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Online Resources
This page has online resources for exploring and analyzing world literature.
Genius.com
Source for annotated literary texts.
MLA Style Guide
Practice with Grammar (and Diction)
Grammar Bytes - the best site for grammar and English language exercises that I have seen so far!
Comma Chameleon is a great game for understanding punctuation in English. If you are having trouble with run-ons (or any punctuation issues), I may assign you this activity.
Diagramming Sentences is a great interactive tool for understanding English syntax (word-order) and subject/verb agreement.
Diagram It! also teaches you how to diagram a sentence (understand English word-order).
Editing
Drafting and Revising a Paper
Purdue Owl
Critical Thinking and Analysis
- What is critical thinking?
- List of literary rhetorical devices: http://literary.edublogs.org
- The Critical Thinking Community
- Genius.com - source for annotated primary texts (very useful for the final paper)
Visual Thinking and Analysis
Other Resources for formal analysis:
- "Understanding Formal Analysis" The Ghetty
- Educational Art Websites (DIA): http://www.dia.org/learn/resources.aspx
- MET Timelines of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/
- Web Art Academy
Online Writing Techniques
Online resources for visual media:
Online resources for visual artifacts:
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Online Collections)
- The MET has a good international collection of artifacts.
- The Victoria and Albert Museum
- The V&A is good for anyone interested in material culture and textiles (fashion...).
- The Library of Congress
- More online resources for digital media are available on:
- Collision Course Introduction (includes international museum links and artistic movement links)
- Visualizing Cultural Collisions (includes specific artifacts and links for more information)
- Visual Thinking (includes general material about visual thinking)
This page contains all the miscellaneous materials you may need to navigate this Introduction to Fiction.
Genre Information:
MLA Style Guide: Purdue OWL
- Epic: a genre of fiction (from the Greek adjective ἐπικός (epikos'pi), from ἔπος (epos) "word, story, poem"[1]). An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.
- Novel: a long work of prose fiction defined by a complex plot with causation, conflict, response, opposition, and interaction.
- Short Story: a compact, concentrated work of narrative fiction that ideally creates a single impression, mood, or idea - often focuses on a single character or single action.
- Drama: a play; fiction written for performance on stage by actors.
- Poetry: literary genre characterized by rhythmical quality of language and compressed treatment of language.
Literary Terms:
- Plot: connected plan or pattern of causation in a narrative (what happens in a text).
- Setting: where the plot takes place.
- Characters: the personalities who act in a narrative (the who in a text).
- Freytag Pyramid: graphic illustration of conventional plot progression
Literary Devices (how literature works)
- Tone: the techniques and modes of presentation that reveal or create attitude.
- Narrative Voice: how a story is conveyed (the narrator).
- Omniscient Narrator: all-knowing voice that articulates a story.
- The role of the omniscient narrator is to chronicle the events of a story in an impartial way. He or she has full access to the events and dialogue occuring in the narrative, rendering his or her account the most complete and accurate. This all-knowing, all-seeing narrator type jumps from scene to scene, following characters throughout a story and assessing the progress of the narrative. Retrieved from http://narrative.georgetown.edu/wiki/index.php/Omniscient_narrator.
- Unreliable Narrator: story-telling voice that lacks credibility.
- The opposite of a reliable narrator, an unreliable narrator typically displays characteristics or tendencies that indicate a lack of credibility or understanding of the story. Whether due to age, mental disability or personal involvement, an unreliable narrator provides the reader with either incomplete or inaccurate information as a result of these conditions. Lack of alignment with the "tastes, judgements, [and] moral sense" (Prince 103) of the implied author is a determining factor in a narrator's unreliability. Most notably done by William Faulkner in his novels, the use of a main character with a mental disability or a skewed perspective is indicative of unreliability as well as the under-developedperspective of a child narrator.
- Polyphony: multiple voices (with equal weight).
- Diction: the words used in a narrative (diction may be specific and concrete or general and abstract).
- Syntax: word order and sentence structure.
- Denotation:what a word means (actual definition).
- Connotation: the meanings surrounding or associated with a word (what a word implies, especially in context).
- Metaphorical Language: figure of speech used to enhance understanding or give insight.
- Metaphor: (implied) comparison between two things.
- Simile: comparison of two things with the terms "like" or "as".
- Symbolism: a specific word, idea, or object that represents another idea, value, person, or something else.
- Theme: the central idea of a work.
- Imagery: use of images or word pictures in a narrative.
- Irony: indirection; language that states the opposite of what is intended.
- Humor: capacity to cause laughter.
- Motivation: impulse propelling characters in a fictional text.
- Donnee: literally "given" in French; a set of assumptions on which a work of literature is based.
- Double Entendre: literally "double meaning"; deliberately ambiguous language or statement, often sexual and usually humorous.
Style:
- Verisimilitude: life-like, true, or plausible style.
- Hyperbole: exaggeration.
- Monologue: long speech spoken by a character and directed to self, audience, or an offstage character.
- Satire: an attack on human follies or vices, usually humorous.
- Fantasy (the Fantastic): the creation of events that are dreamlike or fantastic
These definitions are primarily derived from the text Literature.
RESEARCH
American Literature and History Resources:
- Archiving Early America
- Early America
- Smithsonian: Early American History
- American History: USHISTORY.ORG
Author Information:
Other Miscellaneous Information:
Quest Resources
- Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale
- Literary Fiction.docx - A psychology essay about why reading and writing matter.
- American Experience - Summary of (stereotypical) life in the 1950s (in the US).
- "Primary vs. Secondary Sources"
- Mars Hill Audio - audio journal that offers a Christian perspective on the humanities. This is a great resource for anyone who has trouble reading text articles and could be used for one of the secondary resources for the final paper.
Other Research Links:
- The Nineteenth Century in Print is a Library of Congress online database that has articles and material from the nineteenth century (which may be useful in making arguments/comparisons): http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html
- AUTHOR WEBSITES and SOCIETIES: scholarly websites (created by PROFESSORS or UNIVERSITIES) on YOUR AUTHOR can provide helpful information (OR point you towards good sources for your specific text). See author websites above for examples - these can be found by GOOGLING.
- PERIOD WEBSITES: scholarly websites on the TIME PERIOD of your novel/short stories can also be VERY HELPFUL (such as Romantic Circles, Victorian Web and Picturing Literary Modernism).
- Also consider looking for SCHOLARLY WEBSITES on your THEME or topic (the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS webpage has some great, scholarly links).
- There are also periodicals and scholarly websites devoted to YOUR GENRE which may provide you the background information you need to make INSIGHTFUL, CONCRETE comments about your specific text.
- Nineteenth-Century British Supernatural Fiction: Folklore and the Fantastic (2008) by Jason Marc Harris.
- Christianity Today
- "Christianity on the Early American Frontier" Christianity Today
- Here is a link for MLA Citation: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/11/
History Quick Sources
Why the Humanities Matter (from a Psychology standpoint):
Other Online Lectures