All 17 Uses of
passage
in
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
- When the snow comes at the end of the story, in a beautiful and moving passage, it covers, equally, "all the living and the dead."
Chpt 2passage = short part of a longer written work
- In Pale Rider Clint Eastwood actually has a character speak the relevant passage so we don't miss the point (although the unnamed stranger in an Eastwood western is pretty much always Death), but here Morrison does the same with a three-word phrase and a pose.
Chpt 7
- You might turn to Ecclesiastes for a passage that reminds us that every night is followed by a new day, that life is an endless cycle of life, death, and renewal, in which one generation succeeds another until the end of time.
Chpt 7
- At least that's what Hemingway did, borrowing his title from that biblical passage: The Sun Also Rises.
Chpt 7 *
- The passage speaks of the cup of the Lord's fury, and the context has to do with sons who have lost their way, who are afflicted, who may yet succumb to desolation and destruction.
Chpt 7
- The Cantos of Ezra Pound have some marvelous passages, but they also contain some very ugly views of Jewish culture and Jewish people.
Chpt 25passages = short parts of a longer written work
Uses with a meaning too common or too rare to warrant foucs:
- Instead she is one of, in the words of the epigraph to the novel, the "sixty million and more" Africans and African-descended slaves who died in captivity and forced marches on the continent or in the middle passage or on the plantations made possible by their captive labor or in attempts to escape a system that should have been unthinkable—as unthinkable as, for instance, a mother seeing no other means of rescuing her child except infanticide.
Chpt 11passage = way to get from one place to another
- In his masterful novel A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster has as his central incident a possible assault in a cave.†
Chpt 12
- In a passage of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom thinks of Shakespeare that he has a quote for every day of the year†
Chpt 18
- In its small way, it is the middle passage, that watery sojourn that, one way and another, took the lives of millions, as Morrison says in the novel's epigraph.†
Chpt 18
- Forster's later masterpiece, A Passage to India, focuses on other types of mayhem growing from English misbehavior as the rulers of India and from very confused feelings that beset recent arrivals on the subcontinent.†
Chpt 19
- It might help to know Hemingway's background in World War I, during which the novel is set, or his earlier life experiences, or his psychology and worldview, or the difficulty of writing this passage (he rewrote the last page twenty-six times, he said) in order to make sense of this scene.†
Chpt 26
- E. M. Forster only wrote a handful of books early in the twentieth century, but two of them, A Passage to India and Howards End (1910), are among the truly great novels.†
Chpt 26
- But to her horror the woman answered, "Walk in please, miss," and she was shut in the passage.†
Chpt 27
- Mother sent—"The little woman in the gloomy passage seemed not to have heard her.†
Chpt 27
- She was back in the passage.†
Chpt 27 *
- Inside the dead man's house itself, she goes down a "gloomy passage" to a kitchen "lighted by a smoky lamp."†
Chpt 27
Definitions:
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(1)
(passage as in: In lines 1-9 of the passage...) a short part of a longer written workThis meaning of passage is commonly seen on standardized tests like the SAT and ACT.
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(2)
(meaning too common or rare to warrant focus) meaning too common or too rare to warrant focus:
More frequently, passage refers to a passageway for travel or to the act of traveling. It can also refer to the passing of time or of a law. See a comprehensive dictionary for the many meanings of passage, but for comfort taking standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, be very familiar with passage being used to refer to a short excerpt from a longer written work.