Indigenous children from their families and continue to aid in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

Survivors Demand Justice
"...the Government of Canada now recognizes that it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this. We now recognize that it was wrong to separate children from rich and vibrant cultures and traditions that it created a void in many lives and communities, and we apologize for having done this".

I have just one last thing to say. To all of the leaders of the Liberals, the Bloc and NDP, thank you, as well, for your words because now it is about our responsibilities today, the decisions that we make today and how they will affect seven generations from now.

My ancestors did the same seven generations ago and they tried hard to fight against you because they knew what was happening. They knew what was coming, but we have had so much impact from colonization and that is what we are dealing with today.

Women have taken the brunt of it all.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here at this moment in time to talk about those realities that we are dealing with today.

What is it that this government is going to do in the future to help our people? Because we are dealing with major human rights violations that have occurred to many generations: my language, my culture and my spirituality. I know that I want to transfer those to my children and my grandchildren, and their children, and so on.

What is going to be provided? That is my question. I know that is the question from all of us. That is what we would like to continue to work on, in partnership.

Nia:wen. Thank you.

-Beverley Jacobs, President, Native Women's Association of Canada, June 11, 2008

Read the full transcript and watch the video here.

The residential schools heavily contributed to educational, social, financial and health disparities between Indigenous Peoples and the rest of Canada, and these impacts have been intergenerational. ⁹ Despite the efforts of the residential school system and those who created and maintained it, Indigenous Peoples largely escaped complete assimilation and continue to work to regain what was lost, while also seeking justice for years of wrongdoing; including from the Canadian government, the churches, and the individuals responsible for specific cases of abuse.

It was not until the late 1980s that the Canadian legal system began to respond to allegations of abuse brought forward by Survivors, with fewer than fifty convictions coming out of more than 38,000 claims of sexual and physical abuse submitted to the independent adjudication process. ¹⁰ Notable cases include 1988's Mowatt v. Clarke, in which eight former students of St. George's Indian Residential School in Lytton, B.C., sued a priest, the government, and the Anglican Church of Canada; both the Anglican Church and the government admitted fault and agreed to a settlement. In 1995, twenty-seven Survivors from the Alberni Indian Residential School filed charges of sexual abuse against Arthur Plintwhile also holding Canada and the United Church vicariously liable. In addition to convicting Plint, the court held the federal government and the United Church responsible for the wrongs committed.
The Indian Residential School Survivors Society was formed in 1994 by the First Nations Summit in British Columbia and was officially incorporated in 2002 to provide support for survivors and communities in the province throughout the healing process and to educate the broader public. The Survivors Society provides crisis counselling, referrals, and healing initiatives, as well as acting as a resource for information, research, training, and workshops. It was clear that a similar organization was needed at the national level, and in 2005, the National Residential School Survivors Society was incorporated.
Meanwhile, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples had been interviewing individuals from Indigenous communities and nations across Canada about their experiences. The commission's report, published in 1996, brought unprecedented attention to the residential school system-many non-Indigenous Canadians did not know about this chapter in Canadian history. In 1998, based on the commission's recommendations and considering the court cases, the Canadian government publicly apologized to former students for the physical and sexual abuse they suffered in the residential schools. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation was established as a $350 million government plan to aid communities affected by the residential schools. However, some Indigenous people felt the government apology did not go far enough, since it addressed only the effects of physical and sexual abuse and not other damages caused by the residential school system.
Books & Articles Canada. Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples. Report of the Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Volume 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back. Chapter 10, "Residential Schools." Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1996.
The St. George and Alberni lawsuits set a precedent for future cases, proving that the churches and the government of Canada could be sued as an entity. As the number of cases grew, a National Class Action was filed in 2002 for compensation for all former Indian Residential school Survivors and family members in Canada. In 2005, Canada and nearly 80,000 Survivors reached the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement in which Canada committed to individual compensation for Survivors, additional funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In September 2007, while the Settlement Agreement was being put into action, the Canadian government made a motion to issue a formal apology. The motion passed unanimously. On June 11, 2008, the House of Commons gathered in a solemn ceremony to publicly apologize for the government's involvement in the residential school system and to acknowledge the widespread impact this system has had among Indigenous Peoples. You can read the official statement and responses to it by Indigenous organizations here (scroll down to " Choose a topic" and select " Apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools"). The apology was broadcast live across Canada (watch it here). Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper issued a 'statement of apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools ', noting that

Echoing Stephen Harper, former Chief Justice of Ontario Warren Winkler also observed that the residential school system removed children

"from their families and communities to serve the purpose of carrying out a "concerted campaign to obliterate" the "habits and associations" of "Indigenous languages, traditions and beliefs," in order to accomplish "a radical re-socialization" aimed at instilling the children instead with the values of Euro-centric civilization"( Library and Archives Canada, RG10, volume 6113, le 351-10, part 1). ¹¹

The federal government's apology was met with a range of responses. Some felt that it marked a new era of positive federal government-Indigenous relations based on mutual respect, while many others felt that the apology was merely symbolic and doubted that it would change the government's relationship with Indigenous Peoples. Although apologies and acknowledgements made by governments and churches are important steps forward in reconciliation, Indigenous leaders have argued that such gestures are not enough without supportive action . Communities and residential school survivor societies are undertaking healing initiatives and providing opportunities for survivors to talk about their experiences and move forward to create a positive future for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Recommended resources

Erasmus, George. Notes on A History of the Indian Residential School System in Canada

Fournier, Suzanne and Ernie Crey. Stolen from our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Indigenous Communities. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997.

Haig-Brown, Celia. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998. First published by Tillicum Library, 1988.

Manitoba. Public Inquiry into the Administration and Indigenous People. "Indigenous Women." Vol. 1, chap. 13, in Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba. Winnipeg: Public Inquiry into the Administration and Indigenous People, 1999.
Websites Apologies and Reconciliation
This chapter of the Indigenous Justice Inquiry of Manitoba's report on Indigenous people in the justice system examines how the residential school system has contributed to the abuse and discrimination that many Indigenous women face regularly.

Miller, J. R. Shingwauk's Vision. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

Widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive, key texts on the residential school system, in Shingwauk's Vision Miller has included the perspectives of government and church officials, school staff, and students to create a rich history of the residential school system from its original inception to its phasing out. Cree scholar Winona Wheeler calls Shingwauk's Vision "the most thorough and comprehensive study of Indian residential schools in Canada to date and most noted for its good use of a wide range of Indigenous life histories and personal reminisces" (Wheeler, "Social Relations of Indigenous Oral Histories," in Walking a Tightrope: Indigenous Peoples and their Representations, 2005. 193)

Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, Indian Residential Schools: The Nuu-Chah-Nulth Experience. Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, 1996.

Roberts, John. First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples: Exploring their Past, Present, and Future. Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2006.

Secwepemc Cultural Education Society, Behind Closed Doors: Stories from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Penticton: Secwepemc Cultural Education Society & Theytus, 2000.

Endnotes

[1] Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986.University of Manitoba Press, 1999. 91-2; Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997. 49.

[2] Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Volume 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back. Chapter 10, "1.2 Changing Policies." Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1996. 344-353.

[3] Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. University of Manitoba Press, 1999. Xvii, 91-2.

[4] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Canada's Residential Schools: The History, Part 2 1939 to 2000. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 103.

[5] Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba. 1999. The Justice System and Aboriginal People. Ch. 14 ( http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter14.html)

[6] National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Canada), Marion Buller, Michèle Audette, Brian Eyolfson, and Qajaq Robinson. 2019. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 104; Longman, Nickita. 2018. "Examining the Sixties Scoop and Beyond." Discourse Magazine, 2018.

[7] National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Canada), 355.

[8] National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Canada), 355.

[9] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Canada's Residential Schools: The Legacy: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 5. Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 3.

[10] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Canada's Residential Schools: The Legacy: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 5. Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 7.

[11] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Canada's Residential Schools: The History, Part 2 1939 to 2000. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 574.

To Cite This Article

MLA:
Hanson, Eric, et al."The Residential School System." Indigenous Foundations. First Nations and Indigenous Studies UBC, 2020. Website. [Date accessed].

Chicago:
Hanson, Eric, Daniel P. Games, and Alexa Manuel. "The Residential School System". Indigenous Foundations. https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/residential-school-system-2020/. (accessed Month, day, year).

APA:
Hanson, E., Gamez, D., & Manuel, A. (2020, September). The Residential School System. Indigenous Foundations. https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/residential-school-system-2020/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Erin Hanson (2009), with updates and revisions by Daniel P. Gamez & Alexa Manuel (September 2020). The original version of this article has been archived, but may be accessed here. To cite this article, we have recommendations at the bottom of the page.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to find sources & peer-reviewed articles?

# data[].attributes.subject
How to find sources & peer-reviewed articles?

# data[].attributes.body
Use the MLA International Bibliography with full text. It can be found by going through the Red Deer Polytechnic English Library!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The travelling exhibition runs from September 17 to November 20 at the Kitimat Museum & Archives.
Indigenous languages featured at the Kitimat Museum & Archives
Kitimat and Terrace -How many of us in BC can say "hello" in the language of the people on whose traditional territory we live, work and play?

You might find yourself expanding your vocabulary-and appreciation for the state of Indigenous languages spoken in BC-after visiting Kitimat Museum & Archives to view 'Our Living Languages: First Peoples' Voices in BC travelling exhibition.

Learn what First Nations communities throughout the province are doing to help 34 different languages survive and flourish, in Our Living Languages, a beautifully designed exhibition from the Royal BC Museum and First Peoples' Cultural Council that celebrates the resilience and diversity of Indigenous languages in the face of change.

To complement the travelling exhibition and speak to the local language component, the Museum will have an exhibition panel describing the efforts by Haisla to preserve Haislakala and Henaksialakala. It is the goal of the Museum to recognize the importance of language revitalization within the Haisla community to preserve the language heritage.

Languages, especially the languages we grow up with, are powerful and potent markers of identity and culture. BC, one of the planet's most linguistically diverse regions, is known as a linguistic "hotspot" because of the diversity and vitality of the First Nations languages in BC.

Our Living Languages provides visitors with the opportunity to learn more about the history of disrupted languages in BC, the complexity of these languages, and the people-and entire communities-that are working tirelessly to document and revitalize them.

The original exhibition of the same name was developed in partnership with the First Peoples' Cultural Council and is a permanent fixture on the 3 rd floor of the Royal BC Museum, in Victoria.

The travelling exhibition runs from September 17 to November 20 at the Kitimat Museum & Archives.
Kitimat Museum & Archives Media contact:
Angela Eastman, Collections & Programming
(250) 632-8950
aeastman@kitimatmuseum.ca
About the Royal BC Museum
The Royal BC Museum explores the province's human history and natural history, advances new knowledge and understanding of BC, and provides a dynamic forum for discussion and a place for reflection. The museum and archives celebrate culture and history, telling the stories of BC in ways that enlighten, stimulate and inspire. Located in Victoria on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen (Songhees and Xwsepsum Nations), we are a hub of community connections in BC-onsite, offsite and online-taking pride in our collective histories.

- 30 -
Media contact:
Royal BC Museum Media Inquiries
250-387-5051
news@royalbcmuseum.bc.ca
@RoyalBCMuseum royalbcmuseum RoyalBCMuseum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Our Living Languages: First Peoples' Voices - Kitimat Museum & Archives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The travelling exhibition runs from September 17 to November 20 at the Kitimat Museum & Archives. Indigenous languages featured at the Kitimat Museum & Archives Kitimat and Terrace-How many of us in BC can say "hello" in the language of the people on whose traditional territory we live, work and play?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Neither critical race nor postcolonial theory can be understood apart from histories of anti-racist and anti-colonial political struggles. But while their specific histories may differ, what critical race and postcolonial theories share in common is the fact that they emerged out of-and represent intellectual challenges to-contexts of racial oppression. They also borrow heavily from one another, and share a commitment to developing theory based not solely on the thoughts of academics, but also from the voices and experiences of people of color and the former subjects of colonialism.

Critical race theory, by and large, evolved in response to racism and racial conditions in the United States. While the exact term "critical race theory" was coined by critical legal scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, critical theories of race in the U.S. go back as far as the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with roots in the writings of prominent intellectual-activists such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

What makes critical race theory "critical" is that its major aim is to uncover and critique racially oppressive social structures, meanings, and ideas for the purposes of combating racism. As such, the two major objects of study and thought for critical theorists of race are, unsurprisingly, race and racism. With regard to race, critical race theorists have presented a major challenge to theories that understand race as something "essential" or biologically ingrained in humans. For critical race scholars, racial categories like Black, White, Latino, Asian, Mulatto, Quadroon, etc., are social constructions, produced not by biology but by social relationships, cultural meanings, and institutions like law, politics, religion, and the state. Moreover, critical race theorists also argue that the construct of "race" has been a central aspect of modern social organization and modern forms of knowledge like human biology, medicine, and law.

Critical race theorists have criticized understandings of racism that simply see it as a result of individual prejudices and hateful acts. They have developed a much more structural and systemic understanding of racism-often termed "institutional racism"-that theorizes racism as embedded not only in individual minds but also in social relationships, practices, and institutions. These social structures and relationships shape individual minds and identities, and allocate economic, political, and social resources (like decent housing, voting rights, and dignity) in racially unequal ways.

Postcolonial theory largely emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, as countries and peoples once ruled as colonies (such as India, then a British colony, and Algeria, then a French colony) struggled for and gained their political independence. Postcolonial scholars have sought to understand the effects centuries of colonial rule and exploitation have had on colonial subjects and their cultures, ultimately for the purpose of combating the harmful consequences of colonial oppression that have been carried over into the new, postcolonial environment.

Like critical race scholars, postcolonial theorists contend that oppression and racism are reproduced by social structures and cultural meanings that are bigger than any one individual and outlast any one historical period. Postcolonial theorists study institutions and archives, as well as literary texts and films, to understand how these structures and meanings are produced in everyday life, and how they often shape powerful countries' views not only of their former colonial subjects, but also of themselves. In his groundbreaking book Orientalism, for example, Edward Said showed that "the West" (or "Occident") had for centuries defined itself through portraying the Eastern "Orient" as its polar opposite. In scores of Western academic texts, literary novels, and artworks during the colonial period, Said found a disturbing and fantastical geography of West vs. East, one in which the West's depiction of itself as "civilized" and "advanced" depended on the degradation of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures as "barbaric" and "backwards."

Like Said, contemporary postcolonial theorists work to critique and subvert dominant Western styles of thought, imagination, and theorizing for the purposes of allowing the voices of former colonial subjects to be heard. They also aim to expand social theory by taking seriously cultural knowledges that have been historically excluded. In doing so, postcolonial theorists critique the idea that the terms "modern" and "Western" are synonymous with one another, challenging social theories that understand modernity and modernization as internal to and exclusively of the West.

How Critical Race and Postcolonial Theory Matter Today

While we might often think of race in terms of individual bodies and racism as purely about individual prejudices, critical race and postcolonial scholars help show that race and racism are intricate parts of social history and the larger social order. Even when individual prejudices wane, racial inequality can perpetuate itself through larger social systems like education, housing, healthcare, and wealth/income. Moreover, these theorists help demonstrate how racial prejudice operates in often taken-for-granted ways. Both critical race theory and postcolonial thought help us see that race and racism have social sources and consequences, and they critique systems of racial dominance with the hope of helping us create more racially just societies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Social Theory Rewired | New Connections to Classical and Contemporary Perspectives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Neither critical race nor postcolonial theory can be understood apart from histories of anti-racist and anti-colonial political struggles. But while their specific histories may differ, what critical race and postcolonial theories share in common is the fact that they emerged out of-and represent intellectual challenges to-contexts of racial oppression.

# data[].attributes.body
Giving credit to the original author for their ideas to prevent plagiarism and receiving academic misconduct.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to Main Content

It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skip to Main Content It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

# data[].attributes.body
Born: January 19, 1968

Career: Author

Won to noble awards: Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (2001) & Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award (2016)

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

# data[].attributes.headline
6 Components of Form when Completing a Close Reading

# data[].attributes.subject
6 Components of Form when Completing a Close Reading

# data[].attributes.body
1. Form: the text’s external shape, including (for verse) its line length and rhyme scheme.

2. Structure and argument: the internal progression or cumulative development of the text’s meaning.

3. Speaker’s voice and tone: the qualities of and changes in tone, as it expresses emotions or states of mind.

4. Sound and rhythm: the length of words, and their arrangement; also any repeated consonants or vowel-sounds (“alliteration”).

5. Language

syntax, or word order

diction, or word choice

meanings of words

repetitions of words

6. Tropes:

metaphors (“my love is a rose”)

similes, or explicit metaphors (“my love is like a rose”)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is a general introduction to close reading, and a specific set of principles and terms for my own students.

This guide to close reading is a subset of my broader guide to Effective Critical Writing. ( It is indebted to similar guides by Robert Matz and John Lye, and to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th edition, ed. J.A. Cuddon and revised by M. A. R. Habib [print]).

Feel free to share this guide, and to adapt it to your own needs - so long as you share what you write under the same creative-commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) that I adopt here.

Here are some useful resources:

What is Close Reading?

Close reading is a practice, a habit of reading texts slowly enough to notice their details. It considers the functions of a text's verbal parts, and asks why the author has chosen them rather than others: its form; its speaker (voice, tone); its argument; its structure; its setting or context; its imagery; its sound and rhythm; its language (syntax, diction, and word meanings); and its rhetorical schemes and tropes (especially metaphors, similes, and symbols).

See it in action

My video (" Turn Ideas into Arguments") takes you through the four stages of annotating texts (for six features); thinking about your notes; filtering your thoughts; and summarizing your arguments. It uses the example of a Dylan Thomas poem, " In my craft or sullen art ".

Why do it?

If you're reading this, presumably someone like me has assigned you the task of close-reading a text. But why? What's the rationale behind these assignments?

Close reading is an essential skill for literary criticism because it studies the building-blocks of meaning, the words that we interpret whenever we make claims about texts. It focuses on the evidence that separates valid claims from invalid ones.

You do it because literary criticism is like palaeontology. You can't build a dinosaur skeleton until you've spent many hours in the field, excavating and dusting fragments of bone. Similarly, you can't make an argument about a text until you've closely examined its parts.

Is it objective?

No. There's no such thing. Nor is there a checklist of things in a text that you must notice in order to 'do it right.' A text is not a box that its author packed full of hidden treasures that you need to unpack. It's a collection of words that either do or don't have significance.

The first time you do a close reading it'll be hard to recognize or describe all those significant moments. But as you learn terms, and as you practice recognizing their formulations and variety, it gets easier - because you get better at it.

Good close readings have only one thing in common: they make rigorous evidence-based claims. Close reading is always based on evidence, and the evidence is always the same - so while there will be commonalities among close readings, most texts are rich enough that two readings will differ. What's more, a reading you do today will differ from one you do tomorrow, because you'll notice different things tomorrow.

Is it over-analysis?

William Wordsworth, whose very poetry you may be close reading for this assignment, thought it could be. "Our meddling intellect | Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things," he warned.

So yes, there is such a thing as reading too much into things. But close reading should generate a flurry of ideas and details, which you then sift and filter to decide if they're valid. You decide whether features seem accidental or deliberate. For instance, if you note that every 17th syllable of a poem uses the letter "w," say, that's probably less valid to note than a poem's recurrent use of nautical terms.

What should I look for?

At least six components of texts are worth noting when you do a close reading. They are:

1. Form: the text's external shape, including (for verse) its line length and rhyme scheme.

2. Structure and argument: the internal progression or cumulative development of the text's meaning.

3. Speaker's voice and tone: the qualities of and changes in tone, as it expresses emotions or states of mind.

4. Sound and rhythm: the length of words, and their arrangement; also any repeated consonants or vowel-sounds ("alliteration").

But that's just the beginning. The 35 terms below, divided into four categories, name different elements of a text that close readings can describe. Some terms, like diction or syntax, are in every text you read. Others, like metaphor or allegory, are only in some texts. Your task is to recognize them where they occur.

Okay, so how do I do it?

Step 1: Paraphrase

Read the passage and carefully paraphrase its meaning in modern or ordinary language. Split it up into parts. Try to understand how it's organized, and what gives it this structure. Does the argument of the passage ever contradict itself?

Step 2: Reflect

Write your questions, ideas, and issues in the margins of your book. Think about how the different parts of the passage are working together. Think about how words from one part reflect words from another.

Step 3: Use a dictionary

What words do you not know? Which seem to be used in unexpected ways? Do some words seem to have more than one meaning? Identify at least two words that seem archaic in usage and meaning. Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells you how a word's meanings have changed through time. How do these different meanings change your paraphrase?

Step 4: Reread

A close reading requires many readings of the same passage. It's often a good idea, in fact, to do an intensive close reading of a passage one day, and then come back to it again with a new look on a different day. Are any key words or phrases repeated? Do they change in meaning or connotation from one instance to another?

Dos and Don'ts

DO give your close reading a structure, with paragraphs that each have a beginning, middle, and end. Move from broad to narrow features, or general to particular. It can help to move sequentially through the passage - but:

DON'T retell the story, or paraphrase the text in your own words without doing analysis of it. Assume that your reader is familiar with the text or passage.

DON'T toss all your ideas into a blender and pour them onto the page. All you'll get is mushy prose, gathering ideas without order.

DO follow the guidelines for clear, precise, and natural language that are the hallmarks of all good writing.

DON'T quote long passages. Single out words in phrases that are typically no longer than 5-6 words.

Can I see some examples?

Sure. These are all from Shakespeare, and were originally compiled by Sarah Hertz (in 2011). Many of the examples come from As You Like It, only because that was the play we were teaching at the time. Sarah used standard reference works like The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory; and some specific ones like Reading Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (Arden).

Four categories

In this list, I group literary terms into four categories, which you can think of as different levels of close reading. Each of these is defined at the beginning of each section below:

1 / Linguistic Terms

These are terms that address language on the surface level, as they appear and are arranged in sequence. They cover vocabulary, grammar, word choice and order, and figures of speech.

alliteration

❧ (From the Latin 'repeating and playing upon the same letter.') A figure of speech in which consonants are repeated. They are often at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables.

Two examples from As You Like It:

That is another simple sin in you, to bring the ewes and the rams together, and to offer to get your living by the copulation of cattle; to be bawd to a bell-wether, and to b etray a she-lamb... (Touchstone, 3.2.75-78)

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running b rooks,

Sermons in s tones, and good in everything. (Duke Senior, 2.1.16-17)

Alliteration is a very old device in English verse - much older than rhyme - and is common in verse generally. It is also used occasionally in prose.

antithesis

❧ (From the Greek 'opposition.') A rhetorical figure in which two ideas are directly opposed. Think of antithesis as tension plus parallelism ( both defined above): opposing ideas presented in a grammatically parallel way.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. ( As You Like It, 5.1.31-32)

For happy wife, a most distressed widow;

For joyful mother, one that wails the name;

For queen, a very caitiff, crown'd with care;

For one being sued to, one that humbly sues;

For one that scorn'd at me, now scorn'd of me. ( Richard III, 4.4.98-102)

assonance

❧ The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in neighbouring words. It is distinct from rhyme in that the final consonants differ although the vowels or diphthongs match: sw eet dr eams, h it or m i ss.

How is assonance different from alliteration? Alliteration refers to repeated consonants, and assonance to repeated vowels. They often occur in proximity to each other.

This example, by John Addington Symonds, combines assonance with alliteration:

[T]he breathing fires

Of heaven in everlasting e ndless gyres

Enfolding and e ncircling orbs of thought. (from The Sonnet)

diction

❧ (1) Narrowly defined, a speaker's (or author's) word choice.

❧ (2) More broadly defined, the general type or character of language used in speech or in a work of literature.

In the second, broader sense, diction is typically divided into two components: vocabulary and syntax ( defined below). Vocabulary encompasses the degree of difficulty, complexity, abstractness, formality, and currency of words used, as well as their etymology or origin (native or foreign, Latinate or Germanic, and so on).

Poetic diction refers specifically to the choice and phrasing of words suitable for poetry.

dissonance

❧ Harshness of sound and/or rhythm, either inadvertent or deliberate. The term is nearly equivalent to cacophony, but tends to denote a lack of harmony between sounds rather than the harshness of a particular sound in isolation.

Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed

Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined. (First and Second Witch, Macbeth, 4.1.1-2)

euphony

❧ (From the Greek 'sweetness of sound.') A pleasing smoothness of sound, perceived by the ease with which the words can be spoken in combination. The pleasurable impression achieved may be due as much or more to the images evoked as to any inherent musicality in the sounds; calling a passage euphonious thus necessarily involves a subjective judgement. Euphony is the opposite of cacophony, or discordant sounds.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep. The more I give to thee

The more I have, for both are infinite. ( Romeo & Juliet , 2.1.175-77)

interruption

❧ The sudden breaking off of an utterance before it is completed, usually in moments of emotion. It seems quite a colloquial and natural feature in speech, but in earlier literature and drama it would be rare. Consider Hamlet's emotional response to his mother's remarriage:

Heaven and earth,

Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him

As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on; and yet, within a month-

Let me not think on't. Frailty, thy name is woman! (1.2.142-46)

onomatopoeia

❧ (From the Greek for 'name-making.') Wording that seems to signify meaning through sound effects. Onomatopoeic words, such as hiss and sizzle, ostensibly imitate the sounds they represent; onomatopoeic passages more broadly suggest an association between sound and meaning.

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms; ( As You Like It, 2.7)

It was a lover and his lass,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,

That o'er the green corn-field did pass

In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,

When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:

Sweet lovers love the spring. ( As You Like It, 5.3.16-21)

parallelism

❧ The arrangement of similarly constructed clauses, sentences, or verse lines in a pairing or other sequence suggesting some correspondence between them.

...no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy... ( As You Like It, 5.2.31-35)

The effect of parallelism is usually a balanced arrangement that repeats the same syntax. When the elements arranged in parallel are in tension with each other, the result is often antithesis ( defined below).

In a more extended sense, parallelism can also means correspondences between a text's larger elements, such as the relation of subplot to main plot.

syntax

❧ The ways in which words and clauses are ordered and connected to form sentences; or the set of grammatical rules governing such word-order. Syntax also refers to the arrangement - the ordering, grouping, and placement - of words within any phrase, clause or sentence.

Syntax is a prime determinant of literary style, and a key difference between poetic language and so-called ordinary language. While English sentences usually have the structure 'subject-verb-object' (e.g. "Romeo killed Tybalt"), poets often distort this syntax through inversion, while even prose writers can use elaborate syntax.

tension

❧ Generally, the balance or equilibrium between opposing elements in a literary work, especially a poem, that provoke our interest in its outcome. Tensions could include: good/evil; nature/culture; or feminine/masculine. Tension is essential to conflicts or binary oppositions like abstract/concrete, general/particular, and structure/texture. In Tension in Poetry (1938), Allen Tate defines tension as the relationship between two types of meaning: "extension" (concrete, denotative meaning) and "intention" (abstract, metaphorical meaning).

Dramatic tension and inner struggle are central to the plot in Hamlet:

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right! (1.5.189-90)

zeugma

❧ (From the Greek for 'yoking together.') The use of one word - usually a verb - that governs or refers to two or more other words in the same clause or sentence. You can recognize a zeugma by the absence of words that, in ordinary discourse, you would expect to (re)appear.

Bold verbs are zeugmatic in these two examples:

And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things. (William Wordsworth, "Lucy")

Her beauty pierced mine eye, her speech mine woeful heart,

Her presence all the powers of my discourse. (George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie)

2 / Semantic Terms

These are terms that involve the meanings and the ideas that are associated with words.

connotation

❧ The suggestion or implication of a word or phrase, beyond its denotation or literal meaning. A good example is the difference between 'house' and 'home': a 'house' is a physical structure, more or less; whereas the connotative meaning of 'home' relates to the close relationships among its inhabitants. Authors choose words with connotations that raise their desired emotional and cultural associations.

denotation

❧ The literal meaning of a word or phrase. When reading recent or contemporary texts, you'll know the meaning of most words and only look up specialized vocabulary (e.g 'moorish' or 'espoused') - although if you look up words you think you understand, you often find secondary meanings you didn't know about.

But in historical texts (i.e. written 5 or more decades ago), you'll encounter words whose meanings have shifted over time (e.g. 'rude' or 'naked'), and words that are no longer in use (e.g. 'hies' or 'livery'). That's when you need the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives you the historical denotations of words.

The other category of difficult words is idioms, or idiomatic expressions. These are ways of using words to convey more than their literal or grammatical meaning, and they are particular to time and place. Consider the many different ways of answering "thank you": "no problem," "you're welcome," "sure thing," "no worries," "don't mention it," "je vous en prie." Each is particular to the customs of its culture, language, nationality, and time; and none means its literal meaning. Someday our own expressions will be surpassed by new expressions, and we'll sound a tad ancient ourselves. (God forfend!)

Often when you see an idiom in a historical text, though, you don't recognize it because we don't use it in everyday speech: "in my mind's eye," "in the main," "laugh to scorn," "thick and fast," "the quick and the dead." The only way to recognize and translate these into their modern-English equivalents is to read a lot of historical texts, to stay curious about their idioms, and to look up the ones that seem unfamiliar in - where else? - the OED.

double entendre

❧ French for 'double meaning', adopted in English to denote a pun in which a word or phrase has a second, usually sexual, meaning, as in Elizabethan uses of the verb 'lie' referring both to death and to orgasm.

Come, where is this young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth? ( As You Like It, 1.2.191-92)

"Lie" = "to fall to the ground." Echoing biblical descriptions of the body's return to the earth at death and punning on "lie with" as slang for "have sexual relations with."

metaphor

❧ (From the Greek 'carrying from one place to another.') A figure of speech in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two.

The use of metaphor to combine ideas is a major feature of poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors.

In As You Like It, Orlando compares trees to books, and tree bark to pages of the books:

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,

And in their barks my thoughts I'll character. (3.2.5-6)

Metaphors are more compressed versions of similes, and are sometimes more complex for us to understand. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as 'dead' metaphors, like the branch of an organization or the leg of a table. But Shakespeare often takes common, conventional, or 'dead' metaphors and gives them a new twist or elaboration. So Hamlet thinks about the implication of the common image of death as sleep:

To die-to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ...

Must give us pause. ( Hamlet, 3.1.64-68)

A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous, usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing.

paradox

❧ (From the Greek 'beside/beyond opinion.') Originally a paradox was merely a view that contradicted accepted opinion. By about the middle of the 16th century, the word had acquired its now-commonly accepted meaning: an apparently self-contradictory, even absurd statement which, on closer inspection, is found to contain a truth reconciling the conflicting opposites. Two examples from As You Like It:

Sweetest nut hath sourest rind. (Touchstone, 3.2.106)

I do desire we may be better strangers. (Orlando, 3.2.251)

Some paradoxes cannot be resolved into truths, remaining flatly self-contradictory, e.g. "Everything I say is a lie."

A paradox formed by the juxtaposition of two opposite or contradictory words (rather than by a complete statement) is an oxymoron. Consider Romeo's lament in Romeo and Juliet, a long series of oxymorons:

O brawling love! O loving hate! ...

O any thing, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! (1.1.176-81)

personification

❧ A figure of speech or trope, like metaphor, by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line: "Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows."

In drama, the term is sometimes applied to the impersonation of non-human things and ideas by human actors.

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal and who he stands still withal. ( As You Like It, 3.2.299-302)

Personification, known in Greek as prosopopoeia, is common in everyday speech: e.g. "time flies" or "chair legs." It is common in most ages of poetry, particularly in the 18th century. It has a special function as the basis of allegory.

A pathetic fallacy is a limited form of personification, in which human traits and emotions are attributed to inanimate nature: "the sea was angry that day." Compared to personification in general, the pathetic fallacy is narrower in scope, since it applies only to nature rather than anything non-human, and its 'humanizing' characterization is typically less sustained.

pun

❧ A figure of speech which involves a play-on-words exploiting a similarity in spelling and/or pronunciation between words with different meanings. Alternatively, a pun may employ one word that has multiple meanings.

One of the earliest types of wordplay, the pun is a fairly universal form of humour. Puns are often intended humorously, but not always.

A pun form known as asteismus involves a reply to earlier words used in a different sense. This example occurs in Cymbeline(II, i):

CLOTEN: Would he had been one of my rank!

LORD: To have smell'd like a fool.

Rosalind uses the same joke with Touchstone in As You Like It (1.2). Touchstone is a wellspring of puns:

For my part, I had rather bear with you than bear you. Yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse. (2.4.10-12)

Whereas Hamlet is not quite so funny:

A little more than kin and less than kind. ( Hamlet, 1.2.65)

repetition

❧ An essential unifying element in nearly all poetry and much prose. It may consist of sounds, particular syllables and words, phrases, stanzas, metrical patterns, ideas, allusions and shapes. Thus refrain, assonance, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia are frequent in repetition. One example from As You Like It is in the definition of 'line length' below; this is the other:

O, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all hooping! (Celia, 3.2.186-88)

simile

❧ A figure of speech (more specifically a trope) that compares two distinct things by using words such as like or as to link them together. Simile is distinguished from metaphor, another trope that associates two distinct things, but without the use of a connective word. To say "That child is like a cyclone" is to use a simile, whereas to say "That child is a cyclone" is to use a metaphor. In either case, the cyclone is the vehicle, the image used to represent the child, which is the tenor, or subject of the figure.

Two examples from As You Like It:

I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs. (Jaques, 2.5.10-11)

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. (Jaques, 2.7.146-48)

An epic, or Homeric, simile is an extended and elaborate simile in which the vehicle is described at such length that it nearly obscures the tenor.

3 / Structural Terms

These terms involve relationships between a text's form and its themes or ideas.

caesura

❧ A break or pause in a line of poetry, dictated by the natural rhythm of the language and/or enforced by punctuation. A line may have more than one caesura, or none at all. If near the beginning of the line, it is called the initial caesura; near the middle, medial; near the end, terminal. The commonest is the medial.

To be, or not to be: that is the question: ( Hamlet, 3.1.58)

enjambment

❧ (French for 'striding over.') A sentence or statement that spans more than one verse line. Lines exhibiting enjambment do not end with grammatical breaks, and their sense is incomplete without the following line(s). Such lines are sometimes called run-on lines to distinguish them from end-stopped lines. The meaning of an end-stopped line, in which a grammatical pause marked by punctuation and the physical end of the line coincide, is complete in itself. The following lines, from The Winter's Tale, are enjambed:

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex

Commonly are; the want of which vain dew

Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have

That honourable grief lodged here which burns

Worse than tears drown. (Hermione, 2.1.110-14)

Whereas, in contrast, these lines from Romeo & Juliet are all end-stopped:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.

The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.

Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished. (Prince, 5.3.304-07)

line length

❧ The number of syllables -- not words -- in a line of poetry. In Shakespeare's verse the convention is ten syllables per line, but different passages (e.g. songs) will have shorter or longer lines. When one or more lines are significantly different in length to those around it/them, Shakespeare is often suggesting something about the meaning of the line(s), or the character speaking them.

If thou rememberest not the slightest folly

That ever love did make thee run into,

Thou hast not loved;

Or if thou hast not sat as I do now,

Wearing thy hearer in thy mistress' praise,

Thou hast not loved;

Or if thou hast not broke from company

Abruptly, as my passion now makes me,

Thou hast not loved. ( As You Like It, 2.4)

rhyme

❧ The formalized consonance of syllables, represented in an abstract notation or 'scheme': e.g. AA, BB, CC for couplets. Blank verse has no rhyme scheme; that is the meaning of 'blank.'

Master, go on; and I will follow thee

To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty.

From seventeen years till now almost four-score

Here lived I, but now live here no more.

At seventeen years many their fortunes seek,

But at fourscore it is too late a week;

Yet fortune cannot recompense me better

Than to die well and not my master's debtor. ( As You Like It, 2.3)

stanza

❧ A group of lines in poetry, set off by whitespace before and after. As the units into which poets divide poems, stanzas are similar to paragraphs in prose - but different insofar as they are usually of a uniform length, typically between 4 and 12 lines. Poets may repeat words, lines (as refrains), and more often rhyme schemes between stanzas (e.g. ABABBCC).

Sonnets are occasionally divided into two or more stanzas denoting their rhyme scheme (e.g. octave and sestet, quatrains and couplet).

structure & distinct phases

❧ These non-technical terms refer to the progression of the text's meaning, or the stages through which a text moves. Where are its shifts of subject, mood, story, theme, tone, verb tenses? Is there a beginning, middle, and end to what the text describes or recounts? Where do those transitions happen?

For shorter texts like lyrical poems, consider sentences or clauses and their relationships. Does one contradict or reply to another? Is the poem split into stanzas? How might you group some stanzas together, and divide them from others? Don't look at layout alone, but how it relates to what's happening at each stage.

For longer texts like stories, plays, and narrative poems, look for internal divisions (e.g. chapters, scenes, acts). But look also within those divisions, to pivotal moments (e.g. revelations or discoveries) that shift the story. Structure also obtains in non-fictional prose. If the text is an argument, for example, does it make a claim at the beginning and then back it up with evidence? Or use evidence/examples to establish a claim?

title & epigraphs

❧ A text's title might be useful when you are interpreting its meaning, only if you're sure that it hasn't been added or changed by someone other than the author, like a modern editor. (For instance, many of the titles of Shakespeare's plays are abbreviated versions of the titles under which they were first performed or printed.) Poems published in the past few centuries have titles provided either by the author or by their acquaintances and publishers, so you need to be certain which category your title is in before you make too much of it.

Poem titles can be illuminating when they address features that direct and frame your interpretation - as in the case of William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," originally known by the more descriptive title "The Leech Gatherer.""

Epigraphs are short quotations that precede texts; they often represent ideas that inspired or otherwise influenced the text. Normally in a close reading you investigate an epigraph's source and briefly address its influence alongside other sources or contexts.

Novels or plays often print epigraphs on separate pages like title pages, or they appear at divisions like chapter-breaks. Poems print them just before the first line.

4 / Cultural Terms

These terms relate to a text's connections with things outside of its boundaries, like references to places or to other texts, mythology, or other external elements. To identify them, you need to recognize and understand such externalities.

allegory

❧ (From the Greek allēgoria, 'speaking otherwise.') A story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning.

The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape - as in public statues of Liberty or Justice.

In written narrative, allegory involves a sustained, continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale.

An allegory may be conceived as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system. Many critics consider the allegory to be an extended metaphor and, conversely, consider metaphors - which involve saying one thing but meaning another - to be ' verbal allegories'. Famous examples are John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Milton's Paradise Lost.

In As You Like It, Oliver tells the story of his rescue by Orlando (4.3) in supposedly factual terms, or as an event that really happened. But it contains so many symbols (the ancient oak, the "green and gilded snake," the lioness) that it could be construed as an allegory - specifically, as a quasi-Biblical story of good defeating evil, and mankind overpowering nature.

allusion

❧ Usually an implicit reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event. It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer.

An allusion enriches the text by association with some established tradition. The writer tends to assume that the audience is able to 'pick up' the reference.

There are many allusions in As You Like It:

There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are coming to the ark.* (Jaques, 5.4.35-36)

[*Alluding to a biblical account in Genesis 7:2 in which pairs of male and female animals shelter on Noah's ark to escape the flood that covers the earth.]

They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.* (Charles, 1.1.111-13)

[*Alluding to the classical myth of an earlier world of perpetual spring, abundance, and ease from which humankind had degenerated (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1). This golden world was often identified with a pastoral life.]

apostrophe

❧ (From the Greek 'turning away.') A figure of speech in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead or absent person, is addressed as if present and capable of understanding.

Blow, blow, thou winter wind!

Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude. ( As You Like It, 2.7.175-77)

O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black!

O night, which ever art when day is not!

O night, O night, alack, alack, alack... ( A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.168-70)

In classical rhetoric, the term could also denote a speaker's turning to address a particular member or section of the audience. The apostrophe is one of the conventions appropriate to the ode and to the elegy. The poet's invocation of a muse in epic poetry is a particular form of apostrophe.

implied reader / audience

❧ The person(s) to whom a text is addressed; the intended audience of a speech. These qualities of a text often have a direct influence on verbal style. For instance, when Touchstone confronts William in As You Like It 5.1, he uses vocabulary to intimidate him, and to impress Audrey with his learning. Another example from the same play is Phoebe's declaration of love to 'Ganymede,' in the letter that Silvius carries:

He that brings this love to thee

Little knows this love in me; (4.3)

irony

❧ (From the Greek 'dissimulation.') A subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance.

At its simplest, as in verbal irony, it involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant, as in its crude form, sarcasm. Cross-dressing provides ample opportunity for ironic statements:

I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal. (Rosalind in As You Like It, 3.2.335-38)

The more sustained structural irony in literature involves the use of a naïve or deluded hero or unreliable narrator, whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers; literary irony thus flatters its readers' intelligence at the expense of a character (or fictional narrator).

A similar sense of detached superiority is achieved by dramatic irony, in which the audience knows more about the character's situation than the character does, foreseeing an outcome contrary to the character's expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply different sense to some of the character's own statements; in tragedies, this is called tragic irony.

The term cosmic irony is sometimes used to denote a view of people as the dupes of a cruelly mocking fate.

mood

❧ Defined by some critics as synonymous with atmosphere, by others as synonymous with tone, and by still others as synonymous with both. Mood is probably closer to atmosphere than to tone, but, as a general term, it can be correctly applied to either. One could say that an author creates a somber mood, thereby using it as a synonym for atmosphere; one could also say than an author's mood is somber, thereby using it as a synonym for tone. Shakespeare uses dialogue to establish mood and setting in Hamlet:

Tis bitter cold,

And I am sick at heart. (Francisco, 1.1.6-7)

perspective/point of view

❧ The position or vantage-point from which the events of a text seem to be observed and presented to us.

The chief distinction usually made between points of view is that between third-person narratives and first-person narratives.

A third-person narrator may be omniscient, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story's events from outside or 'above' them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or a small group of characters, this method being known as 'limited point of view'. A first-person narrator's point of view is normally restricted to their partial knowledge and experience, and therefore will not give us access to other characters' hidden thoughts.

Many modern authors also use multiple points of view, in which readers are shown events from the positions of multiple characters.

symbol

❧ (From the Greek verb symballein, 'to throw together' and its noun symbolon, 'mark', 'emblem', 'token' or 'sign'). An object, animate or inanimate, which represents or 'stands for' something else.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember. And there is pansies; that's for thoughts.* (Ophelia, Hamlet, 4.5.173-74)

[*Ophelia, recalling each flower's symbolic meaning, distributes them to Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius.]

Now Hercules be thy speed,* young man! (Rosalind, As You Like It, 1.2.201)

[*may Hercules bring you luck. Hercules' name is synonymous with physical strength. This is also an allusion to the classical hero.]

A symbol differs from an allegorical sign in that it has a real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary. It can be an action or a gesture, and in literature it is used to combine an image with a concept (words themselves are a kind of symbol).

tone

❧ The attitude of an author or speaker toward a text's readers, audiences, or subjects. An author's tone may be serious, playful, mocking, and so forth.

Tone is sometimes equated with voice, particularly in the sense of a creative authorial voice that pervades and underlies literary work. It is often used to mean 'tone of voice,' an indeterminate quality of language through which writers (and us in our daily conversations) reveal a range of attitudes towards everything from the subject at hand to those being addressed.

Hamlet's disregard for the body of Polonius is cheeky, flippant, and morbid:

But indeed, if you find him not this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby ( Hamlet, 4.3.34-36).

Although the terms tone and atmosphere may both be equated with mood, their meanings differ. Unlike tone, which refers to the author's attitude, atmosphere refers to the general feeling created for the reader or audience by a work at a given point.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a general introduction to close reading, and a specific set of principles and terms for my own students. This guide to close reading is a subset of my broader guide to Effective Critical Writing. ( It is indebted to similar guides by Robert Matz and John Lye, and to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th edition, ed.

# data[].attributes.body
Title and Author does WHAT by HOW

# data[].attributes.body
Take a word and look at the definitions given. Be able to dig deeper into the word and create a thorough definition linking it to the literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to Main Content

It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

Interlibrary Loans & Other Libraries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skip to Main Content It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. Interlibrary Loans & Other Libraries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
MLA Formatting and Style Guide - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook (9th ed.), offers examples for the general format of MLA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the Works Cited page.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Critical thinking delves beneath the surface of things, turning them into objects for study, interpretation, and judgement. The aim of critical writing is to express these thoughts.

Effective critical writing offers a rigorous and thorough argument composed in clear, concise, and natural language that obeys the rules of grammar.

Other resources

My separate guide to close reading offers step-by-step instructions and a list of terms and principles.

In my YouTube video series, learn how to read and write about texts like a literary critic. There are videos on avoiding common grammatical mistakes, on turning ideas into arguments, and on quoting and citing other writing in your writing.

You might also find the writing-related posts throughout my blog worthwhile; they offer personal observations and unsolicited advice on the ideal writing environment, software, journals, mindsets, and habits.

Always ensure that your argument deals with the terms and scope of the question posed to you.

When you posit an argument, you need to illustrate it with strong and sustained textual evidence (and, often, secondary sources), linked together with your articulate and thoughtful analysis. Your personal judgments are only the beginning of an academic argument, when they are grounded in a sound knowledge of the text and its nuances, when they move from opinions to arguments.

Literary criticism is neither wholly objective, nor wholly subjective. There are no right or wrong analyses, only well- and poorly-argued ones.

A strong argument begins with an effective thesis statement.

A paragraph should be like an essay in miniature, with a discrete (unique) purpose, and a beginning, middle, and end. It should begin and end with analytical statements, rather than with descriptions, paraphrases, or quotations.

A strong argument uses clear and confident language to present its ideas and evidence, avoiding non-committal phrases like "perhaps" or "this might be interpreted to mean". If you're uncertain about your interpretation, buttress it with more (or better) textual evidence-or do some thinking about whether what you're writing is what you truly think.

When responding to a text, don't simply retell the story or argument in your own words. Assume that the reader shares your well-earned mastery of the text. Weave the text's narrative into the pattern of your argument and analysis. This usually means that you don't need (necessarily) to stick to the author's chronology of events: move laterally through the material, according to your own priorities. Make the plot serve your analysis, not the other way round.

In sum, show the reader that you're truly engaged with the both text and with the question(s) at hand.

Writing an Effective Thesis Statement

The thesis statement tells your reader (1) what you will argue, and (2) how you will argue it (what categories of evidence you will use).

It is more than just a topic sentence or starting point.

Here is a weak thesis:
Shakespeare uses metaphors to express Romeo and Juliet's feelings.

Here's a more effective version:
Shakespeare uses the metaphors of beholding and reading, in Romeo and Juliet's conversations, to express their desires and judgements.

This is more effective because it's explicit about which feelings you'll discuss, and it tells the reader what evidence you'll examine.

In this YouTube video, learn more about writing an effective thesis statement. It's the last of a four-stage process from annotating, to thinking, to filtering, to summarizing.

Faulty Arguments

Strong writers argue with the confidence that comes from resourceful use of evidence. Weak writers state and restate arguments to make up for faulty or absent evidence.

One sure sign of weak argumentation is an abrupt shift at the end of a paragraph or essay from bland analysis and excessive quotation to over-confident assertions: "thus we see..." "therefore it is clear...". This is too glib to be trusted: your job is to make it clear, transitioning smoothly between close readings of your chosen (few) quotations and natural conclusions.

Be active, engaging, and clear in your style. Critical writing is a highly self-conscious, if not paranoid, act: you write with an imaginary (and acutely critical) reader looking over your shoulder. Ensure that every word in a sentence needs to be there; superfluous words clutter the page and give the impression that you're being evasive.

The greatest challenge in critical writing is to present ideas you have spent many hours crafting and clarifying as if they occurred to you naturally, without excessive strain or effort. The same applies to the structure of your argument: while you need a logical argument, you must conceal the blueprints after you build the house. Avoid phrases which simply turn your point-form notes into prose, like "In this essay I will argue..." or "In conclusion..." or "The idea of appearance versus reality also appears in Act II, Scene 3." Essays should show the product, not the gestation, of your ideas.

Analysis / Description / Paraphrase / Quotation

Think of these four modes of writing on a spectrum: at one end, there's a purely analytical statement (eg. "Hamlet is a play about epistemological uncertainty").

For more on selecting quotations, see here.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's pure quotation: words quoted directly from the text ("To be or not to be").

Description and paraphrase are modes between these two extremes: they tell the reader about the text in your own words-describing events and dialogue, paraphrasing speeches, and so on.

You can see how these two modes allow for analytical leeway: you inform the reader what's happening, and add your own analytical twist (eg. "Hamlet's musings on Claudius' guilt reveal his epistemological uncertainty").
What should you do with this information? Think of paraphrase and description as a way to balance analysis with description. All four modes of writing have a place in your writing, and both ends of the spectrum need each other: you need description to tell the reader what's happening, and analysis to tell the reader what to think (or what you're thinking). Use paraphrase and description to move between them, to make the distinction less overt.

Be direct

Rather than saying, "In Hamlet, revenge is depicted as...", say it outright: " Hamlet depicts revenge as...".

Avoid the passive voice, where possible: don't say, "Tybalt is killed by Romeo" when it's more direct to say, "Romeo kills Tybalt." Here are some resources on how to identify and avoid it, from the writing centres at Toronto and Purdue and UNC Chapel Hill.

There are exceptions to this rule, as to most: when you truly don't know who did an action. It's appropriate, even necessary, to ask (for example), "Where were these peaches grown?" If you don't know where they grew, it likely follows that you don't know who grew them.

Be confident

Rather than writing, "It seems that Horatio is a loyal friend", try the more direct, "Horatio is a loyal friend." Avoid non-committal phrases like "perhaps" or "this might be interpreted to mean." If you can't strengthen an assertion with textual evidence, don't bother making it.

Audience responses, which are notoriously unpredictable, are an exception to this rule. (eg. You can argue that a speech is designed to elicit sympathy, not that it will evoke sympathy from an audience.

Be explicit

Don't shy away from your critical responsibilities, or pretend that you know something you don't. Don't tell your reader that "it is clear" or "it can be argued that" when your task is to make the argument or idea clear.

Be concise

Ensure that every word in every sentence needs to be there. If you can remove it without changing the meaning, do so. The same goes for sentences within paragraphs.

The most elegant writing is also the most economical. Unnecessarily long words and wordy phrases strain the reader's sense that you truly believe what you are writing, rather than cloaking it in unnecessary verbiage.

To improve the flow of your argument and the cadences of your sentences, try reading your early drafts aloud as you revise them. This technique also helps you avoid run-on sentences, in which you lose the original idea by the end of the sentence, a phenomenon I'm demonstrating in this very sentence, which is, if you are reading it aloud, already incoherent.

My assignments have maximum word-limits because it is far more difficult, and more important, to be concise than to be verbose.

Most writers love to fill space with words - the length of this web page is all the evidence you need. Many of those words are unnecessary verbiage, or words that merely take up space without contributing to your argument.

Here are some egregious examples:

"For many centuries, Romeo and Juliet has been read by countless numbers of people."
Sure, and many of them have been reluctant undergraduates eager to impress their professors with claims of Shakespeare's timeless genius or statements of self-evident literary history.

"This play is an example of how society can dictate rigid lives and teaches us to step back and look at our lives apart from outside expectations."
Well, maybe. I appreciate the sentiment that literature can teach us to experience the world differently. But bland therapeutic pronouncements about text X teaching us moral lesson Y usually replace rigorous evidence-based arguments about that text.

Specific terms & phrases to avoid

"This piece by Sir Philip Sidney..."

Be precise and direct. In modern usage, 'piece' means a short article ("Your piece in the New York Times") or brief artistic/literary compostion (a piece of music, of rhyme). Can everybody agree to use more precise words than 'piece'?

"Through this text society learns valuable lessons."

No, individual readers read texts. They might together alter the social fabric, but society is not a hive mind: it cannot read or learn anything. As Margaret Thatcher said in one of her rare moments of critical lucidity, there's no such thing as society.

Malapropisms

These are words used mistakenly, in the place of a similar-sounding other words""often with amusing results. In Richard Sheridan's play The Rivals (1775), Mrs. Malaprop commits this error all the time: "she's as headstrong as an allegory [alligator] on the banks of Nile," for instance. "Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth [Sistene] Chapel" is another example. Most student examples are more feasible (and less ludicrous) than that, and they tend to fall into the category of what Fowler's Modern English Usage (1926) calls "the love of the long word." This is a trap that students often fall into, in an effort to make their language sound impressive, at the expense of clarity, precision and directness: virtuosity for virtue, orientate for orient. H. W. Fowler also wrote The King's English (1906), which begins with this advice: "Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid."

And this is Fowler's advice on diction (word choice): "Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long." Enough said.

Grammatical errors are the easiest to fix, and are therefore the most exasperating to your readers.

My YouTube video, " Look Smart: Avoid Bad Grammar," addresses the Top Ten most common grammatical errors: commas, semicolons, apostrophes, homonyms, inconsistent verbs, passive-voice verbs, vague pronouns, misplaced modifiers, dangling modifiers, and parallelism.

Specific matters of grammar:

Avoid singular/plural errors when you're trying to avoid gender-specific language. Rather than saying, "The reader understands that they are not given the full story," say "Readers understand that they are not given the full story."

Write in the 'timeless present' tense, not mixing past and present verb-tenses. Don't write "This was one of the recurring themes in the book. There are numerous moments when it appears." Instead, use the present tense throughout: "This is one of the recurring themes..." etc.

Don't make semicolon errors; they are to be used only between complete sentences, or between articles in a list which consist of multiple words (eg. "Daniel Price addresses his sermon to three classes of readers: his dedicatee Charles; former members of Henry's household; and young men who neglect their spiritual duties").

"Never" use quotation marks for "emphasis." It's not only an absurd misuse of this punctuation (whose purpose is to quote something from a source), it also suggests an ironic meaning for the highlighted word, which is the purpose of single quotations (eg. Shall we 'deconstruct' the zoo after our field trip?). The error of quotation marks for emphasis occasionally results in amusing ironies itself (eg. I "appreciate" your grammatical smugness.).

Use two long dashes or two double-hyphens-not single-hyphens-when interjecting a parenthetical word or statement.

Finally, join the campaign to end the two most pervasive errors in English grammar:

it's = it is (or it has), while its= the possessive form of the pronoun 'it'

plural forms of words very rarely require an apostrophe

Citation Style

Follow the MLA citation style. as outlined in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Always include a Works Cited section at the end of your essay.

Remember that you are citing authors, not editors: don't list Romeo and Juliet under its modern editor, but under Shakespeare.Don't introduce a sentence by saying 'In Act III Scene 7, Enobarbus tells Cleopatra..."; rather, quote the character and then close the sentence with the citation (III.7.35). Remember that the citation always goes at the end of your sentence, even if the quotation ends in the middle.

Presentation Guidelines

Here are some of those idiosyncratic guidelines I mentioned in my note at the top of this page. Following these will make me happier when I draw your essay from the groaning piles on my desk.

Do proofread carefully, especially a text you're quoting from any source.

Do include the following at the top of page one (not in a separate title-page): name, student number, date, course, professor, due date, word count, essay title, and question number.

Do double-space your essay, with margins of at least an inch on all sides.

Don't justify the right-hand margin, which makes your paper look like a magazine article.

Do include page numbers.

Writing with style can also mean writing in style. Many students use Times New Roman font, without considering the aesthetic appeal of other fonts like Garamond or Georgia or Lucida. Anything but Courier, or one of those Baroque script-like fonts, makes for a more pleasant reading experience. But please: nothing smaller than 12 point, and no coloured text or paper.

Finally, do give your essay an insightful title, rather than parroting the words in the question. (E.g. If the question asks you to analyze Falstaff's sense of humour, don't call your essay "An Analysis of Falstaff's Sense of Humour.")

Quoting Primary Texts

In my YouTube video, " Quote with Integrity," you learn why and how to quote other people's writing, in your writing. You also learn how to cite your sources, whether they're prose or verse. And how to integrate that textual evidence smoothly into your analysis, and when to paraphrase it. Finally, you learn why plagiarizing sources in your essay is the equivalent of claiming that you and your friends recorded Rihanna songs in your garage.

How do you use quotations in your argument? Use them to support your claims and to return the reader back to the text at hand, especially in the midst of long analytical sections. Quotations show that you have done a careful reading and that your analysis can be phrased in the text's own terms and language.

Try at all times to integrate quotations into your own prose. This effectively reassures your readers that they are reading a reliable account of the text, one that is almost interchangeable with it. I'm overstating the case somewhat, but when you adroitly interweave an author's words and phrases with your own, you display a proficiency and adeptness that suggests your trustworthiness.

Integrating quotations begins with ensuring that if we removed the quotation-marks from your sentence, it would still be grammatically correct (more or less) and would still make sense. It's jarring for a reader to switch syntactical gears mid-sentence: ease the transition.

Always proofread your quotations very carefully. If your transcription is wrong, can your interpretation be any more trustworthy?

Gratuitous quotations are equally tiresome. Remember when you quote a text, at any length, to JUSTIFY its presence in your argument. Why is it quoted, rather than paraphrased? The answer comes from your analysis, which interprets the quotation's meaning and clarifies its purpose in the essay.

When you quote a text, you assume the responsibility to discuss particular details like its tone, syntax, and diction. When you quote verse (rather than prose) you must acknowledge the ends of lines, either by inserting line breaks ( / ) or by presenting the verse as it's laid out in the quoted text. How do you decide which one to do? If you're quoting within your own prose, use line breaks. If you're using the block-quotation (indented) format, lay it out as it appears. When introducing a quotation, use the proper punctuation. You should also not use "quotation marks" for block quotations.

Examples

Here's what I mean. In these two examples, the first instance uses the correct format. The wrong format follows below, with errors in bold type.

Note that in the first example I quote Lepidus within my own prose, because the speech is only two lines. For quotations longer than three lines, use the block format shown in the second example.

Also note that you should never use an ellipsis (...) at the beginning and ends of quotations. Only use them when you are replacing words in the middle of quotations (e.g. "Evils ... to darken ... his goodness" - wherein "enough" and "all" are replaced by "...").

Right format:

Responding to Caesar's critique of Anthony's revelry, Lepidus has a more indulgent view: "I must not think there are / Evils enough to darken all his goodness" (1.4.10-11).

Wrong format:

Responding to Caesar's critique of Anthony's revelry, Lepidus has a more indulgent view, " ... I must not think there are evils enough to darken all his goodness ... " (1.4.10-11).

Right format:

Lepidus has a more indulgent view:

I must not think there are

Evils enough to darken all his goodness.

His faults in him seem as the spots of heaven,

More fiery by night's blackness. (1.4.10-13)

Wrong format:

Lepidus has a more indulgent view,

"I must not think there are / Evils enough to darken all his goodness. / His faults in him seem as the spots of heaven, / More fiery by night's blackness" (1.4.10-13)

Quoting Critical Texts

Effective critical writing is both independent and original. It presents the results of your own critical engagement with a central question about a text, and the series of problems that arise from that question.

To achieve this, your writing must weave the ideas of other critics (quoted from articles and books) into your own argument. That is, it must use those critics to add complexity - not just support - to your argument.

A common problem in undergraduate essays is that critics feel slighted: students quote them briefly and then move ahead with their arguments, as if they were merely filling a quota. Think of them as fellow readers whose interpretations you are testing, not as talking-heads in a documentary you're editing. Engage with each of the ideas you introduce; agree or disagree with them, develop them or depart from them""use any rhetorical method that suggests you are in conversation with them.

That's why, for instance, you should always begin a paragraph with your own ideas, not with the words of Critic X. Your own ideas should always be at the forefront: they are stucturing the argument and determining the subjects of each paragraph.Similarly, end each paragraph with a summation of its subject (its argument in miniature)""not with another quotation, from any source.Speaking of documentaries, don't introduce critics like they're on a panel discussion ("In his 2001 book Managing Readers, William Slights of the University of Saskatchewan argues"). The convention is to integrate them more subtly ("William Slights argues that"), and to leave publication information for the Works Cited page.

Another common problem is the use of broad interpretive or "˜background' ideas without attribution (e.g. "pilgrims were often poor," or "Una represents Christian truth"). These are fine when you cite the source or critic you got them from (even, say, "English 408 Lecture on November 17th, 2008″), and then when you pull them apart and question their truth. But you should never accept them at face value, or (worse) base your argument on them. You have clearly done some extra research, which is good, but you can't let that research go unattributed. If it's from Wikipedia and you'd rather not say so, stop using Wikipedia and find the information from a more reputable source: usually a printed book, journal, or encyclopedia in the library. This means that yes, you have to go to the library to research your subject.

4: More general advice

Time Management

The most common mistake among students is not allowing adequate time to complete an assignment. (Having been there, I can sympathize-to a point.) So plan your time carefully, particularly when you can anticipate weeks when many assignments will be due. Write your various due dates on a calendar at the beginning of each term, and plan in advance when you will work on each of them. As these dates approach, give yourself time to work on the assignment regularly: half an hour every day is a modest and thus an achievable goal. The final few days before the essay is due should be dedicated only to revision and editing-fine-tuning of what you have already written.Effective critical writing is never a last-minute endeavour. Good essays rarely emerge as "blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil," to quote W. B. Yeats. If this doesn't convince you, consider what Thomas Cogan, the High Master of Manchester Grammar School, wrote in 1584:

"nothing is more hurtfull than studying in the night. ...Wherefore to watch and to be occupied in minde or bodie in the day time, is agreeable to the motions of the humours and spirites: but to watch and studie in the night, is to strive against nature, and by contrarie motions to impaire both the bodie and minde" (from The haven of health: chiefly gathered for the comfort of students).

Writing Resources

No writer's desk should be without a good dictionary and thesaurus. Any acknowledged dictionary will do, but the Oxford Paperback Canadian Dictionary should be useful to English students in Canada. A thesaurus, when used judiciously, is another excellent resource for finding the words that will do justice to your ideas.

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edition. (1998). Unparalleled.

Fowler's Modern English Usage, the longstanding standard authority on English usage, has been thoroughly revised by R. W. Burchfield (3rd. edition, 1996). It's an excellent guide to common and particular problems, like 'that' vs. 'which', or 'who' vs. 'whom'. And it offers such entertaining definitions as the entry for "pedantry": "the saying of things in language so learned or so demontratively accurate as to imply a slur upon the generality, who are not capable or not desirous of such displays". Classic. For more like these, see John Ralston Saul's The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (1994).

Forgive me if any of the following resources go offline - and please let me know:

Academic Integrity

In my YouTube video, " Quote with Integrity," I compare plagiarizing your sources to claiming that you and your friends recorded Rihanna songs in your garage.

Plagiarism is the deliberate or inadvertent presentation of someone else's work as your own. If you submit an assignment that includes material (even a very small amount) that you did not write, but that is presented as your own work, you are guilty of plagiarism. Your readers must know at every point whether they are reading your ideas, or someone else's.

The definition of plagiarism is simple, but its penalties are severe, as detailed in the University guidelines. Ignorance is not a defence: it is your responsibility to ensure that you understand and apply the citation rules outlined in the MLA Handbook.

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to, the following scenarios: using the work of someone else, from whatever source, without citation; recycling work from other university or high school courses; or submitting the same paper in two different courses.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Critical thinking delves beneath the surface of things, turning them into objects for study, interpretation, and judgement. The aim of critical writing is to express these thoughts. Effective critical writing offers a rigorous and thorough argument composed in clear, concise, and natural language that obeys the rules of grammar.

# data[].attributes.body
in Literary Criticism, close criticism, close reading, etc., critical and detailed analysis of a text; an example of this. Also applied to the analysis of other works of art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is a general introduction to close reading, and a specific set of principles and terms for my own students.

This guide to close reading is a subset of my broader guide to Effective Critical Writing. ( It is indebted to similar guides by Robert Matz and John Lye, and to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th edition, ed. J.A. Cuddon and revised by M. A. R. Habib [print]).

Feel free to share this guide, and to adapt it to your own needs - so long as you share what you write under the same creative-commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) that I adopt here.

Here are some useful resources:

What is Close Reading?

Close reading is a practice, a habit of reading texts slowly enough to notice their details. It considers the functions of a text's verbal parts, and asks why the author has chosen them rather than others: its form; its speaker (voice, tone); its argument; its structure; its setting or context; its imagery; its sound and rhythm; its language (syntax, diction, and word meanings); and its rhetorical schemes and tropes (especially metaphors, similes, and symbols).

See it in action

My video (" Turn Ideas into Arguments") takes you through the four stages of annotating texts (for six features); thinking about your notes; filtering your thoughts; and summarizing your arguments. It uses the example of a Dylan Thomas poem, " In my craft or sullen art ".

Why do it?

If you're reading this, presumably someone like me has assigned you the task of close-reading a text. But why? What's the rationale behind these assignments?

Close reading is an essential skill for literary criticism because it studies the building-blocks of meaning, the words that we interpret whenever we make claims about texts. It focuses on the evidence that separates valid claims from invalid ones.

You do it because literary criticism is like palaeontology. You can't build a dinosaur skeleton until you've spent many hours in the field, excavating and dusting fragments of bone. Similarly, you can't make an argument about a text until you've closely examined its parts.

Is it objective?

No. There's no such thing. Nor is there a checklist of things in a text that you must notice in order to 'do it right.' A text is not a box that its author packed full of hidden treasures that you need to unpack. It's a collection of words that either do or don't have significance.

The first time you do a close reading it'll be hard to recognize or describe all those significant moments. But as you learn terms, and as you practice recognizing their formulations and variety, it gets easier - because you get better at it.

Good close readings have only one thing in common: they make rigorous evidence-based claims. Close reading is always based on evidence, and the evidence is always the same - so while there will be commonalities among close readings, most texts are rich enough that two readings will differ. What's more, a reading you do today will differ from one you do tomorrow, because you'll notice different things tomorrow.

Is it over-analysis?

William Wordsworth, whose very poetry you may be close reading for this assignment, thought it could be. "Our meddling intellect | Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things," he warned.

So yes, there is such a thing as reading too much into things. But close reading should generate a flurry of ideas and details, which you then sift and filter to decide if they're valid. You decide whether features seem accidental or deliberate. For instance, if you note that every 17th syllable of a poem uses the letter "w," say, that's probably less valid to note than a poem's recurrent use of nautical terms.

What should I look for?

At least six components of texts are worth noting when you do a close reading. They are:

1. Form: the text's external shape, including (for verse) its line length and rhyme scheme.

2. Structure and argument: the internal progression or cumulative development of the text's meaning.

3. Speaker's voice and tone: the qualities of and changes in tone, as it expresses emotions or states of mind.

4. Sound and rhythm: the length of words, and their arrangement; also any repeated consonants or vowel-sounds ("alliteration").

But that's just the beginning. The 35 terms below, divided into four categories, name different elements of a text that close readings can describe. Some terms, like diction or syntax, are in every text you read. Others, like metaphor or allegory, are only in some texts. Your task is to recognize them where they occur.

Okay, so how do I do it?

Step 1: Paraphrase

Read the passage and carefully paraphrase its meaning in modern or ordinary language. Split it up into parts. Try to understand how it's organized, and what gives it this structure. Does the argument of the passage ever contradict itself?

Step 2: Reflect

Write your questions, ideas, and issues in the margins of your book. Think about how the different parts of the passage are working together. Think about how words from one part reflect words from another.

Step 3: Use a dictionary

What words do you not know? Which seem to be used in unexpected ways? Do some words seem to have more than one meaning? Identify at least two words that seem archaic in usage and meaning. Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells you how a word's meanings have changed through time. How do these different meanings change your paraphrase?

Step 4: Reread

A close reading requires many readings of the same passage. It's often a good idea, in fact, to do an intensive close reading of a passage one day, and then come back to it again with a new look on a different day. Are any key words or phrases repeated? Do they change in meaning or connotation from one instance to another?

Dos and Don'ts

DO give your close reading a structure, with paragraphs that each have a beginning, middle, and end. Move from broad to narrow features, or general to particular. It can help to move sequentially through the passage - but:

DON'T retell the story, or paraphrase the text in your own words without doing analysis of it. Assume that your reader is familiar with the text or passage.

DON'T toss all your ideas into a blender and pour them onto the page. All you'll get is mushy prose, gathering ideas without order.

DO follow the guidelines for clear, precise, and natural language that are the hallmarks of all good writing.

DON'T quote long passages. Single out words in phrases that are typically no longer than 5-6 words.

Can I see some examples?

Sure. These are all from Shakespeare, and were originally compiled by Sarah Hertz (in 2011). Many of the examples come from As You Like It, only because that was the play we were teaching at the time. Sarah used standard reference works like The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory; and some specific ones like Reading Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (Arden).

Four categories

In this list, I group literary terms into four categories, which you can think of as different levels of close reading. Each of these is defined at the beginning of each section below:

1 / Linguistic Terms

These are terms that address language on the surface level, as they appear and are arranged in sequence. They cover vocabulary, grammar, word choice and order, and figures of speech.

alliteration

❧ (From the Latin 'repeating and playing upon the same letter.') A figure of speech in which consonants are repeated. They are often at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables.

Two examples from As You Like It:

That is another simple sin in you, to bring the ewes and the rams together, and to offer to get your living by the copulation of cattle; to be bawd to a bell-wether, and to b etray a she-lamb... (Touchstone, 3.2.75-78)

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running b rooks,

Sermons in s tones, and good in everything. (Duke Senior, 2.1.16-17)

Alliteration is a very old device in English verse - much older than rhyme - and is common in verse generally. It is also used occasionally in prose.

antithesis

❧ (From the Greek 'opposition.') A rhetorical figure in which two ideas are directly opposed. Think of antithesis as tension plus parallelism ( both defined above): opposing ideas presented in a grammatically parallel way.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. ( As You Like It, 5.1.31-32)

For happy wife, a most distressed widow;

For joyful mother, one that wails the name;

For queen, a very caitiff, crown'd with care;

For one being sued to, one that humbly sues;

For one that scorn'd at me, now scorn'd of me. ( Richard III, 4.4.98-102)

assonance

❧ The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in neighbouring words. It is distinct from rhyme in that the final consonants differ although the vowels or diphthongs match: sw eet dr eams, h it or m i ss.

How is assonance different from alliteration? Alliteration refers to repeated consonants, and assonance to repeated vowels. They often occur in proximity to each other.

This example, by John Addington Symonds, combines assonance with alliteration:

[T]he breathing fires

Of heaven in everlasting e ndless gyres

Enfolding and e ncircling orbs of thought. (from The Sonnet)

diction

❧ (1) Narrowly defined, a speaker's (or author's) word choice.

❧ (2) More broadly defined, the general type or character of language used in speech or in a work of literature.

In the second, broader sense, diction is typically divided into two components: vocabulary and syntax ( defined below). Vocabulary encompasses the degree of difficulty, complexity, abstractness, formality, and currency of words used, as well as their etymology or origin (native or foreign, Latinate or Germanic, and so on).

Poetic diction refers specifically to the choice and phrasing of words suitable for poetry.

dissonance

❧ Harshness of sound and/or rhythm, either inadvertent or deliberate. The term is nearly equivalent to cacophony, but tends to denote a lack of harmony between sounds rather than the harshness of a particular sound in isolation.

Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed

Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined. (First and Second Witch, Macbeth, 4.1.1-2)

euphony

❧ (From the Greek 'sweetness of sound.') A pleasing smoothness of sound, perceived by the ease with which the words can be spoken in combination. The pleasurable impression achieved may be due as much or more to the images evoked as to any inherent musicality in the sounds; calling a passage euphonious thus necessarily involves a subjective judgement. Euphony is the opposite of cacophony, or discordant sounds.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep. The more I give to thee

The more I have, for both are infinite. ( Romeo & Juliet , 2.1.175-77)

interruption

❧ The sudden breaking off of an utterance before it is completed, usually in moments of emotion. It seems quite a colloquial and natural feature in speech, but in earlier literature and drama it would be rare. Consider Hamlet's emotional response to his mother's remarriage:

Heaven and earth,

Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him

As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on; and yet, within a month-

Let me not think on't. Frailty, thy name is woman! (1.2.142-46)

onomatopoeia

❧ (From the Greek for 'name-making.') Wording that seems to signify meaning through sound effects. Onomatopoeic words, such as hiss and sizzle, ostensibly imitate the sounds they represent; onomatopoeic passages more broadly suggest an association between sound and meaning.

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms; ( As You Like It, 2.7)

It was a lover and his lass,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,

That o'er the green corn-field did pass

In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,

When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:

Sweet lovers love the spring. ( As You Like It, 5.3.16-21)

parallelism

❧ The arrangement of similarly constructed clauses, sentences, or verse lines in a pairing or other sequence suggesting some correspondence between them.

...no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy... ( As You Like It, 5.2.31-35)

The effect of parallelism is usually a balanced arrangement that repeats the same syntax. When the elements arranged in parallel are in tension with each other, the result is often antithesis ( defined below).

In a more extended sense, parallelism can also means correspondences between a text's larger elements, such as the relation of subplot to main plot.

syntax

❧ The ways in which words and clauses are ordered and connected to form sentences; or the set of grammatical rules governing such word-order. Syntax also refers to the arrangement - the ordering, grouping, and placement - of words within any phrase, clause or sentence.

Syntax is a prime determinant of literary style, and a key difference between poetic language and so-called ordinary language. While English sentences usually have the structure 'subject-verb-object' (e.g. "Romeo killed Tybalt"), poets often distort this syntax through inversion, while even prose writers can use elaborate syntax.

tension

❧ Generally, the balance or equilibrium between opposing elements in a literary work, especially a poem, that provoke our interest in its outcome. Tensions could include: good/evil; nature/culture; or feminine/masculine. Tension is essential to conflicts or binary oppositions like abstract/concrete, general/particular, and structure/texture. In Tension in Poetry (1938), Allen Tate defines tension as the relationship between two types of meaning: "extension" (concrete, denotative meaning) and "intention" (abstract, metaphorical meaning).

Dramatic tension and inner struggle are central to the plot in Hamlet:

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right! (1.5.189-90)

zeugma

❧ (From the Greek for 'yoking together.') The use of one word - usually a verb - that governs or refers to two or more other words in the same clause or sentence. You can recognize a zeugma by the absence of words that, in ordinary discourse, you would expect to (re)appear.

Bold verbs are zeugmatic in these two examples:

And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things. (William Wordsworth, "Lucy")

Her beauty pierced mine eye, her speech mine woeful heart,

Her presence all the powers of my discourse. (George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie)

2 / Semantic Terms

These are terms that involve the meanings and the ideas that are associated with words.

connotation

❧ The suggestion or implication of a word or phrase, beyond its denotation or literal meaning. A good example is the difference between 'house' and 'home': a 'house' is a physical structure, more or less; whereas the connotative meaning of 'home' relates to the close relationships among its inhabitants. Authors choose words with connotations that raise their desired emotional and cultural associations.

denotation

❧ The literal meaning of a word or phrase. When reading recent or contemporary texts, you'll know the meaning of most words and only look up specialized vocabulary (e.g 'moorish' or 'espoused') - although if you look up words you think you understand, you often find secondary meanings you didn't know about.

But in historical texts (i.e. written 5 or more decades ago), you'll encounter words whose meanings have shifted over time (e.g. 'rude' or 'naked'), and words that are no longer in use (e.g. 'hies' or 'livery'). That's when you need the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives you the historical denotations of words.

The other category of difficult words is idioms, or idiomatic expressions. These are ways of using words to convey more than their literal or grammatical meaning, and they are particular to time and place. Consider the many different ways of answering "thank you": "no problem," "you're welcome," "sure thing," "no worries," "don't mention it," "je vous en prie." Each is particular to the customs of its culture, language, nationality, and time; and none means its literal meaning. Someday our own expressions will be surpassed by new expressions, and we'll sound a tad ancient ourselves. (God forfend!)

Often when you see an idiom in a historical text, though, you don't recognize it because we don't use it in everyday speech: "in my mind's eye," "in the main," "laugh to scorn," "thick and fast," "the quick and the dead." The only way to recognize and translate these into their modern-English equivalents is to read a lot of historical texts, to stay curious about their idioms, and to look up the ones that seem unfamiliar in - where else? - the OED.

double entendre

❧ French for 'double meaning', adopted in English to denote a pun in which a word or phrase has a second, usually sexual, meaning, as in Elizabethan uses of the verb 'lie' referring both to death and to orgasm.

Come, where is this young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth? ( As You Like It, 1.2.191-92)

"Lie" = "to fall to the ground." Echoing biblical descriptions of the body's return to the earth at death and punning on "lie with" as slang for "have sexual relations with."

metaphor

❧ (From the Greek 'carrying from one place to another.') A figure of speech in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two.

The use of metaphor to combine ideas is a major feature of poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors.

In As You Like It, Orlando compares trees to books, and tree bark to pages of the books:

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,

And in their barks my thoughts I'll character. (3.2.5-6)

Metaphors are more compressed versions of similes, and are sometimes more complex for us to understand. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as 'dead' metaphors, like the branch of an organization or the leg of a table. But Shakespeare often takes common, conventional, or 'dead' metaphors and gives them a new twist or elaboration. So Hamlet thinks about the implication of the common image of death as sleep:

To die-to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ...

Must give us pause. ( Hamlet, 3.1.64-68)

A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous, usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing.

paradox

❧ (From the Greek 'beside/beyond opinion.') Originally a paradox was merely a view that contradicted accepted opinion. By about the middle of the 16th century, the word had acquired its now-commonly accepted meaning: an apparently self-contradictory, even absurd statement which, on closer inspection, is found to contain a truth reconciling the conflicting opposites. Two examples from As You Like It:

Sweetest nut hath sourest rind. (Touchstone, 3.2.106)

I do desire we may be better strangers. (Orlando, 3.2.251)

Some paradoxes cannot be resolved into truths, remaining flatly self-contradictory, e.g. "Everything I say is a lie."

A paradox formed by the juxtaposition of two opposite or contradictory words (rather than by a complete statement) is an oxymoron. Consider Romeo's lament in Romeo and Juliet, a long series of oxymorons:

O brawling love! O loving hate! ...

O any thing, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! (1.1.176-81)

personification

❧ A figure of speech or trope, like metaphor, by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line: "Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows."

In drama, the term is sometimes applied to the impersonation of non-human things and ideas by human actors.

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal and who he stands still withal. ( As You Like It, 3.2.299-302)

Personification, known in Greek as prosopopoeia, is common in everyday speech: e.g. "time flies" or "chair legs." It is common in most ages of poetry, particularly in the 18th century. It has a special function as the basis of allegory.

A pathetic fallacy is a limited form of personification, in which human traits and emotions are attributed to inanimate nature: "the sea was angry that day." Compared to personification in general, the pathetic fallacy is narrower in scope, since it applies only to nature rather than anything non-human, and its 'humanizing' characterization is typically less sustained.

pun

❧ A figure of speech which involves a play-on-words exploiting a similarity in spelling and/or pronunciation between words with different meanings. Alternatively, a pun may employ one word that has multiple meanings.

One of the earliest types of wordplay, the pun is a fairly universal form of humour. Puns are often intended humorously, but not always.

A pun form known as asteismus involves a reply to earlier words used in a different sense. This example occurs in Cymbeline(II, i):

CLOTEN: Would he had been one of my rank!

LORD: To have smell'd like a fool.

Rosalind uses the same joke with Touchstone in As You Like It (1.2). Touchstone is a wellspring of puns:

For my part, I had rather bear with you than bear you. Yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse. (2.4.10-12)

Whereas Hamlet is not quite so funny:

A little more than kin and less than kind. ( Hamlet, 1.2.65)

repetition

❧ An essential unifying element in nearly all poetry and much prose. It may consist of sounds, particular syllables and words, phrases, stanzas, metrical patterns, ideas, allusions and shapes. Thus refrain, assonance, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia are frequent in repetition. One example from As You Like It is in the definition of 'line length' below; this is the other:

O, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all hooping! (Celia, 3.2.186-88)

simile

❧ A figure of speech (more specifically a trope) that compares two distinct things by using words such as like or as to link them together. Simile is distinguished from metaphor, another trope that associates two distinct things, but without the use of a connective word. To say "That child is like a cyclone" is to use a simile, whereas to say "That child is a cyclone" is to use a metaphor. In either case, the cyclone is the vehicle, the image used to represent the child, which is the tenor, or subject of the figure.

Two examples from As You Like It:

I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs. (Jaques, 2.5.10-11)

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. (Jaques, 2.7.146-48)

An epic, or Homeric, simile is an extended and elaborate simile in which the vehicle is described at such length that it nearly obscures the tenor.

3 / Structural Terms

These terms involve relationships between a text's form and its themes or ideas.

caesura

❧ A break or pause in a line of poetry, dictated by the natural rhythm of the language and/or enforced by punctuation. A line may have more than one caesura, or none at all. If near the beginning of the line, it is called the initial caesura; near the middle, medial; near the end, terminal. The commonest is the medial.

To be, or not to be: that is the question: ( Hamlet, 3.1.58)

enjambment

❧ (French for 'striding over.') A sentence or statement that spans more than one verse line. Lines exhibiting enjambment do not end with grammatical breaks, and their sense is incomplete without the following line(s). Such lines are sometimes called run-on lines to distinguish them from end-stopped lines. The meaning of an end-stopped line, in which a grammatical pause marked by punctuation and the physical end of the line coincide, is complete in itself. The following lines, from The Winter's Tale, are enjambed:

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex

Commonly are; the want of which vain dew

Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have

That honourable grief lodged here which burns

Worse than tears drown. (Hermione, 2.1.110-14)

Whereas, in contrast, these lines from Romeo & Juliet are all end-stopped:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.

The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.

Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished. (Prince, 5.3.304-07)

line length

❧ The number of syllables -- not words -- in a line of poetry. In Shakespeare's verse the convention is ten syllables per line, but different passages (e.g. songs) will have shorter or longer lines. When one or more lines are significantly different in length to those around it/them, Shakespeare is often suggesting something about the meaning of the line(s), or the character speaking them.

If thou rememberest not the slightest folly

That ever love did make thee run into,

Thou hast not loved;

Or if thou hast not sat as I do now,

Wearing thy hearer in thy mistress' praise,

Thou hast not loved;

Or if thou hast not broke from company

Abruptly, as my passion now makes me,

Thou hast not loved. ( As You Like It, 2.4)

rhyme

❧ The formalized consonance of syllables, represented in an abstract notation or 'scheme': e.g. AA, BB, CC for couplets. Blank verse has no rhyme scheme; that is the meaning of 'blank.'

Master, go on; and I will follow thee

To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty.

From seventeen years till now almost four-score

Here lived I, but now live here no more.

At seventeen years many their fortunes seek,

But at fourscore it is too late a week;

Yet fortune cannot recompense me better

Than to die well and not my master's debtor. ( As You Like It, 2.3)

stanza

❧ A group of lines in poetry, set off by whitespace before and after. As the units into which poets divide poems, stanzas are similar to paragraphs in prose - but different insofar as they are usually of a uniform length, typically between 4 and 12 lines. Poets may repeat words, lines (as refrains), and more often rhyme schemes between stanzas (e.g. ABABBCC).

Sonnets are occasionally divided into two or more stanzas denoting their rhyme scheme (e.g. octave and sestet, quatrains and couplet).

structure & distinct phases

❧ These non-technical terms refer to the progression of the text's meaning, or the stages through which a text moves. Where are its shifts of subject, mood, story, theme, tone, verb tenses? Is there a beginning, middle, and end to what the text describes or recounts? Where do those transitions happen?

For shorter texts like lyrical poems, consider sentences or clauses and their relationships. Does one contradict or reply to another? Is the poem split into stanzas? How might you group some stanzas together, and divide them from others? Don't look at layout alone, but how it relates to what's happening at each stage.

For longer texts like stories, plays, and narrative poems, look for internal divisions (e.g. chapters, scenes, acts). But look also within those divisions, to pivotal moments (e.g. revelations or discoveries) that shift the story. Structure also obtains in non-fictional prose. If the text is an argument, for example, does it make a claim at the beginning and then back it up with evidence? Or use evidence/examples to establish a claim?

title & epigraphs

❧ A text's title might be useful when you are interpreting its meaning, only if you're sure that it hasn't been added or changed by someone other than the author, like a modern editor. (For instance, many of the titles of Shakespeare's plays are abbreviated versions of the titles under which they were first performed or printed.) Poems published in the past few centuries have titles provided either by the author or by their acquaintances and publishers, so you need to be certain which category your title is in before you make too much of it.

Poem titles can be illuminating when they address features that direct and frame your interpretation - as in the case of William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," originally known by the more descriptive title "The Leech Gatherer.""

Epigraphs are short quotations that precede texts; they often represent ideas that inspired or otherwise influenced the text. Normally in a close reading you investigate an epigraph's source and briefly address its influence alongside other sources or contexts.

Novels or plays often print epigraphs on separate pages like title pages, or they appear at divisions like chapter-breaks. Poems print them just before the first line.

4 / Cultural Terms

These terms relate to a text's connections with things outside of its boundaries, like references to places or to other texts, mythology, or other external elements. To identify them, you need to recognize and understand such externalities.

allegory

❧ (From the Greek allēgoria, 'speaking otherwise.') A story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning.

The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape - as in public statues of Liberty or Justice.

In written narrative, allegory involves a sustained, continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale.

An allegory may be conceived as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system. Many critics consider the allegory to be an extended metaphor and, conversely, consider metaphors - which involve saying one thing but meaning another - to be ' verbal allegories'. Famous examples are John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Milton's Paradise Lost.

In As You Like It, Oliver tells the story of his rescue by Orlando (4.3) in supposedly factual terms, or as an event that really happened. But it contains so many symbols (the ancient oak, the "green and gilded snake," the lioness) that it could be construed as an allegory - specifically, as a quasi-Biblical story of good defeating evil, and mankind overpowering nature.

allusion

❧ Usually an implicit reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event. It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer.

An allusion enriches the text by association with some established tradition. The writer tends to assume that the audience is able to 'pick up' the reference.

There are many allusions in As You Like It:

There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are coming to the ark.* (Jaques, 5.4.35-36)

[*Alluding to a biblical account in Genesis 7:2 in which pairs of male and female animals shelter on Noah's ark to escape the flood that covers the earth.]

They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.* (Charles, 1.1.111-13)

[*Alluding to the classical myth of an earlier world of perpetual spring, abundance, and ease from which humankind had degenerated (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1). This golden world was often identified with a pastoral life.]

apostrophe

❧ (From the Greek 'turning away.') A figure of speech in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead or absent person, is addressed as if present and capable of understanding.

Blow, blow, thou winter wind!

Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude. ( As You Like It, 2.7.175-77)

O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black!

O night, which ever art when day is not!

O night, O night, alack, alack, alack... ( A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.168-70)

In classical rhetoric, the term could also denote a speaker's turning to address a particular member or section of the audience. The apostrophe is one of the conventions appropriate to the ode and to the elegy. The poet's invocation of a muse in epic poetry is a particular form of apostrophe.

implied reader / audience

❧ The person(s) to whom a text is addressed; the intended audience of a speech. These qualities of a text often have a direct influence on verbal style. For instance, when Touchstone confronts William in As You Like It 5.1, he uses vocabulary to intimidate him, and to impress Audrey with his learning. Another example from the same play is Phoebe's declaration of love to 'Ganymede,' in the letter that Silvius carries:

He that brings this love to thee

Little knows this love in me; (4.3)

irony

❧ (From the Greek 'dissimulation.') A subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance.

At its simplest, as in verbal irony, it involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant, as in its crude form, sarcasm. Cross-dressing provides ample opportunity for ironic statements:

I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal. (Rosalind in As You Like It, 3.2.335-38)

The more sustained structural irony in literature involves the use of a naïve or deluded hero or unreliable narrator, whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers; literary irony thus flatters its readers' intelligence at the expense of a character (or fictional narrator).

A similar sense of detached superiority is achieved by dramatic irony, in which the audience knows more about the character's situation than the character does, foreseeing an outcome contrary to the character's expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply different sense to some of the character's own statements; in tragedies, this is called tragic irony.

The term cosmic irony is sometimes used to denote a view of people as the dupes of a cruelly mocking fate.

mood

❧ Defined by some critics as synonymous with atmosphere, by others as synonymous with tone, and by still others as synonymous with both. Mood is probably closer to atmosphere than to tone, but, as a general term, it can be correctly applied to either. One could say that an author creates a somber mood, thereby using it as a synonym for atmosphere; one could also say than an author's mood is somber, thereby using it as a synonym for tone. Shakespeare uses dialogue to establish mood and setting in Hamlet:

Tis bitter cold,

And I am sick at heart. (Francisco, 1.1.6-7)

perspective/point of view

❧ The position or vantage-point from which the events of a text seem to be observed and presented to us.

The chief distinction usually made between points of view is that between third-person narratives and first-person narratives.

A third-person narrator may be omniscient, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story's events from outside or 'above' them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or a small group of characters, this method being known as 'limited point of view'. A first-person narrator's point of view is normally restricted to their partial knowledge and experience, and therefore will not give us access to other characters' hidden thoughts.

Many modern authors also use multiple points of view, in which readers are shown events from the positions of multiple characters.

symbol

❧ (From the Greek verb symballein, 'to throw together' and its noun symbolon, 'mark', 'emblem', 'token' or 'sign'). An object, animate or inanimate, which represents or 'stands for' something else.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember. And there is pansies; that's for thoughts.* (Ophelia, Hamlet, 4.5.173-74)

[*Ophelia, recalling each flower's symbolic meaning, distributes them to Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius.]

Now Hercules be thy speed,* young man! (Rosalind, As You Like It, 1.2.201)

[*may Hercules bring you luck. Hercules' name is synonymous with physical strength. This is also an allusion to the classical hero.]

A symbol differs from an allegorical sign in that it has a real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary. It can be an action or a gesture, and in literature it is used to combine an image with a concept (words themselves are a kind of symbol).

tone

❧ The attitude of an author or speaker toward a text's readers, audiences, or subjects. An author's tone may be serious, playful, mocking, and so forth.

Tone is sometimes equated with voice, particularly in the sense of a creative authorial voice that pervades and underlies literary work. It is often used to mean 'tone of voice,' an indeterminate quality of language through which writers (and us in our daily conversations) reveal a range of attitudes towards everything from the subject at hand to those being addressed.

Hamlet's disregard for the body of Polonius is cheeky, flippant, and morbid:

But indeed, if you find him not this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby ( Hamlet, 4.3.34-36).

Although the terms tone and atmosphere may both be equated with mood, their meanings differ. Unlike tone, which refers to the author's attitude, atmosphere refers to the general feeling created for the reader or audience by a work at a given point.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a general introduction to close reading, and a specific set of principles and terms for my own students. This guide to close reading is a subset of my broader guide to Effective Critical Writing. ( It is indebted to similar guides by Robert Matz and John Lye, and to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th edition, ed.

# data[].attributes.body
The little man is an omen for terrible events that are going to take place. Bright red hair, cold and wet hands to the touch.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to content

500 Gitksan Ave. Haisla PO Box 1101 Kitamaat Village, BC V0T 2B0 | 250.639.9361 | Regular office hours, 8 am to 4 pm, closed 12-1pm for lunch

COMMUNITY

Haisla & Our History

Language & Culture

Kitamaat Village

Comprehensive Community Plan

Haisla Community School

Land Use Plan

COUNCIL

About the Council

Government Services

Economic Development

Overview

Kitimat Advantage

Enquiries

Membership Law

HEALTH

MEMBER SERVICES

Youth Sports Fund

Indian Day School Settlement

Employment & Training Services

Haisla Minors LNG Trust

Member Login

NEWS

dutilh

CORONAVIRUS

CAREERS

CONTACT & HOURS

VIDEO

CALENDAR

Kitamaat Village admin 2017-09-27T15:36:14-09:00

Kitamaat Village

The home community of the Haisla people is Kitamaat Village, located at the head of the Douglas Channel on British Columbia’s North Coast. Kitamaat Village is home to 700 of the 1700 Haisla members, and is located 10 kilometres from Kitimat and 45 kilometres from the Terrace Airport.

The word “Kitamaat” comes from the Tsimshian people, who originate from the Prince Rupert and Metlakatla areas. While “Kitamaat” means ‘people of the snow’ in Tsimshian, the Haisla name for Kitamaat Village is “Tsee-Motsa”, meaning Snag Beach.

Our people have traditionally occupied and used just over 4 million acres of land and waterways. Starting in 1890, the Canadian Federal Government set aside 1640 acres for the Haisla as reserve land. Our territory is one of the wettest regions in B.C., making for forests thick with Sitka Spruce, Western Hemlock, Red Cedar trees which tower over salmon berry, dogwood, and willows. Bears, wolves, deer, foxes, and wolverines are just some of the mammals that live in these forests and feed on our area’s rich biodiversity.

Our territory’s resources have sustained us for generations, providing us with food, shelter, and livelihood. We have worked hard to harvest food, build our villages, and develop the resources we need to survive. The land is connected to our past, our culture, and now, our future.

Today, we seek economic opportunities that respect the waters and wildlife that make our home such a special place.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kitamaat Village The home community of the Haisla people is Kitamaat Village, located at the head of the Douglas Channel on British Columbia's North Coast. Kitamaat Village is home to 700 of the 1700 Haisla members, and is located 10 kilometres from Kitimat and 45 kilometres from the Terrace Airport.

# data[].attributes.body
Frank Hodgins Porfessor of English at the University of Illinois

Published two books and many articles

Earned an A.B. in English and History at Brown University

Has a Ph.D. in English at Yale University

https://robertdaleparker.com/about/

# data[].attributes.headline
Treat women with respect and take them seriously 

# data[].attributes.subject
Treat women with respect and take them seriously 

# data[].attributes.body
Definition of Feminism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This website is aimed at the general reader. It contains information on her books, her publishers, how to contact the Estate as well as news about forthcoming reissues, other books and links to interviews and articles.

# data[].attributes.body
Monkey Beach follows Lisamarie Hill on a quest to find her younger brother Jimmy, who is lost at sea. The narrative alternates between Lisa’s journey to Monkey Beach to find Jimmy, and her reminiscences of growing up in the village of Kitimaat, British Columbia.

# data[].attributes.headline
Effective Cirtical Writing: An Introduction

# data[].attributes.subject
Effective Cirtical Writing: An Introduction

# data[].attributes.body
Critical thinking develops beneath the surface of things, turning them into objects of study, interpretation, and judgement. The aim of critical writing is to express these thoughts.

https://ullyot.ucalgaryblogs.ca/teaching/ecw/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
   the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
   talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
   shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm-and your memory in my head three years after-
   And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud-wept, realizing
   how we suffer-
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
   prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-
   swers-and my own imagination of a withered leaf-at dawn-
Dreaming back thru life, Your time-and mine accelerating toward Apoca-
   lypse,
the final moment-the flower burning in the Day-and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
   Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed-
like a poem in the dark-escaped back to Oblivion-
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,
   trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-
   ping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all-longing or inevitability?-while it
   lasts, a Vision-anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,
   Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-
   dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant-and
   the sky above-an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to-as I walk toward the Lower East Side
   -where you walked 50 years ago, little girl-from Russia, eating the
   first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?-toward
   Newark-
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice
   cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards-
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,
   and learning to be mad, in a dream-what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window-and the great Key lays its head of light
   on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the
   sidewalk-in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward
   the Yiddish Theater-and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now-Strange to have moved
   thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on
   the street, fire escapes old as you
-Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me-
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe-and I guess that dies with
   us-enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever
   every time-
That's good!  That leaves it open for no regret-no fear radiators, lacklove,
   torture even toothache in the end-
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul-and the lamb, the soul,
   in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair
   and teeth-and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,
   braintricked Implacability.
Ai! ai!  we do worse! We are in a fix!  And you're out, Death let you out,
   Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with
   God, done with the path thru it-Done with yourself at last-Pure
   -Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all-before the
   world-
There, rest.  No more suffering for you.  I know where you've gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more
   fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,
   loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands-
No more of sister Elanor,-she gone before you-we kept it secret you
   killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you-an arthritic heart
   -But Death's killed you both-No matter-
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and
   weeks-forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-
   ity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar
   -by standing room with Elanor & Max-watching also the Capital
   ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts
   pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and
   laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave-lucky to
   have husbands later-
You made it-I came too-Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and
   will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer-or kill
   -later perhaps-soon he will think-)
And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now
   --tho not you
I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came
   first--to you--and were you prepared?
To go where?  In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the
   Void?  Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream?  Adonoi at last, with
   you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull
   in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon-Deaths-
   head with Halo?  can you believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,
   than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have-what you had-that so pitiful-yet Tri-
   umph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower-fed to the
   ground-but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,
   shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth
   wrapped, sore-freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the
   knife-lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy-even in the Spring-strange ghost
   thought some-Death-Sharp icicle in his hand-crowned with old
   roses-a dog for his eyes-cock of a sweatshop-heart of electric
   irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out-clocks, bodies, consciousness,
   shoes, breasts-begotten sons-your Communism-'Paranoia' into
   hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later.  You of
   stroke.  Asleep?  within a year, the two of you, sisters in death.  Is
   Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over
   midnight Accountings, not sure.  His life passes-as he sees-and
   what does he doubt now?  Still dream of making money, or that might
   have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-
   mortality, Naomi?
I'll see him soon.  Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't
   when you had a mouth.
Forever.  And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses
   -headed to the End.
They know the way-These Steeds-run faster than we think-it's our own
   life they cross-and take with them.

   Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-
ried dreamed, mortal changed-Ass and face done with murder.
   In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
   Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,
Father in death.  Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm
hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
   Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity-
   Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some
of my Time, now given to Nothing-to praise Thee-But Death
   This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-
derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping
-page beyond Psalm-Last change of mine and Naomi-to God's perfect
Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!

II
   Over and over-refrain-of the Hospitals-still haven't written your
history-leave it abstract-a few images
   run thru the mind-like the saxophone chorus of houses and years-
remembrance of electrical shocks.
   By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your
nervousness-you were fat-your next move-
   By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you-
once and for all-when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my
opinion of the cosmos, I was lost-
   By my later burden-vow to illuminate mankind-this is release of
particulars-(mad as you)-(sanity a trick of agreement)-
   But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and
spied a mystical assassin from Newark,
   So phoned the Doctor-'OK go way for a rest'-so I put on my coat
and walked you downstreet-On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,
unaccountably-'Where you goin Lady to Death'? I shuddered-
   and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask
against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma-
   And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of
the gang?  You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on-to New
York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound-

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956 Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

# data[].attributes.body
1. adj.
Of, pertaining to, or concerned with the Goths or their language

2. Formerly used in extended sense, now expresses

3. a.
Belonging to, or characteristic of, the Middle Ages; medieval, 'romantic', as opposed to classical. In early use chiefly with reprobation: Belonging to the 'dark ages'

3. b.
A term for the style of architecture prevalent in Western Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, of which the chief characteristic is the pointed arch. Applied also to buildings, architectural details and ornamentation.