Article on Letters to Alice Essays

Article on Letters to Alice Essays Article on Letters to Alice Essay Article on Letters to Alice Essay Advice to a Green-Haired Punker By HILMA WOLITZER | LETTERS TO ALICE On First Reading Jane Austen. By Fay Weldon. | he premise of Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen is that literature matters in the larger scheme of things, that reading can inform and alter ones life. This slender volume is its own best argument. Billed as an epistolary novel, it is more a study of a writer (and reader) thinking aloud about art and civilization. The letters, from Aunt Fay, are addressed to an imaginary niece away at school, a green-haired punker who rebels against reading Jane Austen and who is busy writing her own novel. Letters to Alice was probably inspired by a series of instructive letters Austen sent to an actual niece on the occasion of her first attempts at novel-writing. Fay Weldon, the gifted and prolific British novelist, has a clear debt to Austen; her own fiction reveals a dry wit and is devilishly incisive in its portraiture. In this book, she refers to the City of Invention, where novelists build Houses of the Imagination and readers explore for pleasure and illumination. Here in this City of Invention, the readers come and go, by general invitation, sauntering down its leafy avenues, scurrying through its horrider slums, waving to each other across the centuries, up and down the arches of the years. Critics, we are told, are mere bus drivers here. The fictitious Miss Weldon tries to lure Alice into this metropolis, between the Road to Heaven and the Road to Hell, acknowledging the competition of the local McDonalds, of certain books with empty calories and even of Alices own nervous dread of literature. She approaches the city as both a builder and a visitor, with appropriate measures of awe and trepidation. Woven into the narrative is a kind of fiction. Aunt Fay is estranged from Alices parents, and although she hopes to become reconciled with them, she deliberately gives their daughter subversive advice and aid. In the single letter she writes to her sister, Enid, Fay defends herself. Of course I am not encouraging your daughter Alice to write a novel. Of course she should concentrate on her studies. Still, she offers her niece outrageous rewards for literary effort and does encourage rebellion against the conventions that stifle the creative spirit. Most of all she makes Alice think. She draws her attention, and ours, to the inevitable connections between art and life by alternating passages from Austens novels with the facts of her real experience. In the most moving sections she describes the conditions under which women lived in early 19th-century England. The details of domesticity, the fact of womens total financial dependence on fathers and husbands and the statistics on mortality in childbirth are equally affecting. At once there is a sense of the general tenor of the times and of the particular personal history of one writer a spinster in her parents Georgian household inventing and recording other lives at a modest round table between the hearth and the window. Miss Weldon persuasively defends Austen for excluding certain worldly concerns from her work and praises her for her moral courage and for independence of thought and expression. It is true that the world of politics and power, dissent and revolution, feature a lmost not at all, in Jane Austens novels, but this was surely from choice rather than from ignorance. The main concentration in Letters to Alice is on the life and work of Jane Austen. We witness her childhood, her evolution as a writer and even her early death from Addisons disease, which is now treatable. But this is a generous book, with a broader scope one that evokes the various joys and responsibilities of the artist and the consumer of art. It defines and celebrates their shared experience, and perhaps it should be required reading, a prerequisite for students of literature. Aunt Fay writes to Alice: Only endure! Loveless marriages turn again to loving ones; unwanted children become wanted; the study that bores you today may enlighten you tomorrow. Do not change courses in mid-stream, Alice. Do not abandon Eng. Lit. for Social Studies. Simply write your own book to counteract the danger of too much analysis; synthesize as much as you analyze, and you will yet be saved. W E can only make assumptions about Alices response to such impassioned urging. (This reader immediately sought out and read Austens lesser-known Lady Susan.) We do learn that Alice plugs away at her novel and then submits it for publication, risking painful rejection. Her aunt has prepared her for that likelihood too. The eventual commercial success of Alices book it far outsells all of Aunt Fays is reported with rueful pride. Lucky Alice, to be saved from her own inclinations toward indolence and arrogance by Miss Weldons seductive invitation to the City of Invention. For anyone withou t such a wise and loving aunt, there is this splendid little book.

Definition and Examples of the Series in Grammar

Definition and Examples of the Series in Grammar Definition In English grammar, a  series is a  list of three or more items (words,  phrases, or  clauses),  usually arranged in parallel form. Also known as a list or catalog. The items in a series are usually separated by commas (or semicolons if the items themselves contain commas). See Serial Commas. In rhetoric, a series of three parallel items is called a tricolon. A series of four parallel items is a tetracolon (climax). See Examples and Observations below. Also see: Writing With Descriptive ListsAsyndeton and PolysyndetonAuxesisBill Brysons ListsClimactic OrderCoordinate Adjectives  and  Cumulative AdjectivesDiazeugmaHypozeuxisEdward Abbeys List of ExamplesEnd-Focus and End-WeightEnumeratioListicleNikki Giovannis ListsParallelismSystrophe EtymologyFrom the Latin, to join   Examples and Observations With their repetitions, their strong rhythmic qualities- lists are often the most musical section of a piece of prose, as though the writer suddenly broke into song.(Susan Neville, Stuff: Some Random Thoughts on Lists. AWP Feb. 1998)Twitter has become a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers: Shaquille ONeal, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest.(Daniel Lyons, Dont Tweet on Me. Newsweek, Sep. 28, 2009)Tea is the steady companion of the Scottish day, and each hotel, no matter how humble, stocks its rooms with supplies for brew-ups: electric pot for boiling water, ceramic pot for brewing, china cups and small tea creamers, a raft of teas, honey, fresh milk, and lemons.(Emily Hiestand, Afternoon Tea,  The Georgia Review, Summer 1992)Donkey: I dont get it, Shrek. Why didnt you just pull some of that ogre stuff on him? You know, throttle him, lay siege to his fortress, grind his bones to make your bread? You know, the whole ogre t rip.Shrek: Oh, I know. Maybe I could have decapitated an entire village, put their heads on a pike, gotten a knife, cut open their spleens and drunk their fluids. Does that sound good to you?Donkey: Uh, no, not really, no.(Shrek, 2001) Daisy said some cruel and heartless things about me, my personality, my looks, my clothes, my parents, my friends, the way I eat, sleep, drink, walk, laugh, snore, tap my teeth, crack my fingers, belch, fart, wipe my glasses, dance, wear my jeans up around my armpits, put HP sauce on my toast, refuse to watch The X Factor and Big Brother, drive . . . The litany went on and on and was interspersed with tears and sobs.(Sue Townsend,  Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years. Penguin, 2010)Go on vacation with your siblings; you will be back in the treehouse of code words and competitions and all the rough rivalries of those we love but do not choose as family. I am more likely to read trashy books, eat sloppy food, go barefoot, listen to the Allman Brothers, nap and generally act like Im 16 than Id ever be in the dark days of February. Return to a childhood haunt, the campground, the carnival, and let the season serve as a measuring stick, like notches on the kitchen doorway: the last time yo u walked this path, swam this lake, you were in love for the first time or picking a major or looking for work and wondering what comes next.(Nancy Gibbs, To the Time Machine! Time, July 11, 2011) The fictional model for the country gentry is the hard-riding, heavy-drinking, red-faced, Hanoverian-damning, Pox!-exclaiming, no-nonsense Squire Western in Fieldings Tom Jones.(Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People. Overlook, 2000)Throughout [the movie] Sinister, the rooms remain darker than crypts, whether at breakfast or dinnertime, and the sound design causes everything in the house to moan and groan in consort with the heros worrisome quest. I still cant decide what creaks the most: the floors, the doors, the walls, the dialogue, the acting, or the fatal boughs outside.(Anthony Lane, Film Within a Film. The New Yorker, October 15, 2012)Knowing already of the towns carefully nurtured reputation for gentility, I moved [to Bournemouth] in 1977 with the idea that this was going to be a kind of English answer to Bad Ems or Baden-Baden- manicured parks, palm courts with orchestras, swank hotels where men in white gloves kept the brass gleaming, bosomy elderly ladies in mi nk coats walking those little dogs you ache to kick (not out of cruelty, you understand, but from a simple, honest desire to see how far you can make them fly).(Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island. Doubleday, 1995) Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call cowburnt. Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunchgrasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass.(Edward Abbey, Even the Bad Guys Wear White Hats. Harpers Magazine, January 1986)I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the northstar, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a Jan uary thaw, or the first spider in a new house.(Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854) Oh, look, she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provenà §al filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.(P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves, 1934)Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, mee t any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.(President John Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961) The sandwiches were stuffed with alfalfa sprouts and grated cheese, impaled with toothpicks with red, blue, and green cellophane ribbons on them, and there were two large, perfect, crunchy garlic pickles on the side. And a couple of cartons of strawberry Yoplait, two tubs of fruit salad with fresh whipped cream and little wooden spoons, and two large cardboard cups of aromatic, steaming, fresh black coffee.(Thom Jones, Cold Snap, 1995)While politely discussing with him my fathers sudden journey to town, I registered simultaneously and with equal clarity not only his wilting flowers, his flowing tie and the blackheads on the fleshy volutes of his nostrils, but also the dull little voice of a cuckoo coming from afar, and the flash of a Queen of Spain settling on the road, and the remembered impression of the pictures (enlarged agricultural pests and bearded Russian writers) in the well-aerated classrooms of the village school which I had once or twice visited; andto continue a tabulati on that hardly does justice to the ethereal simplicity of the whole process- the throb of some utterly irrelevant recollection (a pedometer I had lost) was released from a neighboring brain cell, and the savor of the grass stalk I was chewing mingled with the cuckoos note and the fritillarys takeoff, and all the while I was richly, serenely aware of my own manifold awareness.(Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Random House, 1966) The one with the assortment of smiles, the oneJailed in himself like a forest, the one who comesBack at evening drunk with despair and turnsInto the wrong night as though he owned it- oh smallDeaf disappearance in the dusk, in which of their shoesWill I find myself tomorrow?(W.S. Merwin, Sire. The Second Four Books of Poems. Copper Canyon Press, 1993)The Length of a SeriesAlthough the four-part series is indicative of a human, emotional, subjective, involved attitude, each additional lengthening of the series increases and magnifies this attitude, and begins to add an element of humor, even absurdity. [William] Hazlitt, writing about human beings, the Public, his own kind, [above] uses the long series to indicate great involvement, great feeling, and a certain sense of humor about it all. The Public is mean, but so ornery that we almost have to laugh.(Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester, The New Strategy of Style. McGraw-Hill, 1978)Usage Tips: Arranging and Concluding a Series- In a n unenumerated series, place the longest element last.(James Kilpatrick)- Do not use etc. at the end of a list or series introduced by the phrase such as or for examplethose phrases already indicate items of the same category that are not named.(G. J. Alred et al., The Business Writers Handbook. Macmillan, 2003) Pronunciation: SEER-eez