Illustration by Shannon May

Overview | What is an allusion? How often do you spot them, whether in your reading, in pop culture, in advertising or anywhere else? In this lesson, students read a Book Review essay about allusions in literature, take a quiz in which they identify allusions made in New York Times articles and headlines, then choose from a variety of activities to go deeper.

Materials | Computers with Internet access and printing capability.

Warm-Up | Ask students to define “allusion.” Check that they understand it as a “brief, usually indirect reference to another place, event” or to words spoken by or that depict a person or fictional character. Give a few common examples, like someone being described as a “Romeo,” an allusion to Shakespeare’s romantic but doomed tragic hero, or a person saying, “I never thought I’d move back to my hometown, but I guess deep down, I’m a Dorothy,” alluding to the “Wizard of Oz” character who learns “there’s no place like home.” You can also ask what is meant by calling a group of women “the real housewives of (name of your city or town)” and asking the source (wealthy, drama-prone women who have a similar look to those seen on the “Real Housewives” franchise). Ask, what would you expect if I called a certain boy an Edward? What about a Jacob? (main characters of the “Twilight” book and movie series). Have students name more allusions, explaining their meanings and sources.

Then, lead a discussion about the pros and cons of making allusions. Pros might include conveying much information in a single word or two or bonding over a shared interest in the source. Cons include allusions only making sense to those who know the source material or, in the case of pop culture phenomena, losing their meaning as time passes. To prove this, ask students to describe a “Jeannie Bueller,” or an “Eddie Haskell.” Then ask colleagues in their 40’s or 50’s the same question to share the answers: a jealous sister who has a wildly popular brother (from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”), and a sycophant who is overly polite to adults for his own gain (“Leave It to Beaver”).

End by turning the tables on yourself and your colleagues, having students ask you to explain allusions to things that most in their peer group will understand immediately but might not be so clear to those being asked. Or, have them brainstorm allusions today that most would understand (“Brangelina,” for example), but that may be impenetrable twenty-five years from now.

Related | In the essay “Grand Allusion,” Elizabeth D. Samet writes about the pleasures and perils of this literary device:

Allusion can feel like something of a parlor game even in the best of times. In the 1940s, in a discussion of T. S. Eliot’s densely allusive poem “The Waste Land,” the formalist critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley questioned prevailing assumptions about the value of allusion-hunting. Eschewing the role of literary detective, they rejected the notion that we “do not know what a poet means unless we have traced him in his reading.” “Eliot’s allusions work,” they argued in “The Intentional Fallacy,” “when we know them — and to a great extent even when we do not know them, through their suggestive power. . . . It would not much matter if Eliot invented his sources,” as Walter Scott and Coleridge had done. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s warning that identifying an allusion does not amount to the same thing as understanding its significance has renewed urgency in the current age of allusion-­automation, for if the Web makes it that much easier for the allusion-hunter to bag his quarry, it does not necessarily tell him how to dress it.

Read the entire article with your class, using the questions below.

Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:

Why do allusions that fail to convey their intended meaning or are not understood by the audience “leave us all exposed,” as Ms. Samet contends? How is the “Vronsky’s horse” anecdote an example of this? Why does the classroom have “its own special dangers” when it comes to allusions? How, according to the essay, has the Internet affected people’s abilities to use and verify allusions? How does your experiences with allusions support or challenge the author’s statement that “In trying to illuminate an allusion in class, I sometimes feel as if I’m opening one nesting doll after another until there’s nothing left at all.”

Related resources:

Activity | Begin by having students reread the article, finding the unexplained allusions it contains. Have them identify the sources, marking “K” for those they already knew and therefore recognized immediately, “I” for those they found via Internet searching, and “O” for other, meaning that they found the source in some other way, whether asking other people, looking in books, or even just guessing.

The allusions include:

“I was reminded that each unhappy allusion is unhappy in its own way.” –Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”

“Don’t make it sad, Cricket, I don’t feel that way.” — Ernest Hemingway, “To Have and Have Not” and the 1944 film adaptation

“Gimme a whiskey. . . . And don’t be stingy, baby.” — Eugene O’Neill’s play “Anna Christie”

“Bastard Normans, Norman bastards.” — William Shakespeare, “The Life of King Henry the Fifth”

“Scylla of the swindle to the Charybdis of condescension” — Greek mythology: Scylla is a sea creature who devours sailors and Charybdis is a whirlpool opposite Scylla’s cave

“… several keyboarding Natty Bumppos of my acquaintance” — James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales

The title of the essay “Grand Allusion” — a play on “Grand Illusion,” a 1937 French war film directed by Jean Renoir

Lead a discussion about the experience of identifying the above allusions. Compare the pride of knowing, or at least being being familiar with, one or more, versus the experience of searching for the phrase online. Ask: What is the difference between relying on Google versus your own memory of favorite books, movies or plays? Is this distinction relevant today for most people, do you think?

Next, ask students to discuss this idea from today’s essay:

Wimsatt and Beardsley’s warning that identifying an allusion does not amount to the same thing as understanding its significance has renewed urgency in the current age of allusion-­automation, for if the Web makes it that much easier for the allusion-hunter to bag his quarry, it does not necessarily tell him how to dress it.

Ask for examples that illustrate the point. You might begin by asking students if they share a love of a certain sports team or musician with a parent or other older person, and the difference, if there is any, between, say, watching live as a famous game unfolded (or listening just as a seminal album was released) versus watching highlights online or downloading an entire music catalog in a single sitting.

Then use the Scylla and Charybdis allusion from the essay as an example. Ask: Is it enough to know it’s a reference to a Greek myth? Or to truly “get” the allusion, do you have to know the story it comes from and what it means?

Next, have students take the New York Times Literary Allusions Quiz, below, alone, in partners or in small groups.

New York Times Literary Allusions Quiz

Fill in the blanks in the lines below taken from New York Times articles or headlines. Each refers to an often-taught work of literature. For extra points, identify that work and give more context to explain its meaning and usage here. (For answers, scroll to the very bottom of this lesson.)

1. “I left Dickens World after a couple of days. As a literary experience, it had been pretty thin gruel. But like _________, I wanted more.”

2. “More Than Kin, and Less Than _________”

3. “In his previous books the journalist Ron Rosenbaum has tackled big topics — Hitler’s evil, Shakespeare’s genius — with acuity and irreverence, believing, correctly, that some things are too important to leave to the experts. He’s proud of his gonzo amateur status, so much so that you half suspect he has a scarlet ‘_________’ tattooed across his chest, where Superman wore his ‘S.'”

4. “Without a Bang or a _________, The School Board Fades Away”

5. “… I’ve come to think something is _________ in the state of economics. The dismal science, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has been ravaged by the same virus that has corrupted the rest of our national discourse.”

6. “Qaddafi might have maneuvered himself into a gilded overseer’s role and gifted power to his bespectacled son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the nice, educated boy who lost it when he realized — The horror! The _________! — that he might have to give up all his toys”

7. “To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, so much _________ upon a Chicago bank.”

8. “Decentralizing the Internet So Big _________ Can’t Find You”

9. “Destruction, thy _________ is Bieber.”

10. “The Kushner Flap: Much Ado About _________”

11. “Call me, _________” (Please note: In the original, there is no comma; in the Times essay we are quoting here, there is. Read it to see why.)

12. “It was the best of times, it was the _________ of times. O.K., maybe not literally the worst, but definitely bad.”

Have students share their findings and check their answers, then discuss the meaning and source, including, again, whether they knew it or looked it up. Students might then look up the original and explain its context, then relate it to the allusion. This can be done independently or in groups.

Going Further | There are several options to extend this lesson:

Allusion Hunting Every edition of The New York Times is full of allusions. Challenge teams to find and list as many as they possibly can as they read articles that interest them. Then, have them read the After Deadline column “Allusions We Love Too Much” on the line between allusion and cliché. Which, if any, of the allusions they found do they believe have been overused enough to become clichés? Why?

Digital Remix Culture and Allusion Though this lesson has mostly dealt with literary allusions, students will likely bring up the dizzying ways in which artists across categories remix, reuse, update and mash-up material today, from musicians who “sample” bits of other music in their pieces to new versions of Jane Austen and Shakespeare to advertising that references or remakes cultural touchstones. Have them do a version of the Allusion Hunting activity above, but with the whole world as fair game: how many “allusions” can they spot in one day? (Use our lesson plan Remix, Reuse, Recombine: Holding a Seminar on Mash-Up Culture for more help.)

Build Your Own Allusion Ask students to write an original essay on a topic unrelated to allusions, planting as many allusions as they can. Or, they can retrofit an old essay, sewing in references. Have them read one another’s work, identifying and discussing the allusions and weighing in on whether each one “works” or seems tacked on for the sake of the assignment. Have them incorporate a response to this sentence from today’s article: “Unlike most tricks, the allusion triumphs only when people know precisely how it is done.”

Frank O’Hara’s World and Ours Have students read the Frank O’Hara poem “The Day Lady Died,” which is mentioned in the article. Have them identify the references and then address Ms. Samet’s description of her students’ responses to it. They can write a reaction essay or write a poem of their own in the style of O’Hara’s.

Standards | This lesson is correlated to McREL’s national standards (it can also be aligned to the new Common Core State Standards):

Art Connections

1. Understands connections among the various art forms and other disciplines.

Theater

5. Understands how informal and formal theater, film, television, and electronic media productions create and communicate meaning.

6. Understands the context in which theater, film, television and electronic media are performed today as well as in the past.

Historical Understanding

1. Understands and knows how to analyze chronological relationships and patterns.

2. Understands the historical perspective.

Language Arts

1. Uses the general skills and strategies of the writing process.

2. Uses the stylistic and rhetorical aspects of writing.

3. Uses grammatical and mechanical conventions in written compositions.

4. Gathers and uses information for research purposes.

5. Uses the general skills and strategies of the reading process.

6. Uses skills and strategies to read a variety of literary texts.

7. Uses skills and strategies to read a variety of informational texts.

8. Uses listening and speaking strategies for different purposes.

9. Uses viewing skills and strategies to understand and interpret visual media.

New York Times Literary Allusion Quiz answers:

1. Oliver Twist, alluding to the character in Charles Dickens’s novel of the same name (from a 2012 article, “The World of Charles Dickens, Complete With Pizza Hut”).

2. Kind, alluding to a line in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (The headline was for a 2011 Opinon piece about the News of the World scandal.)

3. “A,” alluding to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” (from “Thinking the Unthinkable Again in a Nuclear Age,” a 2011 book review).

4. Whimper, alluding to T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (from this 2002 article).

5. rotten, alluding to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” again (from “The Politics of Economics in the Age of Shouting,” a 2011 Op-Ed).

6. horror, alluding to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (from a 2011 Op-Ed, “The Price of Delusion”).

7. depends, alluding to Williams’s poem, “The Red Wheel Barrow” (from a 2007 Business article, “Chicago Is Major Battleground for ABN Amro Bid War”).

8. Brother, alluding to George Orwell’s “1984” (from a 2011 New York Region article).

9. name, alluding to “Frailty, thy name is woman,” from, yep, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” again (from a 2009 piece, “20-Year-Old Fogy Cedes Audience to 15-Year-Old”).

10. Nothing, alluding to the Shakespearean play of the same name (from a 2011 Opinion piece by Stanley Fish).

11. Ishmael, alluding to the first line of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” (the headline of a 2007 Book Review essay).

12. worst, alluding to the first line of Charles Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities” (from “The Banks Are Not All Right,” a 2009 Op-Ed).