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Ghost Stories Analysis

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The classic ghost story is shared around a campfire to frightened children, stuffing s’mores in their mouths, or on a candlelit tour around an old city (and usually for a fee). When we tell ghost stories, we enter deep time, a thing so infinitely interconnected and complex that it becomes difficult to separate fact from fiction and present from past. Ghost stories emerge out of ignorance, revolve around dramatic irony, and of course, linger somewhere in the haze between truth and just a tale. Likewise, Holmes and Woolf dive into deep time with their EMF meters to write the ghost stories The Age of Wonder and To the Lighthouse. Meanwhile, Herschel hunts for ghosts in the night sky, and Mr. Ramsay hunts for a ghost within himself in his quest …show more content…

By distorting time and neglecting to include details, she lets their spirits linger in a way that feels eerily unresolved. As creations of Woolf’s own mind, Andrew, Prue, and Mrs. Ramsay should receive comprehensive stories of their deaths. An entire novel could be written about Andrew Ramsay’s tragic demise in World War I, but instead Woolf chooses to place, inside brackets, “A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (Holmes 137). Not only does Woolf condense his entire experience in a world war to two sentences, but she refuses to even share precisely how many men died, where in France this explosion occurred, how far into the war Andrew made it, or even what year it was. Likewise, Prue died of “some illness connected with childbirth” which, Woolf clarifies, “was indeed a tragedy, people said” (Holmes 136). Nestled between brackets, Prue’s death is attributed to an unknown illness and not even labeled a tragedy by Woolf herself. All the reader hears of Mrs. Ramsay’s fate is that she “died rather suddenly” ( The uncertainty with which Woolf shares the stories of their deaths, and the way in which she condenses months or even years into one or two sentences mirrors the distortion of time and blurriness of ghost

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Getting Ghost, an ethnographic research carried out by Luke Bergmann in 2000, shows how culture shapes and gives meaning to the lives of the adolescent African American males in inner city Detroit. Many African Americans had migrated to Detroit in the 1920s at the promise of employment in the automotive industry, however, after the industry began to dissolve in the 1970s, Detroit’s inner-city population began to be hit with a strong economic downfall (Background Sheet 2014,1). Subsequently, drug dealing in Detroit became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to a strong drug and convict culture which has affected many of the youth over multiple generations (Background Sheet 2014,1). A common practise in the African American population

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These three major ideas present in The Ghost Map are the most impressive and powerful: The miasma theory, John Snow’s waterborne theory, and the idea and drive to make London great. After all this research, after pinpointing each and every case of cholera, after making one of the most well-known statistical maps on earth, and after years of the waterborne theory sinking into the mind of the general populous, Snow finally receive validation against miasma. Through this validation, London grew into the mega city it is today. Most memorable and most important are these ideas, because these ideas shaped the

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Reading Response How do the last chapters make you feel? Recently, I started reading a book called Ghost Messages by Jacqueline Guest, and I have just finished it. In my opinion, the genre of this book would be mystery, fantasy, and historical fiction.

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Manipulating Moments in Time: Comparing John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Virginia Woolf’s The Death of a Moth Time can be manipulated in several different ways in writing, whether through sentence length, detail, time skips, flashbacks, flashforwards, or any number of other strategies. In their pieces Hiroshima and The Death of a Moth, John Hersey and Virginia Woolf use several techniques to manipulate moments in time; in the beginning of Hiroshima, Hersey prolongs and relives the moments before and during the detonation of the atomic bomb above the city of Hiroshima, while Virginia Woolf stretches out moments in time as a moth flutters along a window sill and dies in her essay The Death of a Moth. There are several different strategies used in the first two sentences of Hersey’s Hiroshima and sentences three through seven of Woolf’s

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The collection of short stories “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost: three versions of one story” has been taken from the book American Ghosts and Old World Wonders written by the Canadian feminist writer Angela Carter in 1987. Carter, known for her use of irony when writing her feminist stories so as to criticise the patriarchal society, confessed some years ago her interest in rewriting fairytales “I don’t mind being called a spell-binder. Telling stories is a perfectly honourable thing to do ... I do find imagery of fairytales very seductive and capable of innumerable interpretations” (Haffenden, 1985: 82). By making this statement, the writer clarifies her interest in retelling old fairytales using their plot to create a new story.

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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf depicts a day of a high-society women running errands in preparation for an evening party, in companion with Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the First World War, who is suffering from shell shock. The novella embraces a Bergsonian sense of time through the distinction Woolf makes between time on the clock and time in the mind, which directly correlates to Bergson 's notion of temps and duree. Woolf’s predominant concern with time is firstly delineated through the time on the clock, or temps. In the novella, temps not only act as a source of disturbance to Clarissa, but also account for Septimus’ death. By using the clock symbol, Woolf draws a discrepancy between the clock-time, temps and the mind-time, or duree.

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The diction and tone in Woolf’s essay affects her message as it was melancholy and calm. The diction was clear and understandable to ensure that the audience could understand her message, rather than try and decipher large incoherent words. Woolf also uses many words with negative connotations, but takes a neutral attitude to the subject. At the beginning of the essay Woolf 's tone is very hopeful, but as the essay progresses it turns dark and somber. At the beginning Woolf used phrasing such as “ Pleasant morning” (Woolf 5) and “enormous energy of the world”(Woolf 24) .

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By using casual diction, simple sentences, and well-known allusions, Woolf is able to shift the audience’s attention from the gender of the

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1071 Words | 5 Pages

In Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting”, the reader follows Woolf through a winter’s walk through London under the false pretense to buy a new pencil. During her journey through the streets of London, she is made aware of a number of strangers. The nature of her walk is altered by these strangers she encounters. Street Haunting comes to profound conclusions about the fluidity of individuality when interacting with other people. Woolf is enabled by the presence of others to subvert her individuality.

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1779 Words | 8 Pages

In Mrs. Dalloway, one does not just encounter one form of time, but instead faces the concepts of time on the clock and time in the mind, as well as the discrepancies between the two. In this paper, it will be argued that in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf was concerned with the differences between the objective physical clock which measures time, and the time measured by the subjective human consciousness in relation to experiences registered throughout an individual’s lifetime. Furthermore, it will be argued that Woolf’s different representations of time as being sometimes non-chronological relate to the context of Modernity through the constant use of stream of consciousness in the text. Woolf’s concern with the concept of time in Mrs. Dalloway is evident from the outset of the novel, when the chiming of Big Ben is mentioned in the opening lines: “What a lark! What a plunge!

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The death of Edward’s mother, Queen Victoria, means the end of the Victorian age. Edward’s reign and rule was short i.e. (1901-1910), however for people who attended the period, it was completely different from its previous era. It was the beginning of a new era named “The Modern Age” or the world before and after the Great War. Throughout Woolf’s life, she had many periods of depressions, though also a love life with males and females. Critics like Eileen Barret and Patricia Cramer declare that Woolf has incorporated many of her own experiences in her fictional works.

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Study wants to show that Virginia Woolf created two very different characters but with a very interesting and complex connection. The first one is Mrs. Ramsay, a woman still belonging to the Victorian age, the second, Lily Briscoe, here called a “New woman”. My intention is also to analyze the significance of Lily’s painting and how it symbolizes and represents her coming to terms with her homosexuality, and simultaneously her feelings towards Mrs. Ramsay. To the Lighthouse depends almost on the passing of time, it expands or contracts the sense of time very freely It is a book, with an ironical or wistful query and questions of life and reality.

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