English 021 Creative Reading

Weblog - Entries for aahearn
Hunger Artists
E3 Haroun Alice
by aahearn

Fish in Through the Looking Glass and Haroun and the Sea of Stories Oysters, glumfish, sharks, pomfrets, and Plentimaws: fish surface repeatedly in Through the Looking-Glass and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. These aquatic creatures are one of the few constants between the two worlds Alice and Haroun traverse....
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May 12, 2005, 02:51 PM
Narration as Transaction
8 Carroll
by aahearn

The poem in Chapter 8 is about two sorts of transactions: the business transactions that the aged man engages in and the transaction of language between the White Knight and the old man. For a poem about commercial transactions, the title “Ways and Means” is fitting because it refers to...
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May 04, 2005, 10:45 PM
A Plant's Pun
7 Carroll
by aahearn

When Alice questions why the flowers she meets in the Looking Glass garden are able to talk, the Tiger-lily replies, “In most gardens, they make the beds too soft – so that the flowers are always asleep” (159). This clever pun on the term “flowerbed" contributes to the anthropomorphic characterization...
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April 26, 2005, 08:52 PM
A Question of Happiness
6 Rushdie
by aahearn

The ending of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is permeated with questions posed by Haroun, such as, “Am I in trouble or not?” (199); did I really travel to Kahani or was it all a dream?; “Was this the Walrus’s work, too?” (210); “What is there to celebrate?” (209)....
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April 21, 2005, 02:12 PM
Stabbed with "Faery Needles"
E2 Possession
by aahearn

A Dutch microscopist who investigated the corneas of gnats and the ovaries of bees seems a strange figure to surface in the center of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte’s love affair in Possession. Yet Jan Swammerdam, the biologist whom A.S. Byatt dredges out of 17th century history and positions...
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April 14, 2005, 02:13 PM
An Existence "Beyond the Safe and Solid"
5 Byatt
by aahearn

Maud wrote a paper about “the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces” (61). Living in a simple university flat, with a secure teaching post and an...
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April 01, 2005, 11:18 PM
Self-PossessIon: Maud's Fortress of Autonomy
4 Byatt
by aahearn

Maud Bailey is concerned with definition 3-c of possession: “the fact or condition of being self-controlled” (Merriam-Webster). She says, “I keep my defenses up because I must go on doing my work. I know how she (LaMotte) felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don’t want to...
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March 28, 2005, 03:18 PM
An Ecosystem of Art: Symbiotes, Scavengers and Parasites in Pale Fire
E1 Pale Fire
by aahearn

An Ecosystem of Art: Symbiotes, Scavengers and Parasites in Pale Fire Charles Kinbote burrows into John Shade’s life like a “tick...botfly...worm” (171) tunneling into its host: he peers into his bedroom windows, apes his prose style, tags along on his nature rambles, and seeks him out in his bathtub....
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March 08, 2005, 02:50 PM
Encaged
3 Nabokov
by aahearn

Despite the seeming disconnection between Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s commentary, Nabokov has actually created “Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense,” forging “some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern” (63) between the poem and the notes. One such point of congruence is that both poet and commentator...
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February 16, 2005, 09:35 PM
Introspection over Inter-connection
2 Wallace
by aahearn

Labeling characters with letters instead of names, refusing to disclose which drug addict dies, and leaving the rift between X and Y unexplained, David Foster Wallace writes fiction that remains “maddeningly hard to pin down” (123). This open-ended technique draws the reader “down here quivering in the mud of the...
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February 09, 2005, 10:11 AM
A Fatal Set-Up
1 Wilde
by aahearn

With his portrait besmirched by blood and his name mentioned in two suicide notes, Willie Hughes seems to be connected with fatality, as Erskine implies. Yet, only two of the three men who research him end up dead and one of these deaths stems from a natural case of...
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February 03, 2005, 09:08 AM
Amy's Test Entry

by aahearn

I'm just testing to see if my blog entry worked. -Amy...
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January 27, 2005, 09:13 PM