English 021 Creative Reading

Weblog - Entries for jhoffman
El último trabajo escrito
E3 Haroun Alice
by jhoffman

John Hoffman E3 Haroun Alice Enigma and Escape in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Through the Looking Glass Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Through the Looking Glass are viable as children’s stories because they ostensibly deal in absolutes. Salman Rushdie’s Kahani is the scene of an...
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May 12, 2005, 04:14 PM
La ultima bloga
8 Carroll
by jhoffman

In "It's My Own Invention" Carroll does not necessarily present us with a series of alternative titles for the song that ostensibly is "A-sitting on a Gate". As Gardner points out in his note, the White Knight is playing games with logic and semantics when he distinguishes between what the...
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May 05, 2005, 10:00 AM
Jumping on the Pessimism Bandwagon
6 Rushdie
by jhoffman

Every absolute introduced in Haroun and the Sea of Stories is subsequently contradicted or complicated. To understand the novel's ending, it is necessary to examine the reoccurrence fo this phenomenon. The power of storytelling is partially subverted by the mercenary flaws in Rashid's character. The power of names, established by...
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April 20, 2005, 11:57 PM
Modernity and Creativity in Possession
E2 Possession
by jhoffman

John Hoffman 4/14/2005 021 Creative Reading Modernity and Creativity in Possession The subtitle to A.S. Byatt’s Possession, whether added by the author or her publisher, is “A Romance.” Yet the majority of the novel takes place in modern London, in an era when the concept of romantic love has been...
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April 14, 2005, 03:48 PM
Sabine Lucréce Charlotte
5 Byatt
by jhoffman

Sabine's relationship with imaginative writing is similar to Christabel LaMotte in that they are both heirs to a tradition of mythology passed down through their fathers. But her experience with mythology differs in that her father communicates it through oral storytelling, while Christabel’s chooses to catalogue the history of it...
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April 05, 2005, 02:22 PM
Ellen Ash
4 Byatt
by jhoffman

The fundamental prerequisite to true ventriloquism is not the ventriloquist but the doll, that object to whom thoughts are attributed. It follows that Ellen Ash, who left only a diary incoherent even to Beatrice Nest (252), is most vulnerable to the ventriloquism of modern academics, and thus the most easily...
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March 29, 2005, 03:01 PM
Verbal Artistry and Transformation in Pale Fire
E1 Pale Fire
by jhoffman

John Hoffman English 024: Creative Reading Verbal Artistry and Transformation in Pale Fire From the moment “the wind-borne black butterflies” (15) of John Shade’s incinerated first drafts flit across the lines of Charles Kinbote’s opening commentary, Pale Fire shimmers with visual imagery. Contrasts of red and green, of mountains and...
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March 08, 2005, 03:00 PM
Insert witty palindrome here
3 Nabokov
by jhoffman

Kinbote's preoccupation with symetry of order and form seems a mere footnote in his psychological profile - it certainly pales in comparison to his gener issues, his delusions of grandeur, and his near-schizophrenic separation from reality. Yet it is significant in that Shade, and perhaps Nabokov, seem to share this...
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February 17, 2005, 02:48 PM
The Anxiety of Empathy/Down to the Wire (II)
2 Wallace
by jhoffman

Anxiety and empathy are seldom far apart in "Octet" and "Adult World", although the relationship between the two is often difficult to discern. The young wife’s insecurities in “Adult World” (I) and (II) stem not from any perceived personal inadequacies but from her fear that her lovers are disengaged from...
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February 10, 2005, 02:43 PM
down to the wire ...
1 Wilde
by jhoffman

On the surface, Willie Hughes appears to be a literary theory that offers a sublimely perfect solution to a great mystery of literature, emulating in its comprehensiveness the tyrannies of authorship so detested by Roland Barthes. Yet Barthes is vindicated by Cyril Graham’s dependence upon a forgery to prove his...
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February 03, 2005, 02:43 PM
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by jhoffman

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January 31, 2005, 09:45 PM