The+House+of+Spirits

=//The House of The Spirits// by Isabel Allende =

Guides
Here is a fairly comprehensive study guide from eNotes. It includes some good background to Allende's writing   and a link to the Shmoop study guide. When using Shmoop, please be aware that these guides are written to be accessible to students and are not necessarily models of how to write literary criticism. I would expect your writing style, in formal essays, to be of a more formal, academic style.  Shmoop study guide

Class Discussion
April 14 2010: H ere is the document we discussed in class on 14 April. This is a very detailed discussion of an extract from the novel. There is no way that you would be able to write in such detail in Paper 1, the commentary, but it does give you a good model of the way you can talk about literature. It would also be a good model for your second world literature assignment, Detailed Study option D, which is a commentary on an extract from one of the texts. Either way, use it as an insight into the text and as a model for writing. It is by no means without fault, but is an interesting read.

 By way of extra information, there was a recent news item about the musician, poet and political activist Victor Jara's body being exhumed. He was one of those taken to the football stadium, tortured and finally shot. His family have been campaigning for years to get a proper burial for him. There was a massive funeral for him on 3 December this year. Here's a link to some news items about it.

Wikipedia Entry

BBC News

Tasks
Just as with Solzhenitsyn, Allende's writing is very tied up with events occuring in her country, Chile. In order fully to understand The House of the Spirits one needs to understand the context in which it was written, both historically/politically and in terms of the types of art which were being produced in South America, which in many ways were different to other parts of the world. To this end I would like you to conduct some research on the following (similar to that which you undertook for the other writers we are studying):
 * Biography – note significant dates and events in her life
 * Context – historical, geographical, social, political and cultural
 * What was happening during her life time that might have affected her writing?
 * How might where she was born and raised affected her writing in both content and style?
 * What political events might have affected her writing?
 * Writing style
 * How would you categorise her writing? Find out what other critics have said about her work. Do you agree, from what you’ve read so far?

I want you to produce a timeline, on one side of which will be the major political and other events in Chile's history, and on the other tie this into events in the novel.