Week3 Approach to Literature

△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.

  ▲Charles Dickens: 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:

→ “It's not the matter of being good or bad, it's the matter of the choice, preference, and attitude.” quoted from T. Sara Sun

△The western canon:

  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

    Pachelbel's Canon is the name commonly given to a canon by the German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel in his Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo , sometimes referred to as Canon and Gigue in D or simply Canon in D.

△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.

△chapel/ church/ cathedral

chapel:
a small church, or a special room used as a church, where Christians can pray or worship

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”.

△prefix, suffix, and root

  1. mor-: death

morgue- place where dead bodies are kept

Memento Mori- something that ​reminds ​people that everyone must ​die

  →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