▲ Introduction (page 1~12)
1. Three key words: creative, artistic, imaginative
2. Before you open the book, it’s necessary to ask
yourself three questions first:
1) What is
literature?
2) What is
literature for?
3) Why
should we know about literature?
(There are also three tips in page 8.)
3. The first paragraph is the hook:
→it takes Charles
Dickens’s novel Hard times for example.
He was an English writer and social critic. His works
enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth
century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius.
a. A Christmas Carol: is a novella by
Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall on 19 December
1843. It tells the story of a bitter old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge and his transformation
into a gentler, kindlier man after visitations by
the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of
Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.
b. Great Expectations: Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's
thirteenth novel and his penultimate completed novel; a bildungsroman which depicts the personal growth and personal
development of an orphan nicknamed Pip.
c. A Tale of Two Cities: is his best-known work of historical
fiction. It’s set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution.
The novel depicts the plight of the French
peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the
revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the
revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the
revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during
the same period.
→set: It
includes time
and place.
→The first paragraph in Chapter 1 is often quoted in other passages:
Western canon is the body of books and, more broadly, music and art that
Western scholars generally accept as the most important
and influential in shaping Western culture.Such a canon is
important to the
theory of educational
perennialism and the development of high culture.
▽Harold
Bloom: He is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.
Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the Canon wars of the early 1990s.
▽canon: The range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider “great” or “major”.
→ original form: Pachelbel's Canon
▲narrator: is the one who tells the
story; however, protagonist: is the main
character in the
story or play. They are completely different. For example, in the
Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is the narrator, and Gatsby is the protagonist.
church:
a
building that Christians go to in order to worship. Traditional churches
usually contain an altar and long wooden seats facing the altar called pews.
cathedral:
a
very large, usually stone, building for Christian worship, which is the largest
and most important church of an area that a bishop controls
▲Roman
Fever
a. define what is “Roman Fever” to the characters
b.
the five parts of plot
→the
greatest conflict must be “Delphin” in this novel.
→the
climax is on page.128, the story came to an end right after Mrs. Slade said “I
had Barbara”.
▲New Words
1. mor-:
death
morgue- place
where dead bodies are kept
→The
painting features a human skull, the classic memento mori.
mortgage- an
agreement which allows you to borrow money from a bank or similar organization,
especially in order to buy a house or apartment, or the amount of money
itself
→They
took out a £40 000 mortgage (= They borrowed £40 000) to buy the house.
2.-i(e)um:
a range that is limited
colosseum
petroleum- a
dark thick oil obtained from under the ground, from which various substances
including petrol, paraffin and diesel oil are produced
museum
