Documents tagged with Reader response

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Getting Noticed

In his poetry, Matthew Arnold deals with abandonment in a way which struck me, at least, as very un-Victorian. His speakers rage against the perpetrators; the fault is with them, not with the spea...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 09 / 22 / 2009
  • 136 reads
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7 p.
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Coherents Holes

Coherent Holes explores the impermanence of meaning and endless suggestiveness in literary works. The short story is followed by an afterword by Richard Sewall, where he clarifies its multiple proc...
  • cecilq published this 09 / 17 / 2009
  • 91 reads
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17 p.
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Jo's March: Becoming Mother Bhaer (March 2002; Word)

First paragraph: New Historicism has profitably helped literary critics, amongst other things, to gauge the extent to which “great” authors’ works share, or even are determined by, the ideas and...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 18 / 2008
  • 1,022 reads
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12 p.
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Marcher's Merger: Avoiding Catastrophe in Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle"

First paragraph: At the end of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” John Marcher decides that he has done nothing with his life—but the truth is that he had once accomplished something rathe...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 11 / 2008
  • 1,822 reads
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9 p.
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The Visible Invisible Man

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the invisible man repeatedly draws our attention to how he captures the attention of discerning individuals. Supposedly, this is not the sort of attention he crav...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 07 / 2008
  • 1,888 reads
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8 p.
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Grabbing Hold, for Departure's Sake (April 2006; Word)

On Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map. One of my favourites from the 2006 batch. Details how Max Vigne, and many of us, loosen our attachments to those we've depended on, without guilt. Prof w...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 07 / 2008
  • 513 reads
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6 p.
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Useful Object (April 2005; Word)

First paragraph: Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, is constantly grumbling about the daily chores she performs for a mother she is rarely shown not battling with. ...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 502 reads
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8 p.
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Sinister Advances and Sweet Returns: Seduction and Restoration in John Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Ur

John Keats tells his readers the story, in “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” of a poet’s (and maybe his own) attempt to “ravish” an urn—that is, to demonstrate powerfully the superior status of the spoken wo...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 607 reads
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9 p.
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Privileging Marlow, in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

Johanna Smith, in “‘Too Beautiful Altogether’: Ideologies of Gender and Empire in Heart of Darkness,” argues that Marlow is attempting to revitalize what had become an old conception of separate s...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 1,311 reads
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43 p.
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Pleasure Into Pain, Pain Into Pleasure

Paragraph near beginning: It is remarkable that from the very beginning of Frankenstein there are clear signs that Shelley is not simply about to offer us a moral tale, but rather is “trying on”...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 1,381 reads
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8 p.
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Mi Casa, Su Casa (August 2004; Word)

Looks at Tarantino's Pulp Fiction as if it were a young suburbanite man's daydream, a daydream in which they imagine themselves in the company of their heroes, and in which they configure means by ...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 301 reads
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9 p.
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Matricide in the City

Second paper I've written on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. About how Ralph Ellison makes use of the moderns' preferred ways of imagining the city to avenge himself in his novelistic universe upon...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 378 reads
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3 p.
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Introductions and Initiations

First paragraph: Phyllis Webb’s “To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide” is a deceptive poem. Rather than being a poem dedicated to those who have already considered suicide, it is, instea...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 131 reads
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9 p.
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Haunting Raveloe: How George Eliot, in Silas Marner, Exorcizes Her Past (June 2002; Word)

first paragraph: In George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), the men at the Rainbow debate over whether there is a ghost at the Warren stables. Further, they weigh in on whether a ghost, even if it ...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 826 reads
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6 p.
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Greedy for Your Hurt (March 2003; Word)

One of the hardest things we can ever admit to ourselves is that the source of our fears of death originates in our parents’ behavior towards us as children. We depend on them so much for love and...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 396 reads
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24 p.
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Having your Beef-Cake, and Leaving him too (previously title: Free, Live Free) (Oct. 2001; Word)

Aphra Behn’s desire for intimacy and sex with an admiring (and admirable) young man is the foremost inspiration for her creating “The Disappointment” and Oroonoko. Claims that either work is prima...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 554 reads
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14 p.
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Draining the Amazon's Swamp (March 2002; Word)

First paragraph: Elizabeth Gaskell, in her “Our Society at Cranford ,” creates for herself a means of revisiting the maternal matrix from which she emerged--the lengthy gestational period with h...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 301 reads
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8 p.
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Our Search for a Way of Being in Blade Runner's City World (Word)

First paragraph: Ridley Scott has recently told us that Decker, from Blade Runner, is a replicant. There are several reasons why this may amount to a disservice to fans of the film. My concern...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 603 reads
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3 p.
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Alexander the Large (March 2003; Word)

First paragraph: When Alex begins his night-time adventure, he tells us that, “[y]ou were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God” (5). In this passage, Alex shows just the sort of ...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 882 reads
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8 p.
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Break on Through to the Other Side?: The Reader's Encounter with Postmodernism (

First paragraph: When Phyllis Webb writes in “Breaking,” “what are we whole or beautiful or good for but to be absolutely broken,” for some this thought seems a highly paradoxical but revelatory...
  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston published this 07 / 04 / 2008
  • 556 reads
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