1. Sensing Endings and Letting Go HUM 2213: British and American Literature II Spring 2013 Dr. Perdigao April 24, 2013

3. British and American Literature According to Carey Mulligan

5. Six Degrees…

9. Exposition Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.” (194) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther.... And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (180)

10. Rising Action Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928) “When she got up. By and by. She must rest. Get strong. Sleep. Then, afterwards, she could work out some arrangement. So she dozed and dreamed in snatches of sleeping and waking, letting time run on. Away. AND HARDLY had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child” (135). Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss. Beloved.” (275)

11. Climax Michael Cunningham, The Hours (1998) “And here she is, herself, Clarissa, not Mrs. Dalloway anymore; there is no one now to call her that. Here she is with another hour before her. ‘Come in, Mrs. Brown,’ she says. ‘Everything’s ready’” (226). Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (2008) “Which makes me remember my mother. I remember how I turned and caught her— how could I have forgotten this until now?—looking not at New York but at me, and smiling. Which is how I come to face my family with the same smile. ‘Look!’ Jake is saying, pointing wildly. ‘See, Daddy?’ I see, I tell him, looking from him to Rachel and again to him. Then I turn to look for what it is we’re supposed to be seeing” (256).

12. Falling Action Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011) “And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams crisscrossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.” (163)

13. Denouement Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005) “That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be” (287-288).