Approaches to Literature week14

▲Format of the response paper

1. The rules and order should be the same as p.777- name→professor name→date, the number of page is required necessarily also.

2. The first paragraph should include three important parts, which are hypothesis/motivation, what the story is about, and the focal point.

3. Then, analyze the text stanza by stanza. Remember that each stanza must be written according to the focal point or hypothesis mentioned in the first part.

4. Briefly re-emphasize the motivation and make a conclusion.

5. “Work(s) cited” should be written in MLA or APA style.

-MLA style

-APA style

▲Dover Beach

It is a lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. 

The title, locale and subject of the poem's descriptive opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of Dover, Kent, facing Calais, France, at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part (21 miles) of the English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.

　　▽Tone: Sad

　　In the earlier lines of the first stanza the speaker's tone is one of pure enjoyment, peace of mind, and appreciation of beauty. Yet his tone changes with his mood when he becomes aware of the pebbles being rolled back and forth by the incoming and outgoing waves. The stanza ends with the words and bring the eternal note of sadness in.　

　　▽Theme: Sadness

　　There's a fight in this poem between light and dark, harmony and chaos. Through the poem, Arnold is lamenting the loss of faith or culture in his society and painting a picture of a world that, as a result of this loss of faith, is full of cruelty, uncertainty and violence.

▲   To His Coy Mistress

It is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678). This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and is possibly the best recognized carpe diem poem in English. The speaker of the poem starts by addressing a woman who has been slow to respond to his sexual advances.

　　▽structure: It is written in iambic tetrameter and rhymes in couplets. In the case of "To His Coy Mistress," the two lines that make up each couplet rhyme with each other.

　　▽hyperbole: is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and creates strong impressions.

　      ▽carpe diem-  is a Latin aphorism, usually translated "seize the day"
→"To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell is centered around this carpe diem theme as it deals with the conflict of beauty and sensual desire on one hand and the destructive force of time on the other.

→To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time: is a poem written by English Cavalier poet Robert Herrick in the 17th century. The poem is in the genre of carpe diem.

▲Authors

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)	He was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools.    Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)	He was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678.   During the Common wealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton.

Approaches to Literature week13

▲Marguerite Duras　

1914-1996

　　Duras was a French novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist and experimental filmmaker. She was born in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging French people to settle in the colony.

▽  Two of her best known works: 

Their storylines are both set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam and during that time, the love without blessings.  
　1. Hiroshima mon amour, 1960:  It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness.

     2. L'Amant, 1984 (translated as The Lover): The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man.

▲Adaptation(s) of Hiroshima mon amour : Song Version (Lyrics by張洪量)

▲free verse

　It is a literary device that can be defined as poetry that is free from limitations of regular meter or rhythm and does not rhyme with fixed forms. It does not follow regular rhyme scheme rules and still provide artistic expression. However, it still allows poets to use alliteration, rhyme, cadences or rhythms to get the effects that they consider are suitable for the piece.

  ▽ prevailed in the early development of Romanticism, and so on : 

Walt Whitman	1819-1892
	Walt Whitman, known as the father of free verse English poetry, who based his long lines in "Leaves of Grass" on the phrasing of the King James Bible, influenced later American free verse practitioners. △O Captain! my Captain! △ I celebrate myself, and sing myself
Emily Dickinson	1830-1886
	Emily Dickinson is famous as the mother of American English free verse. △Come Slowly, Eden

▲Poets  (we have learned in this book) p.1108 

1. Major English Poets of Romanticism

2. others

Approaches to Literature week12

▲Definition of Poetry p.700

1. Archibald MacLeish- 

　　His most well-known poem, "Ars Poetica," contains a classic statement of the modernist aesthetic: "A poem should not mean / But be." He later broke with modernism's pure aesthetic. MacLeish himself was greatly involved in public life and came to believe that this was not ovnly an appropriate but an inevitable role for a poet.

2. Marianne Moore- 

　　Her most famous poem is perhaps the one entitled, appropriately, "Poetry", in which she hopes for poets who can produce "imaginary gardens with real toads in them". It also expressed her idea that meter, or anything else that claims the exclusive title "poetry", is not as important as delight in language and precise, heartfelt expression in any form.

3. William Shakespeare- 

　　Sonnet 18, often alternatively titled Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?, is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet. Detailed exegeses have revealed several double meanings within the poem, giving it a greater depth of interpretation.

▲La Belle Dame sans Merci

　　"The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy", is a ballad written by the English poet John Keats. The poem is considered an English classic, stereotypical of other of Keats' works. At only a short twelve stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, the poem is nonetheless full of enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations.

　▽Ballad: It is featured as narrative, repetitive, and musical.

　　Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of the British Isles from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa.

▲E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e e cummings (in the style of some of his poems) , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright.  
→Cummings often wrote in a manner that did not follow standard English syntax and punctuation.

→He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th century English literature.

　▽ somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond: It expresses how insignificant human is.

　　Cummings gently sprinkled his poem with images while the poem gently oozed with sentimentality and intense feelings. And not only did he utilize the present existing metaphors and imagery but he also invented his own images as seen in “your eyes have their silence” which is deviant of the traditional imagery, “your eyes speak…” or any depiction of the eyes as means to communicate. 

　▽  (a leaf falls) loneliness

　　"l(a" is arranged vertically in groups of one to five letters. When the text is laid out horizontally, it either reads as l(a leaf falls)oneliness —in other words, a leaf falls inserted between the first two letters ofloneliness- or l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness, with a le af fa ll s between a l and one.
　 ▽  anyone lived in a pretty how town- In the poem, Cummings states the lines, "spring summer autumn winter", (3) and "sun moon stars rain", (8) multiple times. In reiterating these lines he changes the order of the seasons, "autumn winter spring summer", (11) and "stars rain sun moon", (21).

▲April is the cruellest month

　▽The Waste Land: It a long poem by T. S. Eliot. It is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central text in Modernist poetry.

→April is the cruellest month because the life and colour of spring throws one's depression into stark relief and forces painful memories to surface.

　▽When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: 
　　It is a long poem in the form of an elegy written by American poet Walt Whitman(1819–1892) in 1865. It was written in free verse in 206 lines, uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. 

　→Lilacs symbolize “past away.”

▲ Funeral Blues

▲New Words

1.「何意百煉剛， 化為繞指柔。」

2. frame (n.)- a border which surrounds and supports a picture, door or window

→frame story: is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories. 

▽ The Canterbury Tales:  is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer. 

→frame (v.)- to make a person seem to be guilty of a crime when they are not, by producing facts or information which are not true
→He claimed he'd been framed by the police.

3. fra- : “brittleness, weakness”

→frame

→fragile (adj.)- easily damaged, broken or harmed

I felt rather fragile (= weak) for a few days after the operation.

→frail (adj.) -weak or unhealthy, or easily damaged, broken or harmed

a frail old lady/the country's frail economy

4. ann-;enn-: “year”

→perennial (adj.)- lasting a very long time, or happening repeatedly or all the time

We face the perennial problem of not having enough money.

→annuity (n.)- a fixed amount of money paid to someone every year, usually until their death, or the insurance agreement or investment which provides the money that is paid

v.s annual fee

→anniversary (n.)- the day on which an important event happened in a previous year

Tomorrow is the thirtieth anniversary of the revolution.

Approaches to Literature week11

▲May Forth in history

　▽MayFourth Movement: was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student participants in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting against the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles.

　　Hu Shih is widely recognized today as a key contributor to Chinese liberalism and language reform in his advocacy for the use of written vernacular Chinese.

　<c.f >movement in the West: movement in drama

　　Henrik Ibsen(1828-1906), 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 had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theatre to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment.

▲Sonnet 18-

　　In the sonnet, William Shakespeare compares his beloved to the summer season, and argues that his beloved is better. He also states that his beloved will live on forever through the words of the poem.

　▽Poetic License: it is the right assumed by poets to alter or invert standard syntax or depart from common diction or pronunciation to comply with the metrical or tonal requirements of their writing.

　 ▽Sonnet: is a poetic form which originated in Italy. By the thirteenth century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. 

→Sonnet 18 is written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet.

▲Figure of speech-It is figurative language in the form of a single word or phrase.

　　It can be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words. There are mainly five figures of speech according to Maggie Tucker: simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification and synecdoche.