Single Man by Charles Dickens

Spector- Ghost
It's about a single man on the railroad who gets a sign from a spector when soeons is about to die. The last time he gets hit is by a train He keeps seeing a lady falls from the train.

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

-Propecy-What's goin to happen
-Raven is a prophecy. It has been associated with mystery, evil, omens and death.
*End rhyme-smiliar or identical sounds at the end of lines Ex:last word rhyming
*Internal Rhyme- rhymes within a line Ex: words within, tapping, napping
*Rhyme scheme- basic pattern of the end rhymes Ex: abc last words and if they rhme
*Stansa- a group of words: like a paragraph

-One December he is just about to fall asleep when he hears a knock on the door.
-It was the ghost of Maiden Lenore
-Keeps repeating over and over because he is scared
-He tells the person to be sorry for he was napping. But when he opens the door no one is there.
-He is scared because no one is there and all he whispers in Lenore over and over!
-He shuts the door, but then there comes another knock. he believes it is only the wind
-He opens the shutter and it is a Raven
-He is asking the Raven why he is coming if he is bringing the death.
-All the Raven says "Nevermore".
-The man pulls a chair up to the window and looks up at the bird. he wonders why this.
-The man asks God to give him relief from his memories of Lenore. he drinks in hopes of these thoughts leaving him.
-All the Raven says is "Nevermore"
-The man accuses the Raven of being a prophet, of the devil and evil. Either sent by the Devil or someone else, he asks if he will ever be relieved.
-Raven "Nevermore"
-He tells the Raven to leave
-Raven "Nevermore"
The Raven is a deamon, the lamp casts the Raven's shadow on the floor as the Raven takes the man's soul and kills the man.

The Masque of the Red Death Short story by Edgar Allan Poe

*The most scary part is the suspense
*When you know there is something behind the door and you see it, you are relieved, but scared at the same time
*Also being scary is the unknown and the music. Mute a movie and you won't think it is that scary.
*You anticipate what's coming
*The thing that scares people is the leading up to the scary action, not the actual "scary" thing itself
*Allegory- work with two layers of meaning. Persons, objects, and events stand for abstract ideas or qualities
*Prince
-Possible meaning: even a prince dies eventually
-Possible lesson: no matter how high you sit, it won't save you
*The Abbey
-Possible meaning: sort of a safe place
-Possible lesson: walls can't protect you from everything
*Series of 7 rooms
-Possible meaning: all rooms had life, but the last one. Black
-Possible lesson: many seasons of life
*Clock
-Possible meaning: life is a ticking clock
-Possible lesson: all our days are numbered
*Stranger
-Possible meaning: he brings death
-Possible lesson: no one can escape death; no matter what you do

-Talks about the disease
-Prince Prospero is happy and wise
-Castellated abbey-building to resembel a monstary
-He built it making everything new. He brought ballet-dancers, musicians. All safe from "Red death"
-He had a party for his a thousand friends
Improvisating- poets who recite verses that they make up as they go along
-Rooms all different in color; Seven rooms
1. blue
2. purple
3. green
4. orange
5. while
6. violet
7. black velvet (window panes color red)
-No light in any room
-Huge clock in the black room. When it rang out everyone stop and was silent
-The party would be happy and alive then when the clock rang everybody would be sad and just look around and laugh nervously.
-The duke didn't like the fine things. People thought he was mad
-Masquerades had bizarre appearances
-No one was to go in Room 7
-At midnight everyone stops and is quiet and still. When everyone is standing still someone walks in
-Prince is in the blue room when he orders the man to take off his mask
-Figure was tall and had clothing from the grave. Look as he was sprinkled blood. Like the "Red Death"
-The Prince goes up to him and the figure stabs him with a dagger.
-The skull masked man was Red Death. He killed everyone who was at the party. The clock stopped working also.
*LESSON
- No one can cheat death. No matter what you do. Death comes in any way. It doesn't matter how it comes in. You will die so before you die you need to live life.

The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving

-Set in Boston, Mass
-A tree had lots of money being buried by a pirate. Some people say that the devil hid the money. But Kidd never return to the sport because he was hanged for being a pirate.
-Tom and his wife were so miserable together that they would cheat each other.
-Their house was pitiful; Iron bars, trees look like a haunted house.
-Fought a lot too
-Tom took a shortcut home through the swamp when he stopped at a old Indian village. When he was sitting he found an old tomahawk.
-This guy comes from behind and is angry with him. He's Indian, but he is covered in soot to make him look black.
The black guy goes by various names. Wild huntsman, black miner etc.
-Talks to Quakers and Anabaptists
-They had a long talk and they soon become friends. Black guy told him about the money.
-He comes home and finds out Absalom Crowninshield is dead.
-Tom and the guy make a deal about the money. He isn't suppose to tell anyone about it.
-Tom goes home and decides to tell his wife about the money. She wants him to do it, but since she wants him to do it he won't because he doesn't want to make her happy.
-The wife decides to talk to the guy. She goes, but comes back empty handed. She goes back again with everything she owned and never returned.
-He comes home and doesn't think anything of it. But after while of her not being there, he gets scared.
-Many stores came up. She got stuck in the swamp, eloped with a guy and moved. Others said a tall black man came out of the swamp with an ax and a bag full of stuff.
-One of the stories said that Tom went to go look for her, when he was about to give up when he looked up and saw her apron and a vulture. When he got to the tree the vulture flew away, but Tom got the apron only to find a heart and a liver.
-tom thought the black man hepled him because of his wife dying. He wanted to pay him back.
-They get together and talk but the money. The black man wants to give it to the slave ship, but he refuses.
-Black man tells him he has to open a broker's shop in Boston.
-He opens his shop and everyone goes to him thus making him rich and taking everyone's money.
-He started to become a bragger and going to church and becoming a LOUD Christian.
-As he got older he became more crazy. One incident is when he cemented his horse to the ground because it was believed that the earth was going to turn over and when it did he would be able to ride away.
-One day when he was old and finishing a deal there was a knock on the door. The black man was there. He tries to get away, but he didn't have any of his bibles with him. the black man whisks him away and the people never saw him again.
-The black man was like the devil. The deal was that he could have the money, but when he has to sell his soul to the devil. And that's what the black man came to get him for. His time was up.

Notes on Gothic Literature

*Gothic Literature
-is characterized by grotesque characters, bizarre situations, and violent events.
-orginated in Europe
-United States during the 19th Century
-Edgar Allan Poe and Hawthrone (Stephen King Now)
-Age of Reason, Fear of Gods, and Puritans
*Romanticism
-romanticism writers saw: Basic elements of human nature
.limitation of reason
.celebrated the individual spirit (Puritans believed in a whole)
.emotions
.imagination
.splendors of natures than the fear of God
.fasination of supernatural
-Washington Irving: one of the promnant writers in the USA
-romantic preoccupation with atmosphere, sentiment and optimism
*Transcendentalists
-transcendent forms of truth exist beyond reason and experience
-"Every individual is capable of discovering this higher truth on his or her own through intuition" Ralph Waldo Emerson
*Dark Side of Individualism
-gothic architecture
.gothic catherderals
.high stained glass windows
.gargoyes: mascot of gothic
-Imaginative distortion of reality
-Imagination led to the threshold of the unknown
-Shadowy region where the fantastic (dark, great) the demonic (demon) and the insane region
-Gothic tradition can be called the Dark Side of Individualism
-Romantics looked at the individual saw hope
-Gothic looked they saw potential evil
*Poe
-Many of his stories were in medieval castles, decaying ancient estates provied weird and terrifying events for the settings
-Male narrotors are insane
-Female characters are beautiful and dead (or dying)
-Plots are extreme situations-Not just murder
.live burials
.physical and mental torture
.retribution from beyond the grave (coming from the dead)
-Only when put in extremem natures show your true colors which was the dark side.
-Romantics would show the good side
*Hawthorne
-Exmained the human hear under various conditions:
.fear
.greet
.vanity
.mistrust
.betrayal

Gothic Literature

Gothic Literature is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.Gothic_fiction English author, Horace Walpole, was believed to be the founder of Gothic Literature with his novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764.Ann Radcliffe's The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) are cited as the defining parameters of the genre.
http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction
http://www.zittaw.com/canon.htm
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/152/844.jpg
http://considertheevidence.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/.pond/otranto.jpg.w180h235.jpg


The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. Romanticism first orginated in the 18th century in Western Europe. It's the next generation after Gothic times. Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. In the United States, romantic gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). Romanticism isn't just literature. Various forms were found it. Music and painting were a few.
http://75.24.205.227/guenther-history/westernciv2/Romanticism%20and%20Nature.jpg
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/508675/Romanticism


Trancendentalists are what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they were trying to be different from.Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made.Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement. Its first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836.Emerson published his first essay, Nature. Other people who were to believed trancendentalists are Emily Dickison, men like Theodore Parker- and Thomas Wentworth Higginson- who identified themselves as Transcendentalists, also worked for freedom of the slaves and for women's freedom.
http://www.transcendentalists.com/what.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
http://transcendentalismblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834c9da8169e201127936cd6428a4-pi

The Crucible

The elements of plot in drama are:
expostion
rising actiong
climax
falling action
resolution

Foil is a minor character who helps better understand of the main character

Speech devices:
monologue- long speech spoken by a single character to himself/herself or to the audience
solioquy- monologus in which a character speaks to be unware of the audience (Scrubs guy)
aside-short speech or comment that is by a character to the audience, but is beyond the hearing of other characters who are present (Zach from Save By The Bell)

Spectral evidence- the testimony of a church member who clamied to have seen a person's spirtit performing witchraft-was enough to sentence the accused to death

Crucible means: a sever test or trial


Act One:
The Crucible is set in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. The town is ruled by God's way. Rules for everyone and everything. Abigail and all her friends are caught dancing around a fire with Tituba. Reverend Parris cathes them and Betty, his daughter, falls down scared. She gets into a like coma and won't come out of it. Everyone in the town is talking about witchcraft which scares Parris because he doesn't want to get blamed for it. He calls for Reverend Hale to come and look at Betty. All the girls have a meeting about it and Abigail tells all of them that they will blame Tituba about the whole thing. Reverened Hale comes and talks to the girls and everyone else about the whole ordeal. Abigail confesses it was Tituba who was doing the witchcraft. They go to her and she doesn't admit to it until Parris beats her. Then she blames Goody Osborn and Goody Sara. When the girls see that they then they all confess to witchery and yell at random names. John Proctor and Abigail have a talk about the whole thing. They had an affair until Elizabeth found out and fired her.
Act Two
John comes over and Elizabeth questions about his whereabouts. She also talks to him about the affair with Abigail which he gets upset and gets mad at her. Mary Warren comes and John gets mad because he forbid her to go town and watch the court. She gives a doll that has a pin in the stomach to Elizabeth. John begins to whip Mary when she yells that she saved Elizabeth's life today. Abigial accused her of witchery, but Mary tells them that Elizabeth was no such woman. Mr. Hale comes along and talks to them about the whole problem. He doesn't want to believe that Elizabeth is a witch. When Hale is about to leave John comes to him and tells him that the whole witch thing is a lie. Abigail lied to everyone to protect herself. When they are speaking Giles comes along and tells them that his wife was taking by the court. While they are talking Cheever comes along and searches the house because of the warrant that was made against them. He finds the popped that Mary gave Elizabeth. Earlier that day Abigail got hurt by a needle that was stuck in her stomach. Like on the doll. Abigail told the people that it was Elizabeth. Proctor freaks and rips up the warrant. Elizabeth is arrested and leaves the house. Proctor gets upset and tells Mary that she will go against the court the next day and tell what is really going on. She stares to bawl and says she cannot do it.
Act Three
The court is talking to all the women that are charged with witchcraft. When Proctor comes about and tries to stall the court. They tell him that his wife is pregnant, but doesn't believe them. Danforth tells him that if she is really pregnant she can live for a year until she gives birth and then she must die. Francis gives a paper to Danforth showing him ninety one names that believe that these women aren't really witches. Proctor confesses to an affair with Abigail.
Act Four
Everything is different in Salem. Sarah Good and Tituba go home to Barboadoes. Abigail runs off and steals Parris money. The court gives Proctor a choice. He can confess to being a witch and right it down. But he must also tell the names of other people. OR he can die. He starts to right down the confession, but he finds out that they will post it on the door. If he does end up living his name will be put to shamed for the rest of life. He figures this out and gets pissed and rips up the paper. He ends up dying.