今日主講
"to imitate," from μῖμος (mimos), "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self.
In ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society, and its use has changed and been reinterpreted many times since then.
Didacticism
Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art. The term has its origin in the Ancient Greek word διδακτικός (didaktikos), "related to education and teaching", and signified learning in a fascinating and intriguing manner.
Didactic art was meant both to entertain and to instruct. Didactic plays, for instance, were intended to convey a moral theme or other rich truth to the audience. An example of didactic writing is Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), which offers a range of advice about critics and criticism.
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet. He is best known for his satirical verse, as well as for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the second-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published anonymously in the January 1820, Number 15 issue of the magazine Annals of the Fine Arts.
Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator's discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn. The poem focuses on two scenes: one in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfilment, and another of villagers about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", and literary critics have debated whether they increase or diminish the overall beauty of the poem. Critics have focused on other aspects of the poem, including the role of the narrator, the inspirational qualities of real-world objects, and the paradoxical relationship between the poem's world and reality.
Melville, Herman
Herman Melville(August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, writer of short stories, and poet from the American Renaissance period. Most of his writings were published between 1846 and 1857. Best known for his sea adventure Typee (1846) and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), he was almost forgotten during the last thirty years of his life. Melville's writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. The main characteristic of his style is probably its heavy allusiveness, a reflection of his use of written sources. Melville's way of adapting what he read for his own new purposes, scholar Stanley T. Williams wrote, "was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's".[1]
Born in New York City as the third child of a merchant in French dry-goods who went bankrupt, his formal education stopped abruptly after the death of his father in 1832, shortly after bankruptcy. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he first took to sea in 1839, as a common sailor on a merchant voyage to Liverpool, the basis for his fourth book, Redburn (1849). In late December 1840 he signed up for his first whaling voyage aboard the whaler Acushnet, but jumped ship eighteen months later in the Marquesas Islands. He lived among the natives for up to a month, of which his first book, Typee (1846), is a fictionalized account that became such a success that he worked up a sequel, Omoo (1847). The same year Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw; their four children were born between 1849 and 1855.
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of the British Regency. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London.
Movie-
Director: Joe Wright
Writers: Jane Austen (novel), Deborah Moggach (screenplay), 1 more credit »
Stars: Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn | See full cast and crew »
Watch movie on YOUTUBE!-CLICK ME
Roman Fever 羅馬熱
"Roman Fever" is a short story by American writer Edith Wharton. It was first published in the magazine Liberty in 1934, and was later included in Wharton's last short-story collection, The World Over.
Analysis:
Edith Wharton wrote “Roman Fever” in 1934 and included it in the collection The World Over (1936). In the New York Review of Books, Percy Hutchinson wrote that "Roman Fever" was “as memorable a short story as Ms. Wharton has ever done,” and “as sharp-cut as a diamond, and as hard of surface.” The plot is relatively straightforward, but the story’s structure, which buries one narrative within another, is a testament to Wharton's literary skill and her understanding of American high society. The primary narrative follows two middle-aged recent widows, Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade, who are meeting by chance in Rome. The women knit and reminisce about their shared history and discuss their teenaged daughters, Barbara and Jenny.
Over the course of the story, the reader learns that Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had spent time together in Rome many years before. Wharton reveals the private thoughts of each woman at times, which is appropriate for these characters because society women would hesitate to share such intimate secrets with one another. Finally, the facade of politeness breaks down as the reminiscing focuses on one particular incident. Mrs. Slade was engaged to her late husband, Delphin, who was in turn, having an affair with Mrs. Ansley (who was single at the time). The women retread betrayals of the past, which results in a revelation that will rock their present-day lives: Barbara is actually Delphin's daughter. Thus, the story ends on a powerful and provocative note.
Armine Kotin Mortimer writes that "Roman Fever" is like the tip of an iceberg, and the massive bulk of subtext is submerged below the surface of the primary narrative. Most of the story's plot points take place in the past. Meanwhile, Wharton shrouds Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley's complicated history in simple, frank language. This is an accurate depiction of the way society women spoke to one another, and also allows Wharton to seductively dangle the truth in front of the reader until the story's final explosive exchange. By the end of "Roman Fever," the subtext has come to the surface and the reader is finally able to understand the underlying tension that exists between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley.
Mortimer explains, “the fact that [Mrs. Ansley's affair with Delphin] is told in the second story mode has a great deal to do with our pleasure in reading ‘Roman Fever’. While the first story is staid because [it is] rule-governed and classical in design and structure, and because it has order, proportion, simplicity, and harmony, the second is feverish because it is told only in erupting elliptical fragments, apparently unintended, disguised and displaced.”
Against the backdrop of propriety and politeness, the reader must unearth the dark, sexual, jealous, and vengeful side of the story. In this way, Wharton engages the reader in the storytelling process as a voyeur as he/she unravels the writer's intent. From the beginning of the story, Mrs. Slade believes that she has the upper hand, but her control slips away as the hidden narrative begins to emerge. She pokes and pushes Mrs. Ansley, which is her way of punishing her friend for past transgressions. However, Mrs. Slade has no inkling of what she is going to unearth after toppling the emotional wall Mrs. Ansley has built around herself. Mrs. Ansley’s knitting is a symbolic defense or fortification against the bitter Mrs. Slade’s confessions and recriminations.
Wharton also frequently uses parallels or paired opposites to create the narrative structure of "Roman Fever." She writes about two women, each with one daughter, who have moved between America and Rome, and the past and the present, etc. Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade use their daughters as a segue to arrive at the conversation about their shared experiences in Rome. Whereas the city is now safe and romantic, it was once filled with danger and hidden but feverish sexuality. Rome itself is also marked by decadence and tragedy. Roman Fever was a deadly strain of malaria that infected many Romans when Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley were young. Wharton implies that Mrs. Slade sent Mrs. Ansley the false letter from Delphin so that Mrs. Ansley would go outside and become infected.
However, "Roman Fever" is concurrently a symbol of sexual longing. Mrs. Ansley's doctor suspected she was infected the night after she went out to meet Delphin. While she was not actually sick, she was pregnant with Delphin's love child. In the present, however, Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade muse that Roman Fever is no longer a threat, so Barbara and Jenny have nothing to fear as they enjoy the sights and sounds of Rome. They are free to run about as they please and, as Mortimer writes, “are neither hampered by propriety nor troubled by romance. It is the mothers’ generation alone for whom the double structure of hiding exists.”
Edith Wharton wrote "Roman Fever" in the early 1930s, which was a time of immense political and cultural change throughout Europe. Fascist governments had begun to consolidate control in Germany and Italy. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley are sitting on a terrace overlooking Rome's most famous historical sites, which were once sites of extreme violence and destruction. Meanwhile, Barbara and Jenny go off to Tarquinia with a couple of Fascist Italian aviators. Tarquinia was the site of Lucretia's rape and the fall of the Etruscan monarchy. Critic Abby Werlock emphasizes the historical context of "Roman Fever," writing that Wharton “poses Fascism as a real threat that looms just outside the story.”
At the end of the story, when Mrs. Ansley moves away from Mrs. Slade, she uses the phrase “Name of the Father,” which is an allusion to the Fascist obsession with patriarchy and purity. Werlock writes, “Mrs. Ansley’s feminist action of producing an illegitimate child can be seen as a politically threatening act” because she has acted outside the bounds of appropriate, government-sanctioned reproduction.
相關知識補充
好字典:(千萬不要用yahoo)
1.Bartleby.com
出自bartleby the scrivener-Melville, Herman(詳參上)
最後一句話是:Ah,humanity!
2.Gutenberg
3.Spring break
Spring break is a vacational period in early spring at universities and schools in various countries in the world.
It is also known by names such as Easter vacation, Easter Holiday, March break, spring vacation, Mid-Term Break, study week, reading week, reading period, or Easter week, depending on regional conventions.
4.Easter
Easter (Old English usually Ēastrun, -on, or -an; also Ēastru, -o; and Ēostre),also called Pasch (derived, through Latin: Pascha and Greek Πάσχα Paskha, from Aramaic: פסחא, cognate to Hebrew: פֶּסַח Pesaḥ) or Resurrection Sunday, is a festival and holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, described in the New Testament as having occurred on the third day of his burial after his crucifixion by Romans at Calvary c. 30 AD. It is the culmination of the Passion of Christ, preceded by Lent (or Great Lent), a forty-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance.
The week before Easter is called Holy Week, and it contains the days of the Easter Triduum, including Maundy Thursday, commemorating the Maundy and Last Supper, as well as Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion and death of Jesus. In western Christianity, Eastertide, the Easter Season, begins on Easter Sunday and lasts seven weeks, ending with the coming of the fiftieth day, Pentecost Sunday. In Orthodoxy, the season of Pascha begins on Pascha and ends with the coming of the fortieth day, the Feast of the Ascension.
5.The Reader
The Reader explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses die and living memory fades.
6.The Giver
The Giver is a 1993 American social science fiction children's novel by Lois Lowry. It is set in a society which is at first presented as a utopian society but then has the reader question whether the societies' utopia is worth the cost. The novel follows a boy named Jonas through the twelfth and thirteenth years of his life. The society has eliminated pain and strife by converting to "Sameness," a plan that has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. The Giver won the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold more than 10 million copies.
script-: write
Scribble (v) to write (a note, for example) hurriedly without heed to legibility or style.
Scripture (n) any writing or book, especially when of a sacred or religious nature.
Prescribe (v) to lay down, in writing or otherwise, as a rule of action to be followed;
astr-: star
Astronaut (n) a person trained to pilot, navigate, or otherwise participate as a crew member of a spacecraft.
Astrology (n) the study of the motions and relative positions of the planets, sun, and moon, interpreted in terms of humancharacteristics and activities.
Asterisk (n) this symbol used in linguistics to mark an ungrammatical or otherwise unacceptable utterance.
留言列表
