House of Mirth Vocabulary, Chapters 1-8

The House of Mirth Vocabulary Sheet
Part 1:
Chapter 1

desultory, contrive, cotillion, plaintively, fastidiousness, perplexity, provocation, interrogatively, conjecture


Chapter 2

scruples, obdurate, dissembling, idiosyncrasies, despoil, candid, contingency, germinating, inculcate, sinuous


Chapter 3
decanters, meagreness, abject, odious, interminable, remittances, resentment, deplored, magnitude, immemorial, dinginess, volatility, indulgence


Chapter 4
servitude, harmonious, incongruously, reminiscence, extraneous, tacitly, inarticulate, recapitulation, volubility, encroaching, contemptuous


Chapter 5
lustre, subversive, deplorable, malleable, alluring, acquiescence, temperate, jocularity, crestfallen, disconcerted, piqued, boisterous


Chapter 6
exhilaration, aloofness, obscurity, fastidious, dismal, poignant, celibate, refurbish, eclectic, belitte, hideous



Chapter 7

admonishing, retaliate, circuitous, depleted, crudity, desecration, consoled


Chapter 8

complacency, ambiguity, mystically, complacency, aspirations, philanthropy, blundering, repugnance, allusion, superfluous

Satire examples from The Onion

Read the following examples of satire from The Onion here and here and here.

Come to class tomorrow ready to discuss: 1) What are the targets of each of these satiric pieces; and 2) how does the writer achieve his/her effects.

Registering for Engrade

To register for Engrade, go to www.engrade.com. Click the student button and go to register. You'll be prompted to enter your special code. Your code is: mrvilbig-yourMidwoodId#-your top secret special four digit code #.

(The top secret special four digit code # is the one I gave you in class.)

Please note that mrvilbig is spelled with no periods and no capitals.

Good luck!

Grades

Grades will be based on the following:
Tests/ at home writing and projects (including creative writing projects): 40 percent
Classwork, quizzes, and homework: 60 percent
Total: 100 percent

How we'll work:

For creative writing, we will use a workshop approach, in which you'll share your work with other writers in the class and get their feedback. (More on this later.)

For each book or literary work we read, you’ll be expected to read about 15 to 25 pages a night. In addition you will sometimes have homework in which you'll be asked to write brief responses or answer questions about your reading or topics for class discussion. In addition, you can expect that for each book or literary work, you'll write one at-home essay and have one to two tests.

IMPORTANT: Grades are cumulative. That means the grades you make now count as much as the grades later in the semester. So it's important to work hard from the very beginning and not dig yourself into a hole in the first weeks of our class.

Welcome to Creative Writing

We will be focusing in this class on becoming skilled writers in a variety of genres from fiction to creative non-fiction to poetry to the literary essay. This class will involve a great deal of writing in which you will be asked to become a self-aware writer and creator, knowledgeable about the traditions of literature and conscious of your own process and the choices you make a writer. Because good writers are also good readers, you’ll read a wide variety of fiction of high literary polish and skill, and you will read as a writer – that is, you will read with the goal of understanding the techniques and methods used by the writer you are studying to create his or her vision.