Compare Nicholas Delbanco And Alan Cheuse

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Instructor’s Resource Guide to accompany Literature: Craft & Voice Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse Prepared by Thomas M. Kitts St. John’s University, NY A Note to Instructors In the following pages, I offer responses to works, approaches for presentation, responses to questions in the text, and possible writing assignments. I am sure some of my ideas will be more helpful than others, and some will be different from yours and your students’. Please remember to consider all that follows as suggestive rather than definitive. Nicholas Delbanco, Alan Cheuse, and I appreciate any comments or suggestions you have on the text or the manual. Table of Contents (hold Ctrl and Click to go directly to the desired section) Thematic Table of Contents 7…show more content…
The episode is one of those revealing and embarrassing moments in teenage life when we are forced to confront how unsophisticated and how self-absorbed we are; or, put another way, when reality intrudes upon our delusions of self. On another level, though hardly emphasized in the story, the incident might have brought the narrator closer to her mother, who, in a crowded household, might not have always been as watchful over her daughter as she might have—consider the narrator’s confession about the aspirin, “which was a mistake.” However, most importantly, I think this incident was the beginning of her life as a writer, although she did not realize it at the time. Looking back, the narrator remembers that during her teenage melodrama she developed a fascination with life, very necessary to a writer. “I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvelous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvised. I could not take my eyes off it.” This interest in the “plots of life” or, as she says, “the way things happened” marked the burgeoning of an authorial

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