دانشجویان ادبیات انگلیسی دانشگاه رازی 86

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elk86 — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:29:18 GMT

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you can read different stories of the

Short Story course(D.r Hooti) in a new

category by the neme of short stories

:New posts are in these

categories:

Short Story

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introduction

elk86 — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 10:14:18 GMT

If you remember, D.r Hooti in the short story class used a power point file, to explain and analyze short stories

As he said, this is the basic of all short stories

I changed its format to text so that you can

use and enjoy it easily

Have fun

Short Story

Analysis of a short story

• What is a short story?

• A short story is a condensed fictional narrative, usually in prose.

• Short stories concern a relatively small number of characters involved in a single action with one theme, and are aimed at exciting in the reader a single emotional response.

• What are the major elements?

• Theme is a moral or a statement abstracted from the story. It is the most important in a serious piece of artistic work. In a sense, it determines all the other elements.

• Setting refers to the particular time and place with other environmental factors.

• Plot is a chain of logical events. In other words, there is causal relationship between the events. Plot is usually divided into several stages: exposition, conflict (complication/ increase of tension), climax, and denouement. Traditional plot features action and is critical in delineating characters, but recent trend focuses on character’s psychological activities.

• What are the major elements?

• Characters can be classified into flat characters and round characters. Flat characters are stereotypical and do not change as the plot develops; round characters are like real human beings, have multi aspects, and usually change over time. In terms of roles played in the story, characters can be categorized into protagonist or hero or heroine and antagonist or villain or adversary forces, with minor ones.

• Atmosphere is part of setting. It is rather the emotional effect intended by and caused in the reader, such as the feeling of coldness, dreary, oppressiveness, the sense of hardness or mystery.

Flat Characters

ü Flat characters have only one or two character traits.

ü They can be described in a short phrase.

ü These are one-dimensional, like a flat piece of cardboard.

Round Characters

ü Round characters have many different character traits.

ü Round characters are more like actual people.

ü They are realistic, three-dimensional, and solid.

Static and Dynamic Characters

ü Static characters do not change much throughout the course of the story.

ü Dynamic characters change as a result of the story’s events.

• Protagonist and Antagonist

ü Protagonist – The main character; the person who drives the action

ü Antagonist – The character or force that stands in the way of the protagonist.

• How to understand characters?

DADI

• Description of the character

• Action of the character

• Dialogue of the character

• Interaction with other character

• There are 4 levels of characterization:

• Biological: gender, age, size, race, appearance.

• Societal: economic status, religion, relationships.

• Psychological: habitual response, desires, motivations.

• Ethical: morals as reflected by choices and decisions.

• What are the five types of conflict?

person vs. self

person vs. person

person vs. nature

person vs. society

person vs. higher power

• Internal vs. External Conflict

• Who wants to fight?

• Internal Conflict

Definition:

A struggle that takes place in a character's mind is called internal conflict.

• Internal Conflict is …

• NOT a visual or tangible opposition.

• a character dealing with his or her own mixed feelings or emotions.

• Example of Internal Conflict

• A character may have to decide between right and wrong or between two solutions to a problem.

• Internal Conflict
Subcategory

• Man vs. himself

• Internal conflict is often referred to as man vs. himself since the struggle is inside one’s head.

• Man vs. Himself Examples

• SARA vs. her worry of losing the necklace

• JAMSHID vs. his fear of being killed

• DAVID vs. his addiction

• Internal Conflict

• Any struggle which is fought between a character and himself.

– The will to win

– Depression

– Choosing between right and wrong

– External Conflict

• Any struggle that is between a character and an outside force.

– Man versus man (woman vs. woman)

– Man versus nature

– Example of External Conflict

• Characters may face several types of outside forces.

• The outside force may be another character. It may be the character and the community.

• The outside force may also be forces of nature. For example, the main character of the story might be struggling against the arctic cold.

• External Conflict
Subcategories

• Man vs. Man

• Man vs. Environment

• Man vs. Man

• This is mostly seen in the form of two characters against each other.

• It can also be represented by a group of people.

• It does not have to be a physical confrontation; it can be a battle between two ideas.

• Man vs. Environment

• Environment is defined as anything surrounding a person.

• This can include weather, objects, activities.

• Basically anything external EXCEPT people.

• Man vs. Environment Examples

• Reza vs. the chilly weather

• Mahsa vs. the Storm

• Conflict
Quick Review

Setting

ü The time in which the story occurs

ü Summer, Fall, Winter

ü May 1957

ü The place of the action in the story

ü London, Kangavar, Harsin, Rome

Suspense

ü Suspense is the uncertainty or anxiety that we feel about what is going to happen next in a story.

ü Write what you want to find out by the end of the story.

Plot Diagram

Exposition

ü The beginning

ü We learn the characters and the setting (the basic situation).

Conflict

ü The basic problem.

Complications

ü The rising action

ü The main character takes some action to resolve the conflict, but meets more problems.

Climax

ü The highest point of emotion in a story.

Resolution

ü The falling action

ü The conflicts in the story are over.

ü We find out what is going to happen to the characters.

ü Denouement (DAY-NOO-MAWN) - French for “the unraveling of the knot.”

Point-of-View

ü 1st person - The narrator is a character in the story and uses the words “I” or “me.”

Point-of-View

ü 3rd person limited - The narrator is NOT a character in the story and only knows the thoughts and feelings of 1 character.

ü 3rd person omniscient - The narrator is NOT a character in the story and knows everything there is to know about the characters and their problems.

ü Omniscient - “All knowing”

Theme

ü The central truth about life that the author is wanting you to think about.

ü Always stated in one sentence.

ü Examples:

ü Uncontrolled anger is destructive.

ü Persistence leads to success.

ü The analysis of the recommended short stories

• Finding a theme

• - A rose for Emily by W. Faulkner

• -The use of force by William Carlos William

• Looking at characters

• -Tears, Idle tears by Elizabeth Bowen

• -I’m a Fool by Sherwood Anderson

• Commenting on Irony

– My sad face by Heinrich Boll

– The Guest by Albert Camus

• Analyzing point of view

• -The Lottery by Shirely Jackson

• -First Confession by Frank O’Connor

• Commenting on Symbol

• -The Masque of the red death by Edgar Alan Poe

• -The Guest by Albert Camus

• -

Thank you for your attention!

WISH YOU ALL BEST OF LUCK

HOOTI

I'M A FOOL

elk86 — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:59:18 GMT

Focus on the characters of this story

I'M A FOOL

by Sherwood Anderson

It was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to face. And it all came about through my own foolishness too . Even yet sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or kick myself Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be a kind of satisfaction in making myself look cheap by telling of it.

It began at three o'clock one October afternoon as I sat in the grandstand at the fall trotting and pacing meet at Sandusky, Ohio.

To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be sitting in the grandstand at all. During the summer before I had left my home town with Harry Whitehead and, with a nigger named Burt, had taken a job as swipe with one of the two horses Harry was campaigning through the fall race meets that year. Mother cried and my sister Mildred, who wanted to get a job as a school teacher in our town that fall, stormed and scolded about the house all during the week before I left. They both thought it something disgraceful that one of our family should take a place as a swipe with race horses. I've an idea Mildred thought my taking the place would stand in the way of her getting the job she'd been working so long for.

But after all I had to work, and there was no other work to be got. A big lumbering fellow of nineteen couldn't just hang around the house and I had got too big to mow people's lawns and sell newspapers. Little chaps who could get next to people's sympa

thies by their sizes were always getting jobs away from me. There was one fellow who kept saying to everyone who wanted a lawn mowed or a cistern cleaned, that he was saving money to work his way through college, and I used to lay awake nights thinking up ways to injure him without being found out. I kept thinking of wagons running over him and bricks falling on his head as he walked along the street. But never mind him.

I got the place with Harry and I liked Burt fine. We got along splendid together. He was a big nigger with a lazy sprawling body and soft, kind eyes, and when it came to a fight he could hit like Jack Johnson. He had Bucephalus, a big black pacing stallion that could do 2.09 or 2. 10, if he had to, and I had a little gelding named Doctor Fritz that never lost a race all fall when Harry wanted him to win.

We set out from home late in July in a box car with the two horses and after that, until late November, we kept moving along to the race meets and the fairs. It was a peachy time for me, I'll say that. Sometimes now I think that boys who are raised regular in houses, and never have a fine nigger like Burt for best friend, and go to high schools and college, and never steal anything, or get drunk a little, or learn to swear from fellows who know how, or come walking up in front of a grandstand in their shirt sleeves and with dirty horsey pants on when the races are going on and the grandstand is full of people all dressed up--what's the use of talking about it? Such fellows don't know nothing at all. They've never had no opportunity.

But I did. Burt taught me how to rub down a horse and put the bandages on after a race and steam a horse out and a lot of valuable things for any man to know. He could wrap a bandage on a horse's leg so smooth that if it had been the same color you would think it was his skin, and I guess he'd have been a big driver too and got to the top like Murphy and Walter Cox and the others if he hadn't been black.

Gee whizz, it was fun. You got to a county seat town, maybe say on a Saturday or Sunday, and the fair began the next Tuesday and lasted until Friday afternoon. Doctor Fritz would be, say in the 2.25 trot on Tuesday afternoon and on Thursday afternoon

Bucephalus would knock 'em cold in the "free-for-all" pace. It left you a lot of time to hang around and listen to horse talk, and see Burt knock some yap cold that got too gay, and you'd find out about horses and men and pick up a lot of stuffyou could use all the rest of your life, if you had some sense and salted down what you heard and felt and saw.

And then at the end of the week when the race meet was over, and Harry had run home to tend up to his livery stable business, you and Burt hitched the two horses to carts and drove slow and steady across country to the place for the next meeting, so as to not over-heat the horses, etc., etc., you know.

Gee whizz, gosh amighty, the nice hickorynut and beechnut and oaks and other kinds of trees along the roads, all brown and red, and the good smells, and Burt singing a song that was called Deep River, and the country girls at the windows of houses and everything. You can stick your colleges up your nose for all me. I guess I know where I got my education.

Why, one of those little burgs of towns you come to on the way, say now on a Saturday afternoon, and Burt says, "Let's lay up here." And you did.

And you took the horses to a livery stable and fed them, and you got your good clothes out of a box and put them on.

And the town was full of farmers gaping, because they could see you were race horse people, and the kids maybe never see a nigger before and was afraid and run away when the two of us walked down their main street.

And that was before prohibition and all that foolishness, and so you went into a saloon, the two of you, and all the yaps come and stood around, and there was always someone pretended he was horsey and knew things and spoke up and began asking questions, and all you did was to lie and lie all you could about what horses you had, and I said I owned them, and then some fellow said "will you have a drink of whiskey" and Burt knocked his eye out the way he could say, offhand like, "Oh well, all right, I'm agreeable to a little nip. I'll split a quart with you." Gee whizz.

But that isn't what I want to tell my story about. We got home late in November and I promised mother I'd quit the race horses for good. There's a lot of things you've got to promise a mother because she don't know any better.

And so, there not being any work in our town any more than when I left there to go to the races, I went off to Sandusky and got a pretty good place taking care of horses for a man who owned a teaming and delivery and storage and coal and real estate business there. It was a pretty good place with good eats, and a day off each week, and sleeping on a cot in a big barn, and mostly just shovelling in hay and oats to a lot of big good-enough skates of horses, that couldn't have trotted a race with a toad. I wasn't dissatisfied and I could send money home.

And then, as I started to tell you, the fall races come to Sandusky and I got the day offend I went. I left the job at noon and had on my good clothes and my new brown derby hat, I'd just bought the Saturday before, and a stand-up collar.

First of all I went downtown and walked about with the dudes. I've always thought to myself, "Put up a good front" and so I did it. I had forty dollars in my pocket and so I went into the West House, a big hotel, and walked up to the cigar stand. "Give me three twenty-five cent cigars, " I said. There was a lot of horsemen and strangers and dressed-up people from other towns standing around in the lobby and in the bar, and I mingled amongst them In the bar there was a fellow with a cane and a Windsor tie on t hat it made me sick to look at him. I like a man to be a man and dress up, but not to

please and looking down on the swipes coming out with their horses, and with their dirty horsey pants on and the horse blankets swung over their shoulders, same as I had been doing all the year before. I liked one thing about the same as the other, sitting up there and feeling grand and being down there and looking up at the yaps and feeling grander and more important too. One thing's about as good as another, if you take it just right. I've often said that.

Well, right in front of me, in the grandstand that day, there was a fellow with a couple of girls and they was about my age. The young fellow was a nice guy all right. He was the kind maybe that goes to college and then comes to be a lawyer or maybe a newspaper editor or something like that, but he wasn't stuck on himself. There are some of that kind are all right and he was one of the ones.

He had his sister with him and another girl and the sister looked around over his shoulder, accidental at first, not intending to start anything--she wasn't that kind--and her eyes and mine happened to meet.

You know how it is. Gee, she was a peach! She had on a soft dress, kind of a blue stuff and it looked carelessly made, but was well sewed and made and everything. I knew that much. I blushed when she looked right at me and so did she. She was the nicest girl I've ever seen in my life. She wasn't stuck on herself and she could talk proper grammar without being like a school teacher or something like that. What I mean is, she was O.K. I think maybe her father was well-to-do, but not rich to make her chesty because she was his daughter, as some are. Maybe he owned a drug store or a drygoods store in their home town, or something like that She never told me and I never asked.

My own people are all O.K. too when you come to that. My grandfather was Welsh and over in the old country, in Wales h was--but never mind that.

The first heat of the first race come off and the young fellow setting there with the two girls left them and went down to make

a bet. I knew what he was up to, but he didn't talk big and noisy and let everyone around know he was a sport as some do. He wasn't that kind. Well, he come back and I heard him tell the two girls what horse he'd bet on, and when the heat was trotted they all halfgot to their feet and acted in the excited, sweaty way people do when they've got money down on a

The Use of Force

elk86 — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:39:18 GMT

Focus on the theme of the story

The use of force

William Carlos Williams

They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick.

When I arrived I was met by the mother, a big startled looking woman, very clean and apologetic who merely said, Is this the doctor? and let me in. In the back, she added. You must excuse us, doctor, we have her in the kitchen where it is warm. It is very damp here sometimes.

The child was fully dressed and sitting on her father's lap near the kitchen table. He tried to get up, but I motioned for him not to bother, took off my overcoat and started to look things over. I could see that they were all very nervous, eyeing me up and down distrustfully. As often, in such cases, they weren't telling me more than they had to, it was up to me to tell them; that's why they were spending three dollars on me.

The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes, and no expression to her face whatever. She did not move and seemed, inwardly, quiet; an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. But her face was flushed, she was breathing rapidly, and I realized that she had a high fever. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers.

She's had a fever for three days, began the father and we don't know what it comes from. My wife has given her things, you know, like people do, but it don't do no good. And there's been a lot of sickness around. So we tho't you'd better look her over and tell us what is the matter.

As doctors often do I took a trial shot at it as a point of departure. Has she had a sore throat?

Both parents answered me together, No . . . No, she says her throat don't hurt her.

Does your throat hurt you? added the mother to the child. But the little girl's expression didn't change nor did she move her eyes from my face.

Have you looked?

I tried to, said the mother, but I couldn't see.

As it happens we had been having a number of cases of diphtheria in the school to which this child went during that month and we were all, quite apparently, thinking of that, though no one had as yet spoken of the thing.

Well, I said, suppose we take a look at the throat first. I smiled in my best professional manner and asking for the child's first name I said, come on, Mathilda, open your mouth and let's take a look at your throat.

Nothing doing.

Aw, come on, I coaxed, just open your mouth wide and let me take a look. Look, I said opening both hands wide, I haven't anything in my hands. Just open up and let me see.

Such a nice man, put in the mother. Look how kind he is to you. Come on, do what he tells you to. He won't hurt you.

At that I ground my teeth in disgust. If only they wouldn't use the word "hurt" I might be able to get somewhere. But I did not allow myself to be hurried or disturbed but speaking quietly and slowly I approached the child again.

As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor.

Both the mother and father almost turned themselves inside out in embarrassment and apology. You bad girl, said the mother, taking her and shaking her by one arm. Look what you've done. The nice man . . .

For heaven's sake, I broke in. Don't call me a nice man to her. I'm here to look at her throat on the chance that she might have diphtheria and possibly die of it. But that's nothing to her. Look here, I said to the child, we're going to look at your throat. You're old enough to understand what I'm saying. Will you open it now by yourself or shall we have to open it for you)

Not a move. Even her expression hadn't changed. Her breaths however were coming faster and faster. Then the battle began. I had to do it. I had to have a throat culture for her own protection. But first I told the parents that it was entirely up to them. I explained the danger but said that I would not insist on a throat examination so long as they would take the responsibility.

If you don't do what the doctor says you'll have to go to the hospital, the mother admonished her severely.

Oh yeah? I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me.

The father tried his best, and he was a big man but the fact that she was his daughter, his shame at her behavior and his dread of hurting her made him release her just at the critical times when I had almost achieved success, till I wanted to kill him. But his dread also that she might have diphtheria made him tell me to go on, go on though he himself was almost fainting, while the mother moved back and forth behind us raising and lowering her hands in an agony of apprehension.

Put her in front of you on your lap, I ordered, and hold both her wrists.

But as soon as he did the child let out a scream. Don't, you're hurting me. Let go of my hands. Let them go I tell you. Then she shrieked terrifyingly, hysterically. Stop it! Stop it! You're killing me!

Do you think she can stand it, doctor! said the mother.

You get out, said the husband to his wife. Do you want her to die of diphtheria?

Come on now, hold her, I said.

Then I grasped the child's head with my left hand and tried to get the wooden tongue depressor between her teeth. She fought, with clenched teeth, desperately! But now I also had grown furious--at a child. I tried to hold myself down but I couldn't. I know how to expose a throat for inspection. And I did my best. When finally I got the wooden spatula behind the last teeth and just the point of it into the mouth cavity, she opened up for an instant but before I could see anything she came down again and gripping the wooden blade between her molars she reduced it to splinters before I could get it out again.

Aren't you ashamed, the mother yelled at her. Aren't you ashamed to act like that in front of the doctor?

Get me a smooth-handled spoon of some sort, I told the mother. We're going through with this. The child's mouth was already bleeding. Her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks. Perhaps I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more. No doubt it would have been better. But I have seen at least two children lying dead in bed of neglect in such cases, and feeling that I must get a diagnosis now or never I went at it again. But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it.

The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one's self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end.

In a final unreasoning assault I overpowered the child's neck and jaws. I forced the heavy silver spoon back of her teeth and down her throat till she gagged. And there it was--both tonsils covered with membrane. She had fought valiantly to keep me from knowing her secret. She had been hiding that sore throat for three days at least and lying to her parents in order to escape just such an outcome as this.

Now truly she was furious. She had been on the defensive before but now she attacked. Tried to get off her father's lap and fly at me while tears of defeat blinded her eyes.

A rose for Emily

elk86 — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:36:18 GMT

For this story, D.r Hooti asked us to focus on

its theme

A Rose for Emily

by William Faulkner

WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.

They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."

"But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?"

"I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--"

"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But, Miss Emily--"

"See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."

So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.

That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market basket.

"Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.

"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.

"Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "

"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."

The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

"It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't. .."

"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

III

SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- -

without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."

She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her.

"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said.

"Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom--"

"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."

The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--"

"Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?"

"Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--"

"I want arsenic."

The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."

Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."

So THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club--that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.

Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.

So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.

So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.

Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro

He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.

The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

دالان بهشت

elk86 — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:32:41 GMT

دالان بهشت

داستان‌ زندگي‌ دختري‌ كه‌ بنابه‌ تصميم‌ والدينش‌ ازدواج‌ مي‌كند، خيلي‌ زود شكست‌ مي‌خورد و... خدايا چقدر نفهم‌ و كودن‌ بودم‌
كه‌ درك‌ نمي‌كردم‌. حس‌ حسادت‌ زنانه‌ كجا و غيرت‌ و تعصب‌ مردانه‌ كجا! حتي‌ مهلت‌ نشد چشم‌هايش‌ را ببينم‌، سيلي‌اش‌ چنان‌ سخت‌ و محكم‌وآني‌،مثل‌برِتوي‌صورتم‌خوردكه‌هيچ‌چيزنديدم‌.

پسر يا دختر كدام‌ مقصرند؟ و آيا اين‌ پرسش‌ از ريشه‌ اشتباه‌ نيست‌؟ پسر جواني‌ تحصيل‌ كرده‌ است‌، زندگي‌ اجتماعي‌ موفقي‌ دارد و رفتارهايش‌ توسط‌ هر دو خانواده‌ تأييد مي‌شود. دختر اما بي‌تجربه‌ است‌، از پشت‌ ميز مدرسه‌ و از بازي‌ كودكانه‌ به‌ جايي‌ پرتاب‌ شده‌ است‌ كه‌ نمي‌شناسدش‌ و بزرگ‌ترها زندگي‌ زناشويي‌اش‌ مي‌خوانند. همه‌ چيز عليه‌ دختر است‌.
نويسنده‌ اما به‌ ياري‌ سطرهاي‌ نانوشته‌اش‌ چيز ديگري‌ را به‌ تصوير مي‌كشد. سپيدخواني‌ها از به‌ مسلخ‌ بردن‌ يك‌ قرباني‌ حكايت‌ مي‌كنند. نازي‌ صفوي‌، 38 سال‌ دارد، ذاتاً نويسنده‌ است‌ و در آثارش‌ بيش‌ از هر چيز به‌ زنان‌ مي‌پردازد. به‌ زنان‌ و آزادي‌هاي‌ بديهي‌ اما به‌ كسوت‌ آرزو درآمده‌شان‌. اين منم، خوشبخت ترين زن دنيا، كه در تاريك و روشن جاده اي كه به آسمان وصل مي شود، در حالي كه احساس مي كنم خود بهشت را در كنار دارم، همراه نيمه ديگر وجودم به دالان بهشت مي روم

Gone With the Wind

elk86 — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:30:40 GMT

Gone with the Wind is an American War & Peace. This is serious literature, which won the Pulitzer Prize, no less. Most people don't see past the epic plot (which isn't as cut and dried as you may think) or the love story, but this is no less than a successful attempt to reclaim a discarded culture. It is not about crinoline and lace, it is about the Apocalypse and how losers of the counter-revolution must learn to live in a place where all their politics, personal or civil, are demolished. Scarlett O'Hara is popular because she is an American, driven, materialistic, sentimental and utterly ruthless. Rhett Bulter is the tragic character of this book; the way of life and ideals he disdained are killing him, and he suffers like no one else in this post-apocalyptic landscape. His departure at the end is an act of contrition as much as a romantic failure; he had tried to recreate the materialism of the ante-bellum world, but neglected the spirituality (such as it is) of men like Ashley Wilkes. Both men, the dreamer and the realist end up alone in a very sterile place. This book is proto-feminist as well. Scarlett survives, even as everything around her dies, but in the end, she too is alone.

Don't dumb this masterpiece down. The movie fails to capture even a tenth of the depth here. And that awful sequel! Caused by the mistake that this book is some kind of romance novel. This is Art, and you can't stick a new ending on it, any more than you can a great painting or musical composition.

This review is from: Gone With the Wind (Hardcover) by:Margaret Mitchell

Literary Schools By Bahram M Rashidy

elk86 — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:09:01 GMT

In the name of God

Literary Schools By Bahram M Rashidy

This article is a very short review of developments of literature in Europe until the end of 19th century. To study developments of literature in Europe we must stady schools and movements which have appeared and disappeared throughout history because of various reasons. But what are schools, schools in literature are groups of writers or artists whose style of work are similar.

We haven’t had such classification in persian literature until “Malekoshoaraye Bahar” catergorised persian literature to four styles, as you know “Khorasani, Araghi, Hendi, Dowreye Bazgasht.” But in Europe at first we must start from “Ancient Greece” where western civilization started. The Greek with thrir brilliant culture have had a strong influence on Europe, but until 15th century church had absolute power in Europe and there were not any significant literature and artwork.

In this century a movement appeared in Italy called “Humanism” which brought back Greek rationalism and changed the christian impression of human to a good and trustable being and helped the advent. Of “Renaissance” which was the rise of modern world and a cultural rebirth. People schowed an interest in the ideas and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, Gutenberg invented printing and writers and anthors like “Dante Alighieri” with his book “Divine Comedy” had started a new era in literature. It was in 16th century that for the first time a specific style for literature appeared, “Classicisme”, it was a return to Greek and Roman art and literature. classicisme had some principles like following specific rules and previons writers, and showing reality. They focused on the nature, wisdom, the educative role of art and morality.

Actually this educative role of art was very controversial, considering a group of artists who said “Art for art's sake” in the following centuries. Classicisme was dominant style until18th century especially in France with writers Like. Moiere, Boileau and Racine. In England there wasn’t an obvious classicisme and it is usually called pre-romanticism period, however, John Milton whith his book “Paradise Lost” which is a long poem about the story of Adam and Eve and how they were driven out of the Garden of Eden is fomous.

As time passed people understood that they don’t have to follow some restrictive rules in literature. French philosopher Jeam Jacques Rousseou’s ideas had a great effect on artists, they said we can trust human senes and feeling as well as wisdom Societies were getting more complicated than before and monarchies were losing their power. Royal art of classicisme changed to a new style called “Romanticisim” which first started in Britain about the last decades of 18th century. Romanticism was partly influenced by the American and French revolutions. It’s main themes were imagination, feeling, the love of nature and interest in past. Classicist authors wanted to write about beauty and goodness but romanticist authors wanted to show both good and evil aspects of life. Classicists used Greek sources in their works but romanticists mostly used their national and christian elements. Two prominent British poets “Samuel Taylor coleridge” and “William Wordsworth” published their book “Lyrical Ballads” which introduced romanticsm to the world.

“Lord Byron”, British poet who was the greatest poet of his time was a leading figure in this movement. His work including “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” and “Don Juan”. He was an immoral person and died at 37.

Famous novels like “Wuthering heights” by “Emily Bronte” and “Frankenstein” by “Mary Shelley” have been written in this period. In Germany “Guthe” and “Schlegel brothers” and in France “Victor Hugo” and “Voltair” were very famons. Hugo who was the leader of this movent in France and called it "freedom of art".

In the middle of 19th century romanticism came to an end. People wanted to see reality and they were fed up with those sentimental writings. French novelist “Honore de Balzak” wrote stories which were the beginning of a new style, “Realism”. He portrayed his society with all its features. In romanticism, writer’s feelings were a part of story and imagination was more important than reality but realism threw away these features. When a realistic writer portays his society, it’s simple and easy to understand, it is usually about ordinarypeople. In France, “Honore de Balzac”, “Standhal” and “Gustave Flaubert” with his novel “Madame Bovary” which was considered as the bible of realism, were famons realistic authors. “Charles Dickens, Robert Luis Stevenson, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway” were Famous British and American realistic authors and in Russia which had a strong realism, “Feodor Dostoyovsky” writer of “Crime and punishment” and “Leo Tolstoy” writer of the greatest realistic russian novel “War and peace”. There was a kind of realism which was called scientific realism at first but later it became a new and dominant style called “Naturaism”. Naturalists were impressed with science at that time, books like “origin of specices” by “Darwin”. They were very pessimistic and most of the time they wrote about unequalities and the oppressed.

They believed human race is doomed to annihilation. There was a common mistake in 19th century, it was trusting in science of that time. They even thought steam engine will be the last invention. “Emile Zola” French writer was leader of this movement. His famons novel is “Germinal”. “Henric Ibsen” norwegian paywrite and American writer “John Steinbeck” are well-known naturalistic authors.

There was a group of poets who wanted to change dominant rules of poetry and by now they had found out that world is not so simple.

They had obtained eastern theosophy. They said that world is full of signs that we must interpret than. They established a movement called "Symbolism"0 “Charles Boudelair” who shocked the world with his poems “the flowers of evil” was one of the pioneers of this movement.

Symbolists confessed that human beings know nothing. They usually thought about death and human’s fears. Their plays and writings are about mysterious palaces in imaginary countries in unknown times. “Edgar Allan Poe” American poet was the best symbolistic author. His famous works are “The fall of house of usher”, “The pit and the pendulum” and “The murders in the rue morgue”. His poems are: “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”. He invented modern detective story. “Ezra Pound” whose best-known poems are “The Cantos” and “William Butler Yeats” in Britain and in France “Stephen Mallarme” and “Paul Verain” and In Germany “Reiner Maria Rilke” were famous symbolistic authors. Both Poe and Rilke have had a strong effect on “Sadegh Hedayat”.

Twentieth Century:

Twentieth century started with war and disappointed theorists and intellectuals. It’s not so easy to write about schools in 20th century, they’re very complicated and some times are not distinguishable clearly. So I just name the most important ones with a short explaination.

- Impressionism: it was borrowed from painting and was about presenting thoughts as they appear to artist at a particular moment.

- Expressionism: in this school the artis’s subjective expression of inner experiences was emphasised and an inner feeling was expressed through a distorted expression of reality.

- Futurism: expressed values of machine age.

- Dadaism: a nihilistic movement based on irrationality and rejecting accepted laws of beauty.

- Surrealism: represented thoughts and dreams in a strange way. French poet “Andre Breton” developed it out of Dadaism and it was even more nihilistic than Dadaism.

- Existentialism: a philosophical movement assumed that every body is free and is responsible for what they do.

- Post–modernism: it is against established modernism and usually about absurdity of this world.

Bibliography

- مکتب های ادبی: رضا سید حسینی

- Literary Schools: Farah Yeganeh

To all Clever women

elk86 — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:38:18 GMT

compiled bye: Ali Salehi

Headmaster: Shadi Charganeh

To all Clever women eleven people were hanging on a rope

Under a helicopter, ten men and one woman. The

Rope was not strong enough to carry them all, so

They decided that one had to leave, because

Otherwise they were all going to fall. They weren't able to

Name that person, until the woman gave a very

Touching speech. She said that she would voluntarily let

Go of the rope, because, as a woman, she was used

To giving up everything for her husband and kids or

For men in general, and was used to always making

Sacrifices with little in return. As soon as she

Finished her speech, all the men started clapping.

Don't forget your idea

Nasreddin had lost his donkey

elk86 — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:36:41 GMT

Compiled bye: Shadi Charganeh

Nasreddin had lost his donkey. He was going about looking for it every where, and while he was looking, he was singing gaily.

One of his neighbors saw him and said, "Hullo, Nasreddin. What are you doing?"

“I am looking for my donkey, "answered Nasreddin.

"Don't you know where it is?” Asked the neighbor. "No, I don'."

"Then why are you singing so gaily? Usually when somebody loses something, he is sad. "

"Yes, that is quite true, "answered Nasreddin.”But you see, I am not yet sure that my donkey is lost. My last hope is that it is behind that hill over there. If you wait a little, you will hear how I will cry and complain if it is not there!"

Please, don’t forget your idea thank you