🎧 Audio Recording Here Finding Balance Between Modern Brevity & Classical Richness Keep it short The current push for brevity, what we might call the “Twitter-ization” of language, seems at odds with Waugh’s luxuriant descriptions and careful metaphoric constructions. Consider his famous “Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint” – a metaphor that doesn’t just describe but evokes an entire aesthetic and emotional world in a way that...
From Satire to Salvation: Exploring Waugh’s Masterwork of Catholic Transformation 🎧Audio Teaching Click Here Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) began his career writing satirical novels in the 1920s and 30s, including Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934). His early work was marked by a biting, cynical wit that skewered British upper classes and their hedonistic lifestyles. His conversion to Catholicism in 1930 significantly influenced his later works, particularly Brideshead...
Carney imagined beyond the façade; he was looking for something inside. Inside the brown stones have remained one family homes, or been cut up in individual apartments, and the rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint, color, and what have been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. ~ Harlem Shuffle 🎧Listen to the audio teaching here Handout link A Study in Transforming the Mundane into...
Time Jumps, Linked Stories, and the Art of Character Evolution 🎧Listen to Audio Teaching Here 🧐 Before getting started, ponder a couple questions: Considering Ray Carney’s progression, is this ultimately a tragedy plot? Examine the evidence for both this and other possible plot structures in the text. How does Whitehead’s technique of marking time through personal, political, and social details contribute to both character development and themes of transformation? Look for similar...
“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over,...
