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    Things You Need To Know To Feel More Comfortable in Cegep/University Knowledge

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    Ryan Ghaemi
    The document provides a lengthy list of literary works, historical facts, and reference materials that students should familiarize themselves with in order to feel more comfortable in CEGEP and university. It emphasizes that high schools do not adequately prepare students for post-secondary education by teaching them about past works and events. The list includes classical literary works, authors from different time periods, religious texts, important historical events and figures, philosophical movements, and reference books. Mastering this background knowledge will help students succeed in English and humanities courses and allow them to discuss such topics intelligently.

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    Things You Need To Know To Feel More Comfortable in Cegep/University Knowledge

    Uploaded by

    Ryan Ghaemi
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    The document provides a lengthy list of literary works, historical facts, and reference materials that students should familiarize themselves with in order to feel more comfortable in CEGEP and university. It emphasizes that high schools do not adequately prepare students for post-secondary education by teaching them about past works and events. The list includes classical literary works, authors from different time periods, religious texts, important historical events and figures, philosophical movements, and reference books. Mastering this background knowledge will help students succeed in English and humanities courses and allow them to discuss such topics intelligently.

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    F18_101ThingsUNeed2Know

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    The document provides a lengthy list of literary works, historical facts, and reference materials that students should familiarize themselves with in order to feel more comfortable in CEGEP and university. It emphasizes that high schools do not adequately prepare students for post-secondary education by teaching them about past works and events. The list includes classical literary works, authors from different time periods, religious texts, important historical events and figures, philosophical movements, and reference books. Mastering this background knowledge will help students succeed in English and humanities courses and allow them to discuss such topics intelligently.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    30 views3 pages

    Things You Need To Know To Feel More Comfortable in Cegep/University Knowledge

    Uploaded by

    Ryan Ghaemi
    The document provides a lengthy list of literary works, historical facts, and reference materials that students should familiarize themselves with in order to feel more comfortable in CEGEP and university. It emphasizes that high schools do not adequately prepare students for post-secondary education by teaching them about past works and events. The list includes classical literary works, authors from different time periods, religious texts, important historical events and figures, philosophical movements, and reference books. Mastering this background knowledge will help students succeed in English and humanities courses and allow them to discuss such topics intelligently.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 3

    Things You Need to Know to Feel More Comfortable in Cegep/University

    Knowledge:
    Unfortunately (there are exceptions, of course), high schools are no longer doing a great job of
    preparing students for the future by teaching them thoroughly about the past, yet both Cegeps
    and universities expect you to arrive in class knowing that past. This doesn’t mean you can’t
    catch up on your own, however. On the next pages, I have added some bits of knowledge you
    really should know if you wish to do better, notably in English and in the Humanities. If you
    have no time to read the works themselves, at least read a thorough summary online. Do this
    on your spare time or use holidays—you have two years with us. Knowing about these literary
    and historical facts will give you an edge in future classes at Dawson and certainly in
    university. Also, you’ll sound unusually smart at grown-up parties…

    A list of things to know follows.

    Literary Background Knowledge (these are basic classical works that literary authors
    allude to often):

     The Ancient Testament’s Book of Genesis, Book of Exodus, Book of Job, Book of Ruth
     The New Testament’s Gospel according to Saint Luke and according to Saint John
     Ancient mythological tales: Apollo, Dionysus, Zeus, Orpheus & Eurydice, Narcissus,
    Pandora, Demeter & Persephone
     Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey
     Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone
     Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, and King Lear
     Grimm’s, Perrault’s, Andersen’s fairy tales (different from Disney’s versions)

    General Background Knowledge (you should have answers to these):

     Who are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle? What are they known for?
     What are the Middle Ages, and what are they known for in literature and
    philosophy?
     What is the Renaissance and what is it known for (lit./philosophy)? Read one
    author.
     What is the Enlightenment?
     What is the Romantic Period? Name one author. Read one poem.
     What is Realism?
     What is Modernism? Postmodernism?
     What are the main world religions and what do they preach?
     What was the American civil war about? When did it begin? When did it end? How
    did it end?
     What was the Russian Revolution of 1917? Who was Lenin? Stalin? Trotsky?
     What was the Chinese Cultural Revolution and who was Mao Tse Tung?
     What were WWI and WWII about? How did they end?
     What was the Great Depression—how did it come about?
     What is Existentialism? Look up two philosophers or authors who were
    existentialists
     What was the House of Un-American Activities Committee? Who was Senator Joe
    McCarthy?
    2

     What was the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in
    the United States?
     Who was Martin Luther King Jr.? Who was John F. Kennedy? Robert Kennedy?
     What was Apartheid? Who was Nelson Mandela?
     What was the Cold War about? When did it end, and how?
     What was Perestroika? Tiananmen Square? The Fall of the Iron Curtain?
     What was the Vietnam War about? How did it end?
     What was the counterculture? Name three influential singers/songwriters—read
    their songs’ lyrics.
     What was 9/11, exactly? What wars did it lead to and why?
     What is neoliberalism?
     What was the war in Iraq about?
     How did civil war in Syria begin? What have been its consequences?
     Who won the Canadian Nobel Prize for Literature? Read one short story.
     What does the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is part of the Canadian
    Constitution, 1982, say? How does it work?
     What are the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 19th, 22nd, and 25th Amendments to the American
    Constitution?

    For Students in the ALC/Literature Profile Students, specifically:

    Works that you should try to read on your own time, for pleasure, because they are
    the inevitable, inescapable classics—

    Shakespeare: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Richard II [G. Brit., Renaissance]


    Samuel Richardson: Clarissa [G. Brit., Enlightenment]
    Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights [G. Brit., Victorian Female Gothic]
    Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina [Russia, 19th-c. Realism]
    Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary [France, 19th-c. Realism]
    Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Ubervilles [G. Britain, 19th-c. Naturalism]
    Charles Dickens: Hard Times [G. Brit., 19th-c. Realism]
    George Eliot: Middlemarch [G. Brit., 19th-c. Realism]
    Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse [G. Brit., Modernism]
    James Joyce: Ulysses [G. Brit., Modernism]
    T.S. Eliot: The Wasteland [U.S.,Modernism]
    William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August [U.S., Modernism]
    Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls [U.S., Modernism]
    Scott F. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby [U.S., Modernism]
    John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath [U.S., 20th-c. Naturalism]
    Jack Kerouac: On the Road [U.S., Late Modernism; Beat Generation]
    Sylvia Plath, Ariel [U.S., Late Modernism; confessional poetry]
    Don DeLillo: White Noise [U.S., Postmodernism]
    Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [former Czechoslovakia,
    Postmodernism]
    Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of the Lion [Canada, Postmodernism]
    Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace [Canada, Postmodernism]
    3

    Reference Works Every English Student Should at Least Borrow from the Library,
    Especially in 102/103/BXE:

     The MLA Handbook (tells you how to cite works to avoid plagiarism; you can also
    look up “Owl Purdue MLA” on Google)
     Abrams & Harpham: Glossary of Literary Terms (covers literary devices and
    periods/movements)
     Strunk & White: The Elements of Style (how to write clean, muscular, effective
    prose)
     Kelley Griffith: Writing Essays about Literature (expensive to buy, but worthwhile,
    and you can borrow it from the library).

    Good Sites That Explain What Plagiarism Is:

    https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism
    https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism?wssl=1

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