British Literature final

Who wrote '“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”

Alan Sillitoe

Who wrote “Colonization in Reverse”

Louise Bennett

Who wrote Decolonizing the Mind

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Who wrote The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

Who wrote “digging” and “punishment”

Seamus Heaney

Imaginary Homelands

Salaman Rushdie

Who wrote “The Stowaway”

Julian Barnes

“Angry Young Men”

1950’s British Literature ‘movement’ that focused on working-class, strongly masculine heroes and their hostility towards social norms and institutions

multiple Englishes

• the idea that there is not simply one correct version of English and any other versions are necessarily “incorrect” or “improper”.

• instead there are multiple englishes spoken in different contexts that are equally valid

• this notion is also expressed by the term “world Englishes”, which puts more emphasis on the various versions of English that emerge in different places around the world

colonialism

political and/or economic control of a territory and the peoples therein by a foreign power

anti colonialism

broadly, the effort to dismantle colonialism

postcolonialism

• refers to a movement in literature in which writers respond to and critique the legacies and aftereffects of colonialism in their writing

• anticolonial literature from earlier in the 20th century is sometimes folded in under the rubric of postcolonialism

British Nationality Act

• allows all subjects of British Empire to live and work in U.K. without a visa

• ship Empire Windrush arrives in England carrying immigrants from the Caribbean

Windrush Generation

Immigrants arriving from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971 would come to be known as the Windrush Generation

dramatic monologue

• a poem that reveals ‘a soul in action’ through the speech of one character in a dramatic situation

• the character is speaking to an indefinable but silent listener at a dramatic moment in speaker’s life

• the clear circumstances surrounding

suez crisis

• The Suez Crisis was a geopolitical crisis that began in July, 1956

• July, 1956 - Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser announced nationalization of Suez Canal, which upset British and French

• Diplomatic solutions were rejected by Nasser

• British and French plotted military operations

• October 29, 1956 - Egypt was invaded by Israel

• November 5-6, 1956 - Britain and France invaded Egypt

• The actions of Britain and France were condemned by the global community, including the United States, which was newly ascendant on the world stage

english country house

• Term refers to manor houses on large estates

• Date back to medieval estates of aristocrats

• More began to be built in Elizabethan times (linked to imperialism)

• Went into decline in 20th c.

• Symbol for an ideal of Englishness or the English past; a conservative symbol which idealizes the status quo.

• Genre associations

unreliable narrator

one whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation of the matters her or she narrates do not coincide with the opinions and norms implied by the author, which the author expects the alert reader to share

“The Troubles”

• Sectarian violence in Northern Ireland between the Protestant, British-affiliated community and the Catholic, Irish-affiliated community that began in the late 1960s and and ended with theGood Friday Agreement of 1998

postmodernism

• A set of mid-twentieth to late-twentieth/early twenty-first-century philosophical ideas

• A set of mid-twentieth to late-twentieth/early twenty-first century practices/trends in the arts

Different scholars have different ideas about this, but postmodernism is generally viewed as having arisen in British/Irish literature in the 1950s and 60s. (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot [1953])

Continental philosophers/theorists Jacques Derrida andJean-François Lyotard published influential books that helped to define or came to be associated with postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s.

End of postmodernism: ???

Grand narrative

All-encompassing narratives that people use to explain/make sense of history (what we might call capital-H History)/the world

pastiche

A work that imitates the style of an earlier work or combines various styles together in one work.

self-reflexivity

work of art or literature drawing attention to itself as a work of art or literature.

modernism

Umbrella term for a series of literary and artistic sub-movements and texts (often very distinct from one another) that responded to modernization and modernity.

point of view

the vantage point from which an author presents a story

third person POV

narrator is NOT a character; talks about characters as “he", “she”, or “they”

Third person omniscient

Narrator knows everything

third person limited

narrator is able to see into the mind of one character, and limited to what that character knows, feels, and does

first person POV

a character directly relates events/experiences that happened to them or events they witnessed. refers to self with pronoun

• always limited

self-reflexivity

work of art or literature drawing attention to itself as a work of art or literature.

bog poems

represent his human protest against violence, embedded in the cruel images of ritual killing, and they establish his name as a laureate of peace.

who is the character from “The loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”

Smith

Who are the important characters of The Remains of the Day

• Stevens

• Miss Kenton

• Lord Darlington

• Mr. Faraday

what are the dates of the British Nationality Act

1948-1971

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from the short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” by Alan Sillitoe

• A first-person narrative voice filled with resentment, defiance, or cynicism.

• Themes like institutional control (especially the borstal system), individual freedom, and class struggle.

• Running or training for a race

• A borstal or Juvenile detention center

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from the poem “Colonization in Reverse” by Louise Bennett

• Jamaican Patois/Dialect

• Migration of Jamaicans to England

• tone of humor, national pride, and a bit of mischief

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from an excerpt of Decolonizing the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

• How colonial powers imposed their language on African people,

• The psychological and cultural effects of abandoning indigenous languages,

• The connection between language and identity, or

• The need to write in African languages as a political act

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from an excerpt of Imaginary Homelands by Salaman Rushdie

• Diaspora and exile

• Memory and nostalgia

• The fractured identity of immigrants

• The writer’s relationship with home, language, or nation

• Post-colonialism and hybridity

• Broken mirrors or shattered images to describe how memory and identity work across time and distance.

• India, Pakistan, England

• Writing in English as a postcolonial subject

• Cultural pluralism or hybrid identity

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

• First-person, highly self-controlled

• Polished, formal, and sometimes overly wordy or indirect

• Emotionally repressed, especially when discussing feelings or relationships

• Mr. Collins level awkward (ifykyk)

• “one”

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from the poem “Digging” by Seamus Heaney

• The speaker’s father and grandfather, who were farmers cutting turf or digging potatoes in Ireland.

• The contrast between physical labor (digging) and the speaker’s own work as a writer/poet.

• The speaker’s respect for tradition but also his desire to forge his own path — using a pen instead of a spade.

• Digging, turf-cutting, planting, potatoes

• Descriptions of soil, gravel, roots

• Sounds like "a clean rasping sound" and "the squelch and slap"

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from the poem “Punishment” by Seamus Heaney

• A 2,000-year-old bog body (a preserved young woman) discovered in northern Europe.

• The woman is believed to have been punished for adultery.

• Heaney draws a parallel between her punishment and modern sectarian violence in Ireland — especially the treatment of women during the Troubles.

• An ancient, naked, or buried woman,

• References to bogs, nooses, or punishment,

• Or Irish history and shame

how can you tell that a passage or lines are from an excerpt of “The Stowaway” by Julian Barnes

• Is nonhuman (but intelligent and sarcastic) he is literally a wood worm

• Seems to challenge the biblical version of events,

• Claims to be a witness to history that humans have distorted,

• Noah’s ark