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