Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. A classic tale of possessive and thwarted passion….there is something magnificent about the depth and intensity of their love….it is hard not to listen in awe when Catherine cries out, ‘I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’”—Erica Bauermeister, 500 Great Books by Women “It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.”—Virginia Woolf     WutheringHeights is the sole novel of Emily Brontë, who died a year after its publication at the age of thirty. A tale of exceptional emotional and imaginative force, it is an arresting vision of metaphysical passion, in which nature and society, heaven and hell, and dynamic and passive forces are powerfully juxtaposed.   Wuthering Heights is the name of an old house, high up on the Yorkshire moors, occupied by the Earnshaw family. Events are set in motion by the arrival of Heathcliff, a child waif who has been living the life of a wild animal in the slums of Liverpool. Adopted by the kind Mr. Earnshaw, he is bullied and humiliated after Earnshaw’s death by the new master of the house, Hindley. But Heathcliff’s passionate and ferocious nature finds its completion in Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine.   Emily Brontë (1818-1848) published only one novel, WutheringHeights (1847), a story of doomed love and revenge, but that single work has earned its place among the masterpieces of English literature.

Many High School Summer Reading Lists contain the novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman entitled The Yellow Wallpaper. This novel is also available in audio books format.
Watch a short video about The Yellow Wallpaper

Plot Overview – Audio Books For High School
Jethro Creighton, the protagonist, is young and idealistic when the Civil War begins. At first he thinks the war will be neat, full of marching soldiers and demonstrative patriotism. He learns the realities of war soon enough as he watches his three brothers, his cousin, and his teacher go off to fight. One of his brothers, Bill, chooses to fight for the South in a decision that plagues him for a long time. Jethro and his family follow the progress of the war through the newspapers, but it is hard to tell exactly what is happening. Each day the paper is full of praise or criticism for one of the Union generals, and Jethro has trouble sorting out what is actually going on.
Read more at Sparknotes.

Betty Smith, Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

In fact, Smith had an interest in writing about Brooklyn apart from the book. She wrote commentary in the New York Times Magazine which included an essay “Why Brooklyn is that Way.” She became Brooklyn’s unofficial advocate, explaining that Brooklyn was like a small town that New Yorkers were trying to reject.

Indeed, the strong sense of place in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn suggests that she knew the charms and lasting benefits that came with living in a small neighborhood community. One could even say that the title reveals the importance Smith attaches to place.
After all, the novel is the story of Francie Nolan; it might have been titled after the heroine. It seems Smith would rather have her first priority be to represent time and place, and her second priority to create a character out of that setting.
Read entire extract at Sparknotes.

More about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Of her career and upbringing, Burns once said, “It has been said that growing up in the South and becoming a writer is like spending your life riding in a wagon, seated in a chair that is always facing backwards. I don’t face life looking backwards, but I have written about past times and past people.”

Tales of the past make up Cold Sassy Tree, and Burns models these tales on stories from her own life. Although Cold Sassy Tree is not a biographical account of Burns’s own family, Burns draws upon the colorful history and idiosyncrasies of her father and his family to evoke Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Read the full extract at Sparknotes.
More about Cold Sassy Tree which is now available in audio books format.

Here’s an interesting question I came across which was asked by a mother whose daughter has some reading problems. The source is The Desert Sun, California.
Question: Reading is a very hard task for my 6th grade daughter and her teacher suggested that I get books on tape for her to listen to this summer. My husband believes books on tape are not the same as reading and they are considered “cheating.” I’m confused, are books on tape really a form of cheating?
Answer: Although audiobooks can never take the place of reading aloud, many educators agree that audio books are considered wonderful tools for children for several reasons. Audio books are successful in providing struggling readers an opportunity to be exposed to literature they otherwise would not have been able to read. Reading is also about comprehending a story and audiobooks can help children develop strong listening and critical thinking skills.

The audios eliminate the frustration struggling readers experience with decoding, thus allowing them to focus on understanding a story. Many children use audiobooks to help them learn to read by following along in their book with the audio. They also provide opportunities to launch discussions between you and your child about what’s happening in a story, what will happen next, and how it connects to your own lives.

Brent M. Cooper, licensed educational psychologist, has a private practice and is the director of El Paseo Children’s Center for Psychological & Educational Assessment. He evaluates individuals for learning disabilities, attention deficits, and autism. Brent Cooper is also a school psychologist for CVUSD. If you have a question you’d like to see answered in this column, call 342-4900 or e-mail brent@helpmykid.us or visit www.helpmykid.us

Those long summer road trips with kids in the back of the car, bored out of their minds and constantly asking : are we there yet?
Turn that trip into an adventure by giving the kids a selection of audio books they can enjoy. There’s plenty for the adults to choose from too.

Pygmalion, A Play by George Bernard Shaw.

The good news for students of Pygmalion who might be struggling with the  Cockney pronunciation is that George Bernard Shaw’s classic comedy is now available on audiobook.  This means that the Pygmalion student can now benefit from listening to the play and reading the script at the same time.

 This is a fully dramatized version which incorporates the entire Pygmalion script. The narration of the characters in the play, Professor Higgins, Colonel Pickering, Eliza Doolittle are performed by famous English actors including Michael Redgrave, Donald Pleasance and Lynn Redgrave.

Shaw’s play was written in 1913 and the first English production took place in London in 1914. It was regarded as one of the best British comedies of that era. The Pygmalion theme was transformed into a musical by Lerner and Loewe in the 1950′s and became a Broadway smash hit in 1956. The musical, which was renamed ‘My Fair Lady’, includes several memorable songs such as ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’, ‘On The Street Where You Live’, and ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed To Your Face’. The production won the prestigious Tony Award for Best Musical in 1956.

My Fair Lady has been translated into many languages including Czech, Danish, French, German, Polish, Spanish etc..

In 1964, Hollywood produced a film version of My Fair Lady starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. The film won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Musical Score.

The plot of Pygmalion revolves around a wager between two uppercrust Englishmen concerning the transformation of a cockney speaking flower girl into an upperclass English lady.  Professor Higgins, a phonetics expert boasts to his colleague Colonel Pickering as follows: ‘You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English.’

The ‘creature’ in question is Eliza Doolittle a flower girl who was brought up in the cockney speaking East London. 

A quote from the audiobook publishers Harper Collins follows:

‘Following this public boast, Professor Henry Higgins accepts a challenge to teach the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle to speak standard English and launch her into polite society.

Through Higgins’s triumphant transformation of Eliza into a ‘lady’, and Eliza’s subsequent rebellion against Higgins’s attitudes and assumptions, Shaw’s provocative comedy explores questions of speech and class in England.’

George Orwell Author of 1984 – The High School English Literature Curriculum
 
Who was George Orwell, the author of 1984?

George Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair.
He was born in Bengal, India in 1903. His father was an opium agent and worked for the Indian Civil Service. When he was four years old, his family returned to England. He attended the Anglican national school at Henley and later St Cyprian’s school in Sussex. Possibly due to the strict regime of these schools, he wrote some anti-authoritarian works including ‘Awake! Young Men of England’.
When he was fourteen, he won a scholarship to Eton College and made a name for himself as a contributor to many college publications. One of his teachers at Eton was the famous author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World).
At the age of nineteen, he joined the Burmese police and spent five years there. Although he enjoyed his time in Burma, he became disillusioned with the cloak of Imperialism and this may also have inspired his anti authoritarian views later expressed. On his return from Burma he moved to Paris and started to write short stories but success eluded him. Most of his work was rejected by the publishers.
He contracted pneumonia in 1928, an illness which weakened him considerably. After recovering, he returned to England in 1929, when he was twenty-six, and lived on the bread line for a couple of years as he wanted to experience the tough living conditions of the under privileged. To protect his family’s reputation, he adopted the penname George Orwell.
Subsequently he got a job as a sales assistant in a bookshop in London while continuing to write in his spare time. He married in 1936 and he and his wife went to Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to fight against General Franco’s Nationalist party. He sustained a neck wound during the war. After the war, both he and his wife joined a Marxist party in Barcelona and were fortunate not to have been arrested or worse.

He returned to England in 1937 and from this period onwards his writing career became more productive. After a number of successful publications and several salaried jobs later including a broadcasting career with the BBC, George Orwell’s legendary novel ‘Animal Farm’ was published in 1944. Although suffering from tuberculosis, and attending a sanatorium, he labored with his final novel, 1984, originally entitled ‘Last man in Europe’ and this remarkable book was published in 1949. He died a year later from tuberculosis at the age of 47.

1984, A synopsis

George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police, a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities’ will and people live tepid lives by rote.

Winston Smith, the hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him.

The year 1984 has come and gone, yet George Orwell’s nightmare vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is still the great modern classic of negative Utopia.