Selected Readings of English Literature
What Is Literature?
The Random Hou Dictionary definition of the word “literature”:
•writing regarded as having permanent worth through its intrinsic excellence;
•the entire body of writing of a specific language, period, people etc.;
•writing dealing with a particular subject;
Comment on the following statements
Israel Zangwill:
In Literature, everything is true except names and places; in history nothing is true except names and places.
Ezra Pound:
Lite rature is “news that stays news.”
Picasso:
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
Robert Frost:
Literature is “a performance of words.”
Franz Kafka:
Literature “must be an ice-axe to break the a frozen inside us.”
Jack London:
(Good literature) transcends the limits of particularity to reach universality.
Thomas Gray:
Literature is “thoughts that breathe and words that burn.”
Robert Scholes:
The sources of pleasure in literary discour(叙述) can be defined as matters of communicative capacity. Literary works offer readers a chance to u a fuller range of their interpretive(解释的) abilities than do non-literary texts.
Brainstorming activity
•What is behind your choice of the elective, Selective Readings of English Literature?
•What do you think of literature reading? Or why are you fond of reading literature?
Forms of Literature
In the more specialized n of the word, literature is the art that us language as a medium. Literature contains fiction and non-fiction. Under fiction there are four genres ---- novels, short stories, plays, and poems.
Purpo and Means of the Four Genres
with the U of Words
●words are ud to create imaginary persons or events in stories or plays.
●words are ud to show ideas and feelings in essays or poems.
●words are addresd directly to the reader in stories and essays.
●words are overheard by the reader in plays or poems.
The ways literary forms are communicated to the reader
•A story, basically a narration through the report of a storyteller to the reader
•An essay, persuasion
•A poem, meditation
•A play, creation of action through the dialogue of imaginary persons
What do we read for in western literature?
(the first level)
•The most primitive approach to western literature, especially novels, is to read them for emotional s
atisfaction. Students at this level look for what’s going on and what’s happened to the characters they can identify with. All they care about is the “story.” To the readers, novels are recreational at least and therapeutic(有益健康的) at most.
(the cond level)
•The cond level on which literature exists is what can be called the didactic one. Literature is regarded as a depositor of human experience of considerable variety and scope. It gains access to questions of moral philosophy ---- questions of value and of normative(规范的) judgment. In such belief, readers try to read as many meanings as they can into literary pieces. Literature is read for its hermeneutic(诠释的) function.
(the third level)
•Advanced readers of literature have a distinctive concern over matters beyond didacticism. They are not satisfied with “what is going on,” or “what is said.” They look for “how it is said.” Readers at this level are also aware of artistic weakness. They even read texts cloly as texts and not to move into the general context of human experience or history.
How to approach literature?
•One must be both inside and outside of the work. One must allow himlf be carried away by the work, and at the same time, on reading again and again think about the way the end is connected to the beginning. Eliot says that one has to give himlf up, and then recover himlf, and the third moment is having something to say, before one has wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. And the lf recovered is never the same as the lf before it was given.
Short story
•People tell stories to entertain or to instruct.
•Maupassant and Chekhov are two great writers of the later nineteenth century who can be taken as
reprentatives of the two kinds of literature respectively ---- one of resolution, the other revelation. •Much of the best short fiction from Chekhov onward is less concerned with what happens than with how character feels about the happenings. The emphasis is not on external action but in inner action, feeling.
Reading I
Early Autumn
wode
by Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes African-American Writer, Poet, (February 1, 1902 ---May 22, 1967)
About the writer
Langston Hughes (1902-1967): a poet, playwright, novelist, songwriter, biographer, editor, newspaper columnist, translator and lecturer.
Born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, Langston Hughes lived the first twelve years of his life in Kansas, Colorado, Indiana, and New Y ork State. He graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where in his nior year he was elected class poet and editor of the yearbook. Hughes’ other travels included trips to Europe and Africa, and the character of his adventurous, wandering life was reflected in such works as his novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), his short stories, and his autobiography.
conveyer
By 1925, Hughes, together with other Negro writers, had formed a group in the Harlem ction of New Y ork City for the purpo of exchanging ideas, encouraging one another, and, eventually, sharing in the triumph created by the sudden popularity of their work. As spokesman for the group, H
ughes published an article, “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain,” which amounted to a public declaration of the intent of Hughes and his contemporaries to break from their literary heritage and to initiate a new trend in Negro literature. For new black writers, Harlem and its people were to provide the inspiration for much of their artistic work.
In later ye ars, Hughes became known as the “O. Henry of Harlem” and wrote countless short stories, a number of volumes of poetry, ven novels, and six plays. In his poetry, he successfully caught and projected scenes of urban Negro life, and his sketches in ver with their undertones of bitterness, humor, and pathos became also a form of social protest.
Questions for discussion
1. In the first paragraph, it reads “Then something not very important had come between them, and they didn’t speak…” which finally led to their paration from each other. How do you think of both of their attitudes to this matter?
2. Can you discern any pair of contrast in the way the two protagonists treat with each other in their unexpected encounter?
3. Why did Mary not give an answer to Bill’s question “And your husband?” and instead said, “We have three children …”?
4. Why did Mary desperately reach back into the past?
5. We know that Mary impulsively married a man she thought she loved. Then why is it that we know the name of Bill’s wife, Lucille, but that of Mary’s husband has never been revealed?
bloodyhell6. How do you look at the description of the falling leaves in Washington Square?
7. How did it come that the lights of the Fifth A venue turned out to be chains of misty brilliance? And later, how it came that “the lights on the avenue blurred, twinkled, blurred”?
8. Note that soon after Mary gave her answer to what Bill said about his family, that he had two kids, the narrative following is, “A great many people went past them thro ugh the park. People they didn’t know.” And how do you feel about the scene that Mary saw from her leaving bus, “People came between them outside, people crossing the street, people they didn’t know. Space and people.”
succeed9. What effects does the conclusive ntence achieve?
10. What personal traits can be en in both of the protagonists to which, to some extent, their different destinies can be attributed?
11. If you had been one of the two parties in the short story, would you do the same as them, or would your demeanor be different?
12. Titles of works often offer focus. How do you look at the title of this work, Early Autumn? Recreation
rodan•Tell the story to each other, in the same way it is told or in a different version, from the perspective of Mary, of Bill, or of any other person.
po什么意思
Role play
•the chance meeting in Washington Square
•Act out what will be going on after the encounter.
Writing
•Choo a part in the story that is most appealing to you, and make your comment on it.
•If you were suppod to end the story, how would you conclude it? Give to the story an ending different from the original one.
Dreams
Hold fast to dreams a
For if dreams die b
Life is a broken-winged bird cmemo pad
That cannot fly. b
Hold fast to dreams a
如你所愿英文For when dreams go d
Life is a barren field e
Frozen with snow. d
end-rhyme scheme: abcb aded
iamb dimeter (抑扬格二步诗)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers2018高考试题
I’ve known rivers;
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raid the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve en its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunt.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
•This is a lyric(抒情的) poem in free ver (non-metrical poetry). 无韵诗
•The speaker is a particular voice, an “I”, but also a general one, “the negro”.
•The paratactic style (并列排比式) in which things are listed
•The relationship between the particular and general, between the individual and a type, about a universal from a particular point of view
•A poem about knowledge, about identity, and about history
•The flowing of rivers is like the flowing of blood. And to know them is to know what is under or inside particular racial experience at the deepest level
•Or the title can be changed to “The Negro Speaks of Human Life and History as the Negro Knows it
” Reading II
War
by Luige Pirandello •Luigi Pirandello, 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays.
Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.
------ Luige Pirandello Luige Pirandellow ranks as the most important and innovative Italian dramatist of the early twentieth century. He was born in Sicily and moved to Rome to pursue a writing career. Novels and short stories flowed from his pen. Winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in literature, Pirandello express the confusion and suffering of the human condition in disturbing yet humorous ways. His works focus primarily on the inherent instability of human existence, specifically the conflict of reason and instinct within the human mind.
Pirandello’s focus on the social masks that people wear has been a major influence on modern fiction, as well as on modern drama. Pirandello was fascinated by the contrast between appearance and reality in human behavior. He viewed life as a ries of illusions, each concerning a surprising core: comedy in tragedy, sanity in madness, grief in happiness.
He saw people as suffering from the necessity of leading insincere public lives, and he watched with compassion as they clung to their delusions. He created literature that he hoped would force people to examine their convictions, acknowledge their inner-lves, and lead more authentic lives.
Questions for discussion
1.What is the importance of the physical actions in the story? How do they offer clues to the
feelings and attitudes of the characters?
2. If we believe that the contrast in the behavior of the fat old man (whether or not covering his mouth with his hand) before and after the revelation of the death of his child is meaningful, then, with the expod missing teeth, what was it that the man would really want to hide from others?
3. What is the significance of the words we have italicized in the following ntence? “The old man, t
oo, turned to look at her, fixing his great, bulging, horribly watery light gray eyes, deep in her face.”
4. What/When is the climax of this story? How can you tell it is the climax?
5. Is there any hint to the sorrow of the old man over his loss of son before the story reaches its climax?
6. Imagine another version of this story. Suppo that the old man, who son is merely at the front, argues with the other people in the compartment, and persuades them, as in the prent version of the story; at a station, he receives a telegram saying that his son has been killed, whereupon he bursts into “heart-breaking, uncontrollable sobs” while they stare at him in amazement. Why would such aknife的复数
