What is the difference between story and plot? What is the difference between plot summary and plot interpretation? How do you analyze the relationship between the main plot and a subplot? What are the purposes of literary elements and literary techniques? What are the writer’s literary devices and reader’s literary devices? How do you recognize and appreciate ways in which writer use language, structure and style to achieve his intended effects on the reader? How do you shift from mere appreciation of a literary text to critical literary appreciation? How do you engage in literary analysis & what is the purpose? What is the difference between topic and theme and how do you arrive at the theme? How do you compare the theme and the moral message? How do you develop an interpretation of a work of literature (drama, poetry and prose) and what is the purpose? How do you present critical appreciations or your individual responses to literary texts composed in different forms and in different periods and cultures? How do you know your individual response is valid? What are the differences between Critical Literary Appreciation, Literary Criticism, and Literary Theory? Why should there be a Literary theory at all?
Q. Though written with Russian Revolution in mind, Animal Farm is a novel with universal appeal. Discuss. Written in PEEL [Point, Evidence, Explanation and Link] format by BunPeiris The Universality of Animal Farm Goes Unchallenged Animal Farm (1946) written by George Orwell is a satirical fable. It reveals the ironical passage of a oppressive regime that yokes the human frailties […]
Read more
ISABEL ALLENDE Uncle Marcos House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende It had been two years since Clara had last seen her Uncle Marcos, but she remembered him very well. His was the only perfectly clear image she retained from her whole childhood, and in order to describe him she did not need to consult the daguerreotype [*1] in the […]
Read more
Gary soto The talk My best friend and I knew that we were going to grow up to be ugly. On a backyard lawn—the summer light failing west of the mulberry tree where the house of the most beautiful girl on our street stood—we talked about what we could do: shake the second-base dirt from our hair, wash our hands […]
Read more
Amy Tan Rules of The Game I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually, though neither of us knew it at the time, chess games. “Bite back your tongue,” scolded my mother when I cried loudly, yanking her hand toward the store that […]
Read more
Guy de Maupassant The Necklace The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no way of being known, understood, loved, married by any rich and distinguished man; so she let herself be married to a […]
Read more
The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind “The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind” was written during the Cold War, a period of intense rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union that shaped the politics in the second half of the twentieth century. During this time, each action by one country-the creation of a weapon, the launching of a […]
Read more
Little Gems of Literature: Holiday reading for Grade 8,9,10 & 11 with bunpeiris in April, August & December at Kandana. bunpeiris@gmail.com 0777 1000 60 Julia Alvarez When her family fled the Domnican Republic and returned to new York, Julia Alvarez was ten years old, and Spanish was her primary language. Painfully aware of not fitting in, Julia took refuge in reading […]
Read more
Teaching & Learning Literature REQUIREMENTS, APPRECIATIONS AND EXPERIENCES by bunpeiris Stories tell us how to live. Literature being all about us, the human race; being trained upon of the tragicomedy of the lonely race with intelligent aliens yet to be found for company; being homed in on the march of folly throughout their millenniums of history; being bullseyed on the human condition, to introduce this man-made treasure […]
Read moreAncient Literary Criticism by Casper C. de Jonge Throughout Antiquity, Greeks and Romans interpreted, analyzed, and evaluated the texts of poets and prose writers. They formulated ideas about the nature of poetry, its effects, and its function in society. They also developed theories on the effective composition of prose texts, and they commented on the style of orators, historians, and philosophers. […]
Read more
Antigone by Sophocles bunpeiris Like Hamlet, Joan of Arc, Galileo and Sir Thomas More, Antigone inspires us with her courage, fortitude and impenetrable strength of conscience. She stands against the monolith and brings her society to a reckoning it sorely needs. What’s Antigone Antigone [c. 429 B.C], the most celebrated drama in Greek literature & one of the most consistently popular plays […]
Read more
Homer and Shakespeare “Short is the life of man, just like the dew-drop on the tip of a blade of grass; a bubble appearing on the water when rain falls; a line drawn on water with a stick; a mountain stream; a lump of spittle on the tip of the tongue; a piece of meat thrown into an extremely hot iron […]
Read more
Gitanjali Song offerings Rabindranath Tagore A Collection of Prose translations made by the author from the original Bengali With an introduction by W. B. Yeats London: The Macmillan Company, 1913 Nobel prize for literature in 1913 [A limited edition comprising 750 copies was published by the India Society, London in 1912] The book was dedicated to WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN Introduction to […]
Read more
Learning English Literature by bunpeiris Literature being of the virtue of guiding you all to acquire and develop an inquiring mind, you are free to argue not only on any or all the points of views brought in by you guys, but also on received concepts. Literature is all about us. Literature is all about the humanity itself and nothing […]
Read more
Why-study-literature by Dr. Sarah Dillon In her latest research project, Dr Sarah Dillon, a lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, reveals how an appreciation of literature can influence scientific thought and practice At a time when university funding is being cut on both sides of the Atlantic, every academic discipline is now faced with the task of justifying […]
Read moreWilliam Faulkner: The Immortal Man The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949 William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm,December 10, 1950 Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, […]
Read more
