Approaches to Literature week18

Final Week

Approaches to Literature week17

▲ SOP Checklist p.1845

  ▽ about the response paper

-summary/description/paraphrase: repeat briefly in your own words

-tone/evidence/conventions/structure: main body/thesis: main idea

-writing process: hypothesis

→ hypothesis (hypo- : under): an arguable statement about the topic

-Remember that every stanza needs to be discussed equally.

▲ Death of a salesman

  ▽Brief introduction: It is a 1949 play written by American playwright Arthur Miller. It describes an aging traveling salesman recognizes the emptiness of his life and tries to fix it. The American Dream is the theme of the play, but everyone in the play has their own way to describe their American Dreams.

  ▽Main character :

Happy, Biff and Willy Loman

  ▽Father-son relationship: Death of a Salesman gives us a pen picture of Willy Loman and his relationship with his sons Biff and Happy. The older one is Biff who is a failure in his life, and the younger one Happy has a steady job. But nobody of them can meet the demand of Willy. 

Though the father-son relationship was quite well at the beginning, it becomes soared with the passage of time and the gap is never bridged up.

  ▽Trailer

     ▽Two Little Mice: One mouse drowned, but the other mouse swam so hard he churned that cream into butter and walked out. It is an allegory illustrating that with hard work you can achieve anything.

▲A Psalm of Life

　　It is a poem written by American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was inspired to write it by a heartfelt conversation he had with friend; the two had spent an evening "talking of matters, which lie near one's soul:–and how to bear one's self doughtily in Life's battle: and make the best of things".

　　▽ To labor and to wait: use seeds as a symbol

      We can combine the image with symbols in the play “Death of a salesman”. 

      →Seeds represent for Willy the opportunity to prove the worth of his labor, both as a salesman and a father. Moreover, seeds also symbolize Willy’s sense of failure with Biff. Despite the American Dream’s formula for success, which Willy considers infallible, Willy’s efforts to cultivate and nurture Biff went awry.

▲Quotes from The Great Gatsby

"A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth."

  Nick Carraway is reminding us—via his dad—that money isn't the only thing that people are born into. Some people are naturally just nicer and more honest: they have more "sense of the fundamental decencies."

▲new words

1. product ['  prɑdəkt] / produce [prə'  djus]/ productive [prə'  dʌktɪv]

2. get angry with…

3. college v.s university: In general, a college is an institution of higher education that may stand alone or make up one part of a university.

→college degree

→college boy/girl

→college tuition

a.       tuition free

b.      assistantship: a form of financial assistance provided to graduate students through part-time academic employment.

c.       I’ve got tuition wavier. (wav-: “be omitted; get rid of”)

4. American YA = American young adult

5. futile (adj. ) [ˈfjuː.taɪl]- having no effect or achieving nothing; unsuccessful [= fruitless]

→It's quite futile trying to reason with him - he just won't listen.

→All my attempts to cheer her up proved futile.

→Attempts to get supplies to the region are futile because troops will not allow the aid convoy to enter the city.

    futility (n.) [fjuːˈtɪl.ɪ.ti]
→"What's his latest book about?" "Oh, the usual - the transience of love and the futility of life."

▲ mock (v.): to laugh at someone, often by copying them in a funny but unkind way.

-To kill a mockingbird- It’s a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. 

 The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. 

-Mockingjay- It is a 2010 science fiction novel by American author Suzanne Collins. 

  In the book, Katniss must deal with betrayal and violence against people. At the same time, while she was symbolically touching thousands of lives, she must also lead those people into war.

Approaches to Literature week16

▲ Drama Quiz

-foil: 

  a. a very thin sheet of metal, especially used to wrap food in to keep it fresh.

  b. In fiction, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in order to highlight particular qualities of the other character. 

→Pairs of characters whose differences illuminate the important characteristics in each other.

-Verbal irony (irony means “to mock”)

→ Verbal irony is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed.

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, It may be divided into categories such as verbal, dramatic, and situational.

-Classical unities- The classical unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics. They can be divided into unity of time, unity of plot, and unity of place.

▲ Midsummer Night’s Dream

It is a comedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1590 and 1597. 

It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. 

▽   theme: 

1. Love difficulty- “The course of true love never did run smooth”

　　　Though most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the play involves a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story;it distances the audience from the emotions of the characters in order to poke fun at the torments and afflictions that those in love suffer.

2. Dream- As the title suggests, dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dreams are linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest.

　        At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the audience members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should remember it as nothing more than a dream.

3. Magic- The fairies’ magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play, is another element central to the fantastic atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal world.

     →Love potion: In fiction, a type of potion designed to create feelings of love.

→Couplet used in the play: A couplet is a pair of lines of metre in poetry.

Couplets comprise two lines that rhyme and have the same metre.

   　　　A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (or closed) couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse.
     ▽   Love looks not with the eye, but with the mind.

▲ MLA v.s APA style in writing

Parenthetical referencing, also known as Harvard referencing, is a citation style in

which partial citations—for example, "(Smith 2010, p. 1)"—are enclosed within

parentheses and embedded in the text, either within or after a sentence.

There are two styles of parenthetical referencing:

MLA style	Author–title or 　　author–page	primarily used in the arts and the  humanities, and recommended by  the Modern Language  Association (MLA).
APA style	Author–date	primarily used in the sciences and  social sciences, and recommended by  the American Chemical Society and  the American Psychological  Association (APA)

▲ New Words

1.mend (v. ): fix or repair something

→amend (v. ): to change the words of a text, especially a law or a legal document

→amendment (n.): a change to a law that is not yet in operation and is still being discussed

2.slumber(n. ): sleep

→I fell into a gentle slumber.

→Sharp cuts in interest rates have failed to bring the economy out of its slumber.

slumber party: a party when a group of children spend the night at one child's house

3. suffix ending for profession: -ant; -ist, -or

   A.   accountant/ mendicant: someone who lives by asking people they do not know for money, especially for religious reasons

　B.   psychologist/ florist/ archaeologist: Archaeologists examine ancient sites and objects to learn about the past. They often work on excavations, commonly called ‘digs’, and record, analyze, and interpret archaeological remains.

　 C.   actor/ doctor/ surveyor: Surveyors measure land, air space, and water areas. They describe where certain areas of land are and they explain what it looks like, and how much land is there.

4. suffix “-al” is standing for noun.

▲ What is Literature

▲ Shakespeare dating tips

Approaches to Literature week15

   ▲ drama- 
      It is the specific mode of narrative,typically fictional, represented in performance. 
There is no narrator in a drama; instead, it is a group of characters deliver information about the story on stage before the audience.

▲  Tom Stoppard

He is a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997. 

Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. The story of Hamlet, as told from the viewpoint of two courtiers echoes Beckett in its double act repartee, existential themes and language play.

　▽ Theatre of the Absurd:

It is a post World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. Their work focused largely on the idea of existentialism and expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down, in fact alerting their audiences to pursue the opposite.

▲  A MidsummerNight’s Dream

　　▽Summary: love, dreams, the creative imagination

　　The main plot of Midsummer is a complex contraption that involves two sets of couples (Hermia and Lysander, and Helena and Demetrius) whose romantic cross-purposes are complicated still further by their entrance into the play's fairyland woods where the King and Queen of the Fairies (Oberon and Titania) preside and the impish folk character of Puck or Robin Goodfellow plies his trade.

　　　→Puck: is a clever, mischievous elf, sprite or jester that personifies the wise knave. 

In the play, Shakespeare introduces Puck as the "shrewd and knavish sprite" and "that merry wanderer of the night"; he is a jester to Oberon, the fairy king.

***[jester- a man in the past whose job was to tell jokes and make people laugh]

 　　▽Love-in-idleness:

It is the flower mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare that inspired romantic love.

　　The love-in-idleness was originally a white flower, struck by one of Cupid’s arrows [misfired arrow], which turned it purple and gave it its magic love potion. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare uses this flower as a plot device to introduce the comical disturbance and chaos of love, but also to highlight the irrationality of romantic love.

▲Henrik Ibsen-He was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. 

　　He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality.

　　▽A Doll's House: It's one of his representative works.The play is significant for its critical attitude toward 19th-century marriage norms. It aroused great controversy at the time, as it concludes with the protagonist, Nora, leaving her husband and children because she wants to discover herself.

▲Story within a story

It is a literary device in which one character within a narrative narrates. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration: novels, short stories, plays, television programs, films, poems, songs, and philosophical essays.

→William Shakespeare used this device in many of his plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labours Lost, and Hamlet.

▲New words
1. address (v.)-

  1) to speak or write to someone [address… to someone; someone is addressed as…]

→He addressed a few introductory remarks to the audience.

→He likes to be addressed as 'Sir' or 'Mr Partridge'

  2) to write a name or address on an envelope or parcel [be addresses to + someone]

→So why did you open a letter that was addressed to me?

  3) to give attention to or deal with a matter or problem

→The issue of funding has yet to be addressed.

2. In “Which of the following do you learn about the speaker of this poem?” learn means “to get informed” instead of “to get knowledge or skill in a new subject or activity.”

3. preoccupied (adj.)- thinking or worrying about something too much

[someone be preoccupied… (with+ something)]

→She's been very preoccupied recently because her mother has been very ill.

→Why is the media so preoccupied with the love lives of politicians?

   preoccupation (n.)- an idea or subject that someone thinks about most of the time

→My main preoccupation now is trying to keep life normal for the sake of my two boys.

→self-preoccupation: excessive interest in oneself

4. “shouldst” is an archaic use of second-person singular simple past form of shall; similarly, “thy” means “you” in the past.

→To His Coy Mistress:  is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the English Interregnum.

5. holy matrimony- is a phrase used by Christians to describe marriage.

6. allude to sb/sth (phrase verb)- to mention someone or 
something without talking about them directly

→She mentioned some trouble that she'd had at home and I guessed she was alluding to her son.

allusion (n.)- It is a figure of speech, in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance from an external context. Also, it can be divided into biblical, literary, and mythological allusion.

10. Notice the pronunciation of Aegean, [I`dʒiən].The same as Aegeus [`iːdʒiəs] or [ˈɛdʒˌjuːs].
→ Aegeus was an archaic figure in the founding myth of Athens. The "goat-man" who gave his name to the Aegean Sea was, next to Poseidon, the father of Theseus, the founder of Athenian institutions and one of the kings of Athens.