EVOLUTE99's Common Place

The third principal part of the English verb is called a "participle". Now listen closely; this is going to be an important definition: A participle is a "verbal adjective". That is, an adjective which is derived from a verb. In fact, that's why we call it a participle, because it "participates" in the essence of both a verb and of an adjective. So in the constructions of the English passive voice, the participle "seen" is actually "modifying" the subject of the verb "to be". I can say "Betty is tall" and "Betty is seen", and these two sentences are analogous. In the predicate of both these sentences the subject further modified, since it is linked to an adjective by the verb "to be". It may seem bizarre to be thinking of a verbal construction as being essentially adjectival, but watch how we can use participles where their adjectival force is quite obvious: "the w...

The Odyssey by Homer translated by Richmond Lattimore Book I: Why was Odysseus driven far from home? Who is Kalypso? Why is she important? Why Odysseus important? Why is Poseidon the only God that doesn't pity Odysseus? Is it an issue of supplication? Is Cyclops Poseidon's son? What one god against many mean? Why are all these suitors hanging around? What does it mean to Telemacho's that his father hasn't returned? Does is thwart Telemacho's honor since his Odyssey hasn't had a proper burial? Why does Telemachos blame the Gods for his father's disappearance? Does this book foreshadow the death of the suitors? How come he blames the Gods but still prays to the god? If Odysseus doesn't return will Telemachos become king or if his mother remarries will he lose all rights and honor? Why does he trust the stranger more so than past rumors and diviners? Book II: Why is penelope forced to have suitors? Is this a cultural aspect? What ...

Every argument, research or not, is built out of the answers to  five questions in that conversation, questions that you must ask yourself on your readers’ behalf: 1. What is my claim? 2. What reasons support my claim? 3. What evidence supports my reasons? 4. Do I acknowledge alternatives / complications / objections, and how do I respond? 5. What principle makes my reasons relevant to my claim? (We call this principle a warrant.) (Booth 109). A claim is a sentence that asserts something that may be true or false and so needs support: The world is warming up. The main claim of a report is the sentence (or more) that the whole report supports (some call this sentence your thesis). If you wrote a report to prove that the world is warming up, the sentence stating that would be your main claim. A reason is a sentence supporting a claim, main or not. The first kind of support, a reason, is a statement that gives your readers cause to accept your claim. W...

If you quote part or all of a single line of verse that does not require special emphasis, put it in quotation marks within your text. You may also incorporate two or three lines in this way, using a slash with a space on each side ( / ) to separate them.  Bradstreet frames the poem with a sense of mortality: “All things within this fading world hath end” (1). Reflecting on the “incident” in Baltimore, Cullen concludes, “Of all the things that happened there / That’s all that I remember” (11-12). Verse quotations of more than three lines should begin on a new line. Unless the quotation involves unusual spacing, indent each line one inch from the left margin and double-space between lines, adding no quotation marks that do not appear in the original. A parenthetical reference for a verse quotation set off from the text follows the last...

I began this journey when I received Lattimore's translation in the mail on 28 December 2011 and reached the final words today 13 February 2012. Now that is a rather long time to spend with this epic, and it was. I didn't want to give it short shrift, I wanted it to be apart of my blood. During that time I read the following novels along side: Frank Norris McTeague , Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (a epic in itself), Woolf's Mrs Dalloway , Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises , Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury , and Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye plus a few poems and short stories and gave two major presentations. And I'm just getting started this semester.

I'm in the early stages of this project. I was thinking today that Faulkner's characters in The Sound and The Fury embody that search for things past, The ubi sunt or "where are things" motif that is prevalent in elegiac Medieval poetry. I was thinking how can I fit the ubi sunt frame work around this novel ( The Sound and the Fury ). It appears I can look at all the characters and there constant lamentation of a lost past. Also the idea of the ubi sunt should work in the Modernist frame work of trying to make sense of a chaotic present, one way to do that or not to do that would be to lament on times gone by. William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury: Ubi Sunt a Modernist Approach Topic: I’m studying The Sound and The Fury as a Modernist version of the Ubi Sunt motif Question: because I want to prove how the Ubi Sunt formula fits in Faulkner’s novel, Significance: in order to help my reader understand the importance Faulkner places on his character’s...

"Literary criticism is meant to help us, either in writing literature; or in reading it with more enjoyment and discrimination; or in understanding, through the literature, the civilization it belongs to." Brooks, Harold. "The Use and Abuse of Literary Criticism." Lecture at Birkbeck College, London. 1974. Kenneth Burke’s “parlor” of criticism – a metaphor that depends obviously and fundamentally on the relation of “parlor” to parler and thus to the notion of companions – for neither the parlor nor parler make sense without companions – serves to dramatize James’s understanding of the process through which “art lives” through the company of companions: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion has already begun long before any of them got there, ...

"In academic research, a problem is something we seek out, even invent if we have to"(Booth 54). "It’s not you who judges the significance of your problem by the cost you pay, but your readers who judge it by the cost they pay if you don’t solve it. So what you think is a problem, they might not. To make your problem their problem, you must frame it from their point of view, so that they see its costs to them. To do that, imagine that when you pose the condition part of your problem, your reader responds, So what?" (Booth 55). "In academic research . . . your problems will usually be conceptual ones, which are harder to grasp because both their conditions and costs are not palpable but abstract" (Booth 56). "You can identify the condition of a conceptual problem by completing that  three- step sentence (3.4): The first step is I am studying / working on the topic of ________. In the second step, the indirect question states the condition of a co...

Alright so far my favorite chapter. This is a major weakness that I have battled over the past semesters. Coming up with a topic and generating questions. The main issue I had was how do I get from topic to questions and guess what that is the title of this sections. The highlight of this chapter is Booth's section on Narrowing your Topic. He states, "At this point, your biggest risk is settling on a topic so broad that it could be a subheading in a library catalog: spaceflight; Shakespeare’s problem plays; natural law. A topic is probably too broad if you can state it in four or five words" (Booth 39). #MR: yeah I have done this before and ended up writing way too much or I end up running up against a deadline and narrow my project so much that it doesn't explore outside a particular section of a work. Booth also adds, "We narrowed those topics by adding words and phrases, but of a special kind: conflict, description, contribution, and developing. Th...

Inquiry Papers were introduced to me last semester by one of my professors. The purpose is to generate questions and pose possible answers and supply evidence. The object is to write to discover and spiral out ideas and hopefully find interesting questions that can be explored. So I'm need to generate Question from Books X-XXI What is the role of language so far in the Iliad? Why is this role so important How doe the gods manipulate language? Why is the role of the subjunctive so dominate in dialog? Why did homer want to emphasize the power of Rhetoric? How can I look at this Epic in different literary perspectives? How does Sarpedon's death relate to Patroloks' death? Why were the bodies so important to fight over? Does Achilles realize his damage he has caused? Why does Achilles let Patroloks take his armor and army? How is Hera's seduction of Zeus detrimental to Zeus' will? Why does Poseidon so easily give way to Zeus? How does the ...

 Choosing A Topic... Working with The Craft of Research I'm taking systematic approach to choosing a topic. So the question is How to start my project? Well in the past I usually find interest in a topic that is relativity broad or some question that was bugging me while during my reading of the primary text. In this case I was interested in an Invisible dominate white character in Jitney that was affecting the decision and action of the African American characters? So after playing around a bit I came up with this: Throughout Jitney, August Wilson utilizes a dominate white idealism defined by experiences told through the various generations of African Americans characters while enhancing the difficulty for African Americans to sustain an economic status during the 1970s.   Fail!!!!! The problem with this statement is that it is a bit dense. Unclear and hard to navigate so I did some tweaking and finally came up with a clear statement. I used Ideali...

With several papers this semester, the time has come for me to find a comfort zone in my writing process. I can say to date, I have never approached a writing process the same way twice and possibly never will. My goals are to successfully record a process that is successful for me but also pliable for future projects. I'm taking this opportunity to record my writing process. I will experiment with The Craft of Research as a guide for all my process and integrate other small processes I have used in the past. classes I'm taking and Project Due Dates: British Literature II: Due 16 February 2012: Essay #1 3-4 20th and 21st Century Literature: Due 22 February 2012: Annotated Bibliography 5 current scholarly sources Due 29 February 2012: Midterm Paper Due 1750-2000 words Ethnic American Literature: Due 20 February 2012: Annotated Bibliography 5 current scholarly sources Due 27 February 2012: Midterm Paper Due 1750-2000 words Advance Literary Studies Western Literary T...

Throughout Jitney, August Wilson defines African American experience through the various use of generational characters while emphasizing the continued struggle of getting ahead in a white man’s world. ****************************************************************************** Brantley, Ben. “Theater Review; Finding Drama in Life, and Vice Versa.” New York Times 26 Apr. 2000: 1. Regional Business News. Web. 5 Feb. 2012. Ben Brantley writes,“A lot of advice gets handed out in the thoroughly engrossing new staging of August Wilson's ''Jitney,'' a play written two decades ago but never before seen in Manhattan. Some of that counsel, on subjects from how to treat a woman to how to get ahead in a white man's world, is sensible; some of it is crazy. But there's one bit of wisdom that you're especially glad the play's characters don't heed: ‘Don't put your business in the street’” (1). ********************************************************...

work cited examples Antin, David. Interview by Charles Bernstein. Dalkey Archive Press. Dalkey Archive P, n.d. Web. 21 Aug. 2007. Committee on Scholarly Editions. “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions.” Modern Language Association. MLA, 25 Sept. 2007. Web. 15 May 2008. Concerto Palatino, perf. “Canzon à 6 per l’Epistola.” By Giovanni Priuli. Boston Early Music Festival and Exhibition. Boston Early Music Festival, 2003. Web. 20 July 2007. “de Kooning, Willem.” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2008. Web. 15 May 2008. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. Lib. of Cong., 8 May 2008. Web. 15 May 2008.

I have a horrible time with too or to. I was supposed to have learn this in the second grade. But I remember specifically not understanding the difference between the two to/too(s) No I feel I have a pretty grasp of To as a preposition or infinitive by too has been my major bugaboo. So two rules to tell if I need to use too. One: If you're able to replace the word with "also" or "excessively/too much," use too. Two: If the word is a number, use two. Otherwise, you'll want to use to.