Approaches to Literature week4

▲Ode on a Grecian Urn

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats. 

→ “Ode” means a poem expressing the writer's thoughts and feelings about a particular person or subject, usually written to that person or subject.

　　The poem is one of several "Great Odes of 1819", which include "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Like many of Keats's odes, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" discusses art and art's audience. Love, Ambition and Poesy are integrated into "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with an emphasis on how the urn, as a human artistic construct, is capable of relating to the idea of "Truth".

▲Thomas Hardy-Unfairness in Working-class

1. Jude the Obscure: It is the last completed of Thomas Hardy's novels. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion and marriage. Its protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man, a stonemason, who dreams of becoming a scholar. The novel explores several social problems in Victorian England, especially those relating to the institutions of marriage, the Church, and education.

2.  Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Hardy's writing often explores what he called the "ache of modernism", and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one critic noted, portrays "the energy of traditional ways and the strength of the forces that are destroying them". 

　　Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and possibly Hardy's fictional masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England.

▲New Words

1. didact (adj.)- intended to teach people a moral

→didactic literature

didact instruction: try to teach you something morally

didactism (n.): a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art

2. obs- “toward, against, across, down” 負面字根

obstacle (n.): something that blocks you so that movement, going forward or action are prevented or made more difficult

→This decision has removed the last obstacle to the hostages' release.

obscurity (n.): when someone or something is not known to many people

→He was briefly famous in his twenties but then sank into obscurity.

obscenity (n.): when someone or something is obscene; a very offensive or sexually shocking word or sentence

→Such deliberate destruction of the environment is an obscenity.

3. “measure for measure” 惡有惡報

Measure for Measure 's main themes include justice, "mortality and mercy in Vienna," and the dichotomy between corruption and purity: "some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall."