accentual meter: Lines of verse organized by number of stresses rather than by feet or number of syllables. This was the form of poetry written in Old English (which combined stress with alliteration). For a modern example, see Richard Wilbur, "Junk" (1961). Accentual meter is the basis of sprung rhythm.

accentual-stress meter: Lines of verse based on the metrical foot. This is the most common form of English poetry.

alcaics: a four-line stanza of considerable metrical complexity, named after the ancient Greek poet Alcaeus.

alliteration: The repetition of sounds in nearby words, most often involving the initial consonants of words (and sometimes the internal consonants in stressed syllables).

allusion: An indirect reference to a text, myth, event, or person outside the poem itself (compare echo). Although it is woven into the context of the poem, it carries its own history of meaning: for example, see the reference to Hamlet in T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917).

ambiguity: The ability to mean more than one thing.

analogy: Resemblance in certain respects between things that are otherwise unlike; also, the use of such likeness to predict other similarities.

anapest: Two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, as in "unabridged" (see foot).

anaphora: Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines. For example, see Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678).

assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds in a line or series of lines. Assonance often affects pace (by working against short and long vowel patterns) and seems to underscore the words included in the pattern. For example, see the beginning of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" (1816).

aubade: A lyric about the dawn (e.g., see John Donne, "The Sun Rising" [1633]).

ballad: A narrative poem, impersonally related, that is (or originally was) meant to be sung. Characterized by repetition and often by a repeated refrain (a recurrent phrase or series of phrases), the earliest ballads were anonymous works transmitted orally from person to person through generations. For example, see"Sir Patrick Spens." Modern literary ballads imitate these folk creations (e.g., Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The 

Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [1798]).

ballad stanza: A four-line stanza, the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter and rhyme with each other; the first and third lines, in iambic tetrameter, do not rhyme. This form, frequently used in hymns, is also known as "common meter"; a loose form of it is often used by Emily Dickinson.

blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter; for example, see Alfred, Lord Tennyson,"Ulysses" (1842).

caesura: A sign, used in scansion, that marks a natural pause in speaking a line of poetry.

concrete poetry: An attempt to supplement (or replace) verbal meaning with visual devices from painting and sculpture. A true concrete poem cannot be spoken; it is viewed, not read (compare pattern poetry).

confessional poem: A relatively new (or recently defined) kind of poetry in which the speaker focuses on the poet´s own psychic biography. This label is often applied to writings of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.

connotation: What is suggested by a word, apart from what it explicitly and directly describes (compare denotation). For example, the "cypresses" of Eavan Boland´s"That the Science of Cartography Is Limited" (1994) connote death, because of their traditional associations with mourning.

controlling metaphors: Metaphors that dominate or organize an entire poem. For example, metaphors of movement structure John Donne´s "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" (1633).

conventions: Standard ways of saying things in verse, employed to achieve certain expected effects. Conventions may pertain to style (e.g., the rhyme scheme of the sonnet) or content (e.g., the figure of the shepherd in the pastoral).

couplet: A pair of lines, almost always rhyming, that form a unit.

dactyl: A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in "screwdriver" (see foot).

denotation: The direct and literal meaning of a word or phrase (as distinct from its implication). Compare connotation.

dramatic poetry: Poetry written in the voice of one or more characters assumed by the poet. For example, Geoffrey Chaucer´s Canterbury Tales are dramatic narratives.

dramatic monologue: A poem written in the voice of a character, set in a specific situation, and spoken to someone. This form is most strongly identified with poems of Robert Browning (e.g., "My Last Duchess" [1842]); see also Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" (1842).

echo: A reference that recalls a word, phrase, or sound in another text. For example, "And indeed there will be time" in Eliot´s "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) recalls both Ecclesiastes 3.1 ("To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven") and Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (1681; "Had we but world enough and time"). It is less specific than an allusion.

elegy: In classical times, any poem on any subject written in "elegiac" meter (dactylic couplets comprising a hexameter followed by a pentameter line), but since the Renaissance usually a formal lament for the death of a particular person. For example, see W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1940).

end stop: A line break that coincides with the end of the sentence (vs. a run-on line; compare enjambment).

English sonnet: Three four-line stanzas and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. For example, see William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146 (1609; "Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth").

enjambment: The use of a line that "runs on" to the next line, without pause, to complete its grammatical sense (compare end stop). For example, see Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool" (1960).

envoy: A short concluding stanza found in certain poetic forms (e.g., the sestina) that often provides a concise summing-up of the poem.

epic: A long poem, in a continuous narrative often divided into "books," on a great or serious subject. Traditionally, it celebrates the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, using elevated language and a grand, high style (e.g., Homer´s Iliad), but later epics have been more personal (e.g., William Wordsworth´s Prelude [1805 / 1850]) and less formal in structure (e.g., H. D. ´s Helen in Egypt [1961]).

epigram: Originally any poem carved in stone (on tombstones, buildings, gates, etc.), but in modern usage a very short, usually witty verse with a quick turn at the end (e.g., much of the light verse of Ogden Nash).

extended metaphors: Detailed and complex metaphors that extend over a long section of a poem (e.g., the metaphor of grass in Whitman´s "Song of Myself"[1881], section 6 or of the compass in Donne´s "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning").

feminine rhyme: Rhymes comprised of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (e.g., see George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan 1.38 [1819]: "He learn´d the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, / And how to scale a fortress- or a nunnery"). Compare masculine rhyme.

figures of speech: Uses of a word or words that go beyond the literal meaning to show or imply a relationship, evoking a further meaning. Such figures, sometimes called "tropes" (i.e., rhetorical "turns"), include anaphora, metaphor, metonymy, andirony.

foot: The basic unit, consisting of two or three syllables, into which a line is divided in scansion. Verse is labeled according to its dominant foot (e.g., iambic) and the number of feet per line (e.g., pentameter). Lines of one, two, three, four, five, and six feet are respectively called monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter. See anapest, iamb, dactyl, spondee, and trochee.

free verse: Poetry that does not follow the rules of regularized meter and strict form. However, these open forms continue to rely on patterns of rhythm and repetition to impose order; for example, see Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1881).

heroic couplet: A pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. For example, see Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Pardoner´s Tale." Perhaps the most polished instances of this form are provided by Alexander Pope.

iamb: An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in "above" (see foot). Iambic is the most common meter in English poetry.

image: A mental representation of a particular thing able to be visualized (and often able to be apprehended by senses other than sight).

irony: A figure in which what is stated is the opposite of what is meant or expected. For example, see Wilfred Owen´s ironic use of Horace, Odes 3.2.13, in"Dulce Et Decorum Est" (1920).

Italian sonnet: An octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines); typically rhymed abbaabba cdecde, it has many variations that still reflect the basic division into two parts separated by a rhetorical turn of argument (e.g., see Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese [1850]).

limerick: A five-line light poem, usually in anapestic rhythm. The first, second, and fifth lines are rhymed trimeter; lines three and four are rhymed dimeter. The rhymes are frequently eccentric, and the subject matter is often nonsensical or obscene.

lyric: Originally a poem meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Now, a lyric is the most
common verse form: any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, usually expressing personal concerns rather than describing a narrative or dramatic situation.

masculine rhyme: Rhymes that consist of a single stressed syllable. This is the most common form of end rhyme in English (compare feminine rhyme).

meditation: A contemplation of some physical object as a way of reflecting upon some larger truth, often (but not necessarily) a spiritual one. For example, see Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning" (1923).

metaphor: A figure of speech that relies on a likeness or analogy between two things to equate them and thus suggest a relationship between them. For example, in "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962) Derek Walcott portrays the continent as an animal, with a "tawny pelt" and "bloodstreams." Compare metonymy, simile.

meter: The formal organization of the rhythm of a line into regular patterns; seefoot, scansion.

metonymy: A figure that relies on a close relationship other than similarity (compare metaphor) in substituting a word or phrase for the thing meant. For example, the "scepter" in Tennyson´s "Ulysses" (1842) represents the rule of Ithaca.

mnemonic devices: Forms, such as rhyme, built into poems to help reciters remember the poems.

motif: A recurrent device, formula, or situation that deliberately connects a poem with preexisting patterns
and conventions. For example, Edmund Spenser´s Sonnet 75 (1595; "One day I wrote her name upon the strand") relies on the motif of immortality through poetry (cf. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55 [1609]).

mythologies: Large systems of belief and tradition on which cultures draw to explain and understand themselves. These are often political or religious, and often become conventional over time (for example, see the use of "Venus´ son" in Elizabeth´s "When I Was Fair and Young").

narrative: Poetry that tells a story and is primarily characterized by linear, chronological description.

occasional poem: A poem written about or for a specific occasion, public or private (e.g., Maya Angelou´s
poem for the 1993 presidential inauguration, "On the Pulse of Morning"). Such poems can transcend the particular incident that inspired them; for example, see William Butler Yeats, "Easter 1916" (1916).

ode: An extended lyric, usually elevated in style and with an elaborate stanzaic structure (e.g., see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode" [1817]). 

off-rhyme: Rhyme that does not perfectly match in vowel or consonant sound; for example, see William Butler Yeats, "Easter 1916" (1916): faces / houses, gibe / club, etc.

onomatopoeia: Use of a word or words the sound of which approximates the sound of the thing denoted (e.g., "splash").

oxymoron: A figure of speech that combines two apparently contradictory words (e.g, John Milton´s description of the flames of hell as giving "No light, but rather darkness visible" in Paradise Lost 1.63 [1667]).

parody: A poem that imitates another poem closely, but changes details for comic or critical effect. For example, "The Dover Bitch" by Anthony Hecht (1968) parodies Matthew Arnold´s "Dover Beach" (1867).

pastoral: A poem (also called an eclogue, a bucolic, or an idyll) that portrays the simple life of country folk, usually shepherds, as a timeless world of beauty, peace, and contentment. From its beginnings (the Greek Idyls of Theocritus, third century B.C.), pastoral has idealized rural life; poets have used the conventions of this highly artificial form to explore subjects having little to do with any actual countryside (for example, see Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" [1599, 1600]). There is also a large subgenre of pastoral elegy (e.g., see John Milton, "Lycidas" [1637]).

pattern poetry: A poem with lines in the shape of the subject of the poem. This form was popular in English poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., George Herbert, "Easter Wings" [1633]) and again in the twentieth century (notably by John Hollander and May Swenson). Compare with concrete poetry.

persona: A voice assumed by the author of a poem. See speaker.

personification: Treating an abstraction as if it were a person, endowing it with humanlike qualities. For an extended example, see Emily Dickinson, #712 (1890; "Because I could not stop for Death").

Petrarchan sonnet: See Italian sonnet.

prosopopoeia: See personification.

protest poem: An attack, sometimes indirect, on institutions or social injustices. For example, see Anna Letitia Barbauld, "The Rights of Woman" (1825).

pyrrhic: two successive unstressed or lightly stressed syllables.

quantitative meter: Lines of verse divided into feet, which are scanned by syllable length (actual duration of the sound) rather than stress (compare accentual meter). This is the form of classical Greek and Latin verse, and it is very difficult to reproduce in English, which privileges stress.

quatrain: A four-line stanza, whether rhymed or unrhymed. This is the most common stanza form in English poetry. 

rhyme: The repetition of the same ("perfect rhyme") or similar sounds, most often at the ends of lines. See off-rhyme, vowel rhyme.

rhyme royal: A seven-line iambic pentameter stanza, rhymed ababbcc. For example, see Thomas Wyatt, "They Flee from Me" (1557).

scansion: The analysis of a line of poetry (by "scanning") to determine its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, which usually are divided into metrical feet. See foot.

sestina: Six six-line stanzas and a final three-line stanza in a complex form that repeats words, not lines (as in the villanelle) or rhymes. The final word in each line of the first stanza becomes the final word in other stanzas (in a set pattern: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA); the lines in the concluding stanza, or envoy, usually end ECA and each line contains one of the remaining three end words. Invented in the twelfth century by the troubadours, the form has again come into use in the twentieth century (e.g., by Marilyn Hacker); the repetitions often convey a sense of circling around a subject.

setting: The time and place of the action in a poem..

Shakespearean sonnet: See English sonnet.

simile: A direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another that usually draws the connection with the words "like" or "as." Compare metaphor.

situation: The context of the action in a poem; that is, what is happening when the poem begins.

Bibliography

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-terms?category=rhythm-and-meter

http://quizlet.com/9094927/english-poetry-terms-flash-cards/

Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken

* Requested post *

This poem is not listed in STPM syllabus

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Poetic / Literary Devices

Structure and Rhythm
This poem consists of four stanzas with five lines each,with a scheme of ABAAB

Figurative Expressions
■ Repetition
   • "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" {line 1}

■ Alliteration
   • "wanted wear" {line 8}

■ Simile
   • "as just as fair" {line 6}

■ Metaphor
This whole poem is a metaphor as Frost uses it to depict the life decisions one have to continually make, as life is a journey

■ Imagery
   • "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" {line 1}
   • "..bent in the undergrowth" {line 5}
   • "..grassy and wanted wear" {line 8}
   • "trodden black" {line 12}

■ Anaphora
   • "And sorry.." {line 2}
   • "And be one..." {line 3}
   • "And looked down..." {line 4}
   • "it bent.." {line 5}

■ Irony
"I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference." {line 19 - 20}

Stanza by Stanza Analysis

Stanza 1: 
The first stanza implies that the poet are thrown into the position of making choices between possible life situations. The capitalized word, 'TWO', could mean that the poet are beleaguered by two important decisions and the phrase 'yellow wood' suggests that it is autumn and leaves are falling, forming a golden forest path. Autumn points to a slow death as plants starts to wither, leaves fall to the ground and life creeps out of them. Robert brings a different light to the situation, emphasizing it could be a life-threatening or life-changing decisions. The 3rd and 4th line bear the weight of the first two lines as he stood contemplating the path he already has in mind, maybe imagining the future of his current action as Robert claims, 'And looked down one as far as I could'.  How the pathway 'bent in the undergrowth' illustrates the future that it holds.

Stanza 2:
The poet chose the second pathway despite his effort to imagine the future of the first pathway behold. The word, 'perhaps', shows that the poet himself is unsure of his decision. He took the chance because it was the choice that most of the people had made but later ponders that both pathway are just equally the same. His action here proves that he is probably comforting himself that both choices are the same and he is not making a wrong step. His insecurity is already hinted in this stanza.

Stanza 3:
The situation the poet is in, shows that the possibilities are not tarnished and are in an acceptable condition for the phrase 'trodden black'. It leaves no unwanted mark so the choice-making is weighing the poet down. The exclamation on how he would keep the other for another day serves as confidence upon his adventure down the pathway he chose. It is ironic as he knew that he cannot turn back the time and doubted if he could ever change things around. Frost highlights the phrase, 'how way leads on to way' , as life keeps going forward from the choices we made.

Stanza 4:
From the last stanza, we know that the poet harbors disappointment and maybe even regret from the decision he took. He feels that the less traveled road have more potential than the one that every one had taken. The poet thought that everything will flow with a different course if he didn't made the choice he chosen. Perhaps, he starts to feel he should not have conformed with the society but live as an individual instead.

Reading Material

"The Road Not Taken" is an ironic commentary on the autonomy of choice in a world governed by instincts, unpredictable contingencies, and limited possibilities. It parodies and demurs from the biblical idea that God is the "way" that can and should be followed and the American idea that nature provides the path to spiritual enlightenment. The title refers doubly to bravado for choosing a road less traveled but also to regret for a road of lost possibility and the eliminations and changes produced by choice. "The Road Not Taken " reminds us of the consequences of the principle of selection in all aspects of life, namely that all choices in knowledge or in action exclude many others and lead to an ironic recognition of our achievements. At the heart of the poem is the romantic mythology of flight from a fixed world of limited possibility into a wilderness of many possibilities combined with trials and choices through which the pilgrim progresses to divine perfection. I agree with Frank Lentricchia's view that the poem draws on "the culturally ancient and pervasive idea of nature as allegorical book, out of which to draw explicit lessons for the conduct of life (nature as self-help text)." I would argue that what it is subverting is something more profound than the sentimental expectations of genteel readers of fireside poetry. . . .

The drama of the poem is of the persona making a choice between two roads. As evolved creatures, we should be able to make choices, but the poem suggests that our choices are irrational and aesthetic. The sense of meaning and morality derived from choice is not reconciled but, rather obliterated and canceled by a non-moral monism. Frost is trying to reconcile impulse with a con- science that needs goals and harbors deep regrets. The verb Frost uses is taken, which means something less conscious than chosen. The importance of this opposition to Frost is evident in the way he changed the tide of "Take Something Like a Star" to "Choose Something Like a Star," and he continued to alter tides in readings and publications. Take suggests more of an unconscious grasp than a deliberate choice. (Of course, it also suggests action as opposed to deliberation.) In "The Road Not Taken" the persona's reasons wear thin, and choice is confined by circumstances and the irrational:

[lines 1-10]

Both roads had been worn "about the same," though his "taking" the second is based on its being less worn. The basis of selection is individuation, variation, and "difference": taking the one "less traveled by." That he "could not travel both / And be one traveler" means not only that he will never be able to return but also that experience alters the traveler; he would not be the same by the time he came back. Frost is presenting an anti myth in which origin, destination, and return are undermined by a non-progressive development. And the hero has only illusory choice. This psychological representation of the developmental principle of divergence strikes to the core of Darwinian theory. Species are made and survive when individuals diverge from others in a branching scheme, as the roads diverge for the speaker. The process of selection implies an unretracing process of change through which individual kinds are permanently altered by experience. Though the problem of making a choice at a crossroads is almost a commonplace, the drama of the poem conveys a larger mythology by including evolutionary metaphors and suggesting the passage of eons.
The change of tense in the penultimate line—to took—is part of the speaker's projection of what he "shall be telling," but only retrospectively and after "ages and ages." Though he cannot help feeling free in selection, the speaker's wisdom is proved only through survival of an untraceable course of experience:

[lines 11-20]

The poem leaves one wondering how much "difference" is implied by all, given that the "roads" already exist, that possibilities are limited. Exhausted possibilities of human experience diminish great regret over "the road not taken" or bravado for "the road not taken" by everyone else. The poem does raise questions about whether there is any justice in the outcome of one's choices or anything other than aesthetics, being "fair," in our moral decisions. The speaker's impulse to individuation is mitigated by a moral dilemma of being unfair or cruel, in not stepping on leaves, "treading" enough to make them "black. " It might also imply the speaker's recognition that individuation will mean treading on others.

from Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Copyright © 1997 by The University of Michigan

Bibliography

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/road.htm
http://www.shmoop.com/road-not-taken/stanza-1-summary.html
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/section7.rhtml
http://www.gradesaver.com/the-poetry-of-robert-frost/study-guide/section11/

ARITS - How It Is Prevalent Today

Written before the Civil Rights Movement, A Raisin in the Sun exposes the two-layered racism that plagued many African-American communities. The most apparent and blatant form of which stemmed from the baseless xenophobic fears that many whites held. As part of the money that Lena receives from her husband's death, she places a deposit on a house in Clybourne Park, an all-white neighborhood. Representing the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, Mr. Lindner (Scott Mosenson) arrives at the Younger's in the name of friendship and understanding and attempts to bribe them into staying out of his neighborhood. The family refuses, and Mr. Lindner leaves confused and dazed, maliciously hinting that it will be better for the Youngers to stay out.

The other layer of racism is more subtle, yet equally as prevalent and detrimental. Lena's son, Walter Lee Younger (Kevin T. Carroll) unabashedly despises his own race. Claiming that his brethren can only "moan, pray and have babies," Walter places himself above his community. They lack dreams, he says, and he's different because he wants more. He wants to become the new African-American bourgeois, yet he hates them too. The playwright, Lorraine Hansberry demonstrates how this mentality becomes so destructive. Walter becomes so obsessed with his racist views that he eventually begins to embody what he abhors.

Because of the play's setting and events, A Raisin in the Sun is filled with complex characters like Walter Lee. He dreams big, yet partakes in petty squabbles. He places money on a pedestal, yet he freely gives it away without a second thought. He blames everyone for not giving him a chance, yet he loses his family's money on a poorly-planned liquor store venture. He lives for tomorrow's successes, yet cannot make it through today's failures. Even though his contradictions are frustrating, it makes the character more human and thus, more credible. In addition to Walter Lee, Beneatha and Ruth also rise above their own prejudices and live up to their promise, making their struggles and successes a pleasure to witness.

Instead of skirting the issue, Hansberry addresses deep-seeded racism that still prevails in today's world. Through exploring these topics, Hansberry provides rich and colorful characters, whose potential is fulfilled with this cast's adept interpretation and masterful performance.

From: http://www.culvercitynews.org/entertainment/a-raisin-in-the-sun-still-prevalent-today/

Appreciation of Chapters by Analyzing Characters: Jing-mei Woo

Part 1: The Joy Luck Club

# Pain caused by lack of communication

# Ancient Chinese custom

A. Language Barrier

Jing-mei faces language barrier when her mother uses Chinese phrases 'chabudwo' and 'butong'. She claims she cannot remember things she didn't understand in the first place [pg 19]

Aunty Lin's explanation made her feel that "my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese". She feels that they speak in their special language, half in broken English, half in their own Chinese dialect [pg 34]

Suyuan misunderstood what Jing-mei meant when she said she'll look into it - her dropping off when finishing her degree - and was convinced that Jing-mei is going back to school to get a doctorate. "My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more" [pg 37]

B. Cultural Barrier

Jing-mei ignores her mother's criticisms, of her Chinese superstitions, as she thinks that such beliefs just "conveniently fit the circumstances". She even tried to tell her mother that it won't lead to a healthy learning environment, something she had learned in her Psychology class [pg 31]

C. American mindset

When Aunty Lin called JIng-mei by her Chinese name, Aunty Ying corrected the former that the kids go by their American names and for Jing-mei's, its June. Jing-mei simply responded thatits alright to call her by her Chinese name because it is "becoming fashionable for American-born Chinese to use their Chinese names". Jing-mei does not embracce the real meaning of her Chinese name but thought of it as fashion [pg 37]

Author's note:

Towards the end, it occurs to Jing-mei that they (An-mei, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying) are frightened by Jing-mei's upfront character by proclaiming she doesn't know what to tell her twin sisters about her mother. They can see their own daughters just as ignorant of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They also see children who think their mothers are stupid when they explain things in broken English.

read chapter summary here: http://www.shmoop.com/joy-luck-club/part-1-chapter-1-summary.html

Part 2: Two Kinds

  # Conflict between the aspirations of a mother and the resistance from a daughter

Suyuan is always trying to find the prodigy side of her daughter by: (pick one to remember)

> being a Chinese Shirley Temple

> knowing the names of foreign cities

> multiplying numbers in her head

> acrobatics

> poker player

> pianist

Jing-mei seeing her mother's disappointed face, made something inside her die. She feels that she will not comply to what her mother want her to be for she has new thoughts, willful thoughts and Jing-mei will not let her mother change her. Jing-mei is so adamant in her new attitude that she never gave herself a fair chance in correcting herself in her piano lessons. 

Jing-mei has the American mindset in her when she decided not to listen to her mother anymore for she isn't her 'slave' and 'this wasn't China'. She feels that her mother is 'the stupid one' [pg 141]. She strongly fought and accused her mother of the daughters she left behind in China. Jing-mei spat out the she wishes she's dead- like them.

Suyuan deeply hurt by Jing-mei's angry confessions, never asked her child to do anything, anymore.

Author's note:

The piano piece that Jing-mei performed in the talent show is somehow symbolic. She never realised the song is broken into two halves, 'Pleading Child' and 'Perfectly Contented'. She had only known the song is entitled Pleading Child but never found out until 30 years later, that another half of the song which is Perfectly Contented is what she had never learnt and performed in the talent show.

read chapter summary here: http://www.shmoop.com/joy-luck-club/part-2-chapter-4-summary.html

Part 3: Best Quality

Jing-mei received a jade pendant from her mother after a dinner celebration (2 months before her death). Suyuan had gave her, her 'life importance' but Jing-mei never known the meaning of the pendant she got from her mother. To her, she found it - the pendant - garish and unstylish so she had stuffed the pendant in the lacquer box and eventually forgotten about it.

After Suyuan's death, Jing-mei starts to see it as a symbol of mother's love and concern. While Jing-mei used to interpret many of her mother's words as expressions of superstition or criticism, she now sees them as manifesting a deep maternal wisdom and love.

Motherly Love

[pg 202] "..but I knew I could not refuse. That's the way Chinese mothers show they love their children, not through hugs and kisses but with stern offerings of steamed dumplings, duck's gizzards and crab" 

Suyuan also further expresses her concern over the flustered Jing-mei after being embarrased by Waverly Jong at the dinner table. She told her daughter, "Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different" [pg 208]. Here, Suyuan meant to tell Jing-mei that she has a completely different opinion from  others that set her aside, and that she is special.

read chapter summary here: http://www.shmoop.com/joy-luck-club/part-3-chapter-4-summary.html

Part 4: A Pair of Tickets

# Awareness of the significance of Chinese heritage

Inferiority complex

Jing-mei never really embraces the roots of her race, "I realize I've never really known what it means to be Chinese" [pg 268]. Her trip to China makes her think of her own worth. She recalled that ".. when I was fifteen and had vigorously denied that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin" [pg 267]. Her reluctance in embracing her own race seems to take a spin when she enters Shenzhen, China and she claims "I feel different"

Suyuan somehow know this would happen someday, that her daughter will recognise her own Chinese heritage for it is in her blood.

Author's note:

Through her acknowledgement of her own heritage, Jing-mei represents a figure of hope for both generations, that they might share in a dialogue of love that often transcends linguistic and cultural barrier.

read chapter summary here: http://www.shmoop.com/joy-luck-club/part-4-chapter-4-summary.html

Harlem: A Dream Deferred – Langston Hughes

This is a good piece of writing about Harlem Renaissance. 

I found this very long time ago and I didn't keep the link. 

If this is yours, please inform me so I can include your name as credit. 

Lorraine Hansberry took the title of A Raisin in the Sun from a line in Langston Hughes’s famous 1951 poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred.” Hughes was a prominent black poet during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance in New York City, during which black artists of all kinds—musicians, poets, writers—gave innovative voices to their personal and cultural experiences. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of immense promise and hopefulness for black artists, as their efforts were noticed and applauded across the United States. In fact, the 1920s are known to history as the Jazz Age, since that musical form, created by a vanguard of black musicians, gained immense national popularity during the period and seemed to embody the exuberance and excitement of the decade. The Harlem Renaissance and the positive national response to the art it produced seemed to herald the possibility of a new age of acceptance for blacks in America.

Langston Hughes was one of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and his poems and essays celebrate black culture, creativity, and strength. However, Hughes wrote “Harlem” in 1951, twenty years after the Great Depression crushed the Harlem Renaissance and devastated black communities more terribly than any other group in the United States. In addition, the post–World War II years of the 1950s were characterized by “white flight,” in which whites fled the cities in favor of the rapidly growing suburbs. Blacks were often left behind in deteriorating cities, and were unwelcome in the suburbs. In a time of renewed prosperity, blacks were for the most part left behind.

“Harlem” captures the tension between the need for black expression and the impossibility of that expression because of American society’s oppression of its black population. In the poem, Hughes asks whether a “dream deferred”—a dream put on hold—withers up “[l]ike a raisin in the sun.” His lines confront the racist and dehumanizing attitude prevalent in American society before the civil rights movement of the 1960s that black desires and ambitions were, at best, unimportant and should be ignored, and at worst, should be forcibly resisted. His closing rhetorical question—“Or does [a dream deferred] explode?”—is incendiary, a bold statement that the suppression of black dreams might result in an eruption. It implicitly places the blame for this possible eruption on the oppressive society that forces the dream to be deferred. Hansberry’s reference to Hughes’s poem in her play’s title highlights the importance of dreams in A Raisin in the Sun and the struggle that her characters face to realize their individual dreams, a struggle inextricably tied to the more fundamental black dream of equality in America. The underlying theme of Hansberry's Raisin is in the question posed by Langston Hughes' poem "Montage of a Dream Deferred," when he asks, "What happens to a dream deferred?" and then goes on to list the various things that might happen to a person if his dreams are put "on hold," emphasizing that whatever happens to a postponed dream is never good.

Elizabethan Era

I found this very long time ago and I didn't keep the link. 

If this is yours, please inform me so I can include your name as credit. 

o   Also known as the ‘Golden Age’. This represented the apogee of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of poetry, music and literature.

o   The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Reformation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the seventeenth century

o   England in this era had some positive aspects that set it apart from contemporaneous continental European societies. Torture was rare, since the English legal system reserved torture only for capital crimes like treason—though forms of corporal punishment, some of them extreme, were practiced

o   Education would begin at home, where children were taught the basic etiquette of proper manners and respecting others. It was necessary for boys to attend grammar school, but girls were rarely allowed in any place of education other than petty schools, and then only with a restricted curriculum. Petty schools were for all children aged from 5 to 7 years of age. Only the most wealthy people allowed their daughters to be taught, and only at home. During this time, endowed schooling became available. This meant that even boys of very poor families were able to attend school if they were not needed to work at home, but only in a few localities were funds available to provide support as well as the necessary education scholarship. Boys from families of nobility would often be taught at home by a private tutor.

o   The role of women in society was, for the historical era, relatively unconstrained; Spanish and Italian visitors to England commented regularly, and sometimes caustically, on the freedom that women enjoyed in England, in contrast to their home cultures. England had more well-educated upper class women than was common anywhere in Europe.

·         Satire of class system of Elizabethan Era

o   Theater was treated as high culture with William Shakespeare at his peak, as well as Christopher Marlowe and many other playwrights, actors and theatres constantly busy, the high culture of the Elizabethan Renaissance was best expressed in its theatre. Historical topics were especially popular, not to mention the usual comedies and tragedies

o   During the Elizabethan era, people looked forward to holidays because opportunities for leisure were limited, with time away from hard work being restricted to periods after church on Sundays. For the most part, leisure and festivities took place on a public church holy day. Every month had its own holiday, some of which are listed below:

·         The first Monday after Twelfth Night of January (any time between 7 January and 14 January) was Plough Monday. It celebrated returning to work after the Christmas celebrations and the New Year.

·         In medieval and Tudor England, the Twelfth Night marked the end of a winter festival that started on All Hallows Eve — now more commonly known as Halloween. The Lord of Misrule symbolizes the world turning upside down. On this day the King and all those who were high would become the peasants and vice versa. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed.

·         Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night, or What You Will was written to be performed as a Twelfth Night entertainment. The play has many elements that are reversed, in the tradition of Twelfth Night, such as a woman Viola dressing as a man, and a servant Malvolio imagining that he can become a nobleman.