文導 week 5

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. ： an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s.



Anton Pavlovich Chekhov：a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.



The Lady with the Dog：a short story by Anton Chekhov first published in 1899. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between a Russian banker and a young lady he meets while vacationing in Yalta.



The City of Yalta：a resort city on the south coast of the Crimean Peninsula surrounded by the Black Sea.


The Reader is a 2008 German-American romantic drama film based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink.It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past – a secret which, if revealed, could help her at the trial.

Trailer

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own      governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.--- James Madison

Finding Forrester：a 2000 American drama about an African-American teenager, Jamal Wallace, is invited to attend a prestigious private high school. By chance, Jamal befriends a reclusive writer, William Forrester, through whom he refines his talent for writing and comes to terms with his identity.


3C： Computer、Communication、Consumer


Lilac：a color that is a pale violet tone representing the average color of most lilac flowers. It might also be described as dark mauve or light purple.

Literacy：traditionally understood as the ability to read and write. The term's meaning has been expanded to include the ability to use language, numbers, images and other means to understand and use the dominant symbol systems of a culture.

defendant (n)
a person against whom an action or claim is brought in a court of law.

secretive(adj.)
Having a tendency to keep one's thoughts or activities unknown to others

affair(n)
A sexual relationship between two people, especially when at least one of them is married or in another committed romantic relationship.

-ant：professional
ex：Christian(=Protestant+Catholic)、accountant、applicant


WASP：White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

文導 week 4

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period)： an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.

John Keats：an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.

 Ode on a Grecian Urn  BY JOHN KEATS 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Ode to a Nightingale  BY JOHN KEATS 

   

             ------ Tender is the night

Thomas Hardy：an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth.

Jude the Obscure：the last completed of Thomas Hardy's novels, began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion and marriage.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891 and in book form in 1892. Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and possibly Hardy's masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England.

To Kill a Mockingbird:  a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature.The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality.

Harper Lee: an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960.

Shakespeare: an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet, and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship.


The River Avon or Avon：a river in or adjoining the counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire in the Midlands of England. Also known as the Warwickshire Avon or Shakespeare's Avon, it has been divided since 1719 into the Lower Avon, below Evesham, and the Upper Avon, from Evesham to above Stratford-upon-Avon


"What's in a name? that which we call a rose

    By any other name would smell as sweet"

                                                          Romeo and Juliet  by William Shakespeare

scene  act
ex：A Midsummer Night's Dream V. 1


A Midsummer Night's Dream：a comedy believed to have been written by William Shakespeare between 1590 and 1597, portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta.


THESEUS：

More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Measure for Measure(一報還一報): a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. The play's main themes include justice, "mortality and mercy in Vienna," and the dichotomy between corruption and purity: "some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." Mercy and virtue predominate, since the play does not end tragically.



Danny boy

Didacticism: a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art.

obscurity： The quality or condition of being unknown

imagine VS. symbol
imagine：To form a mental picture or image
 symbol：Something that represents something invisible

Do you want to make a scene：to be loud and rude with other people or in public

文導 week 3

Charles John Huffam Dickens： an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.


A Tale of Two Cities (1859)：a novel by Charles Dickens, 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.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."----famous quote in The Tale of Two Cities

A Christmas Carol： a Ghost-Story of Christmas, is a novella by Charles Dickens. The novella met with instant success and critical acclaim. A Christmas Carol 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.


Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy's Progress：the second novel by Charles Dickens. The story is of the orphan Oliver Twist, who starts his life in a workhouse and is then sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. He escapes from there and travels to London, where he meets the Artful Dodger, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin.


The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages：a 1994 book by Harold Bloom on Western literature, in which he defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon.

canon：1.a general rule or standard, as of judgment, morals, etc
              2.a piece of music in which an extended melody in one part is imitated successively in one                      or more other parts.

cathedral, church, and chapel
cathedral：a Christian church which contains the seat of a bishop, thus serving as the central church                      of a diocese, conference, or episcopate.
church： the broader term, referring both to the worship space in an architectural sense as well as
                   the congregation as a collective group of people meeting within the church building.
chapel：It may be part of a larger structure or complex, sometimes with its own grounds.


Roman Fever：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.

Memento mori ("remember that you have to die")：a Latin expression, originating from a practice common in Ancient Rome


The Age of Innocence：Edith Wharton's twelfth novel. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee agreed to award the prize to Sinclair Lewis, the judges rejected his Main Street, on political grounds and "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'", the irony being that the committee had awarded The Age of Innocence the prize on grounds that negated Wharton's own blatant and subtle ironies which constitute and make the book so worthy of attention. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s, during the Gilded Age.


Edith Wharton ：a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
BY JOHN KEATS

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

文導 week 2

中西方觀念差別----從彎腰郵筒與家事分工談中英文差異


fictional plot： refers to the sequence of events inside a story which affect other events through the principle of cause and effect.

Mimesis：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.

flat character VS. round character
  In his book Aspects of the novel, E. M. Forster defined two basic types of characters, their qualities, functions, and importance for the development of the novel

flat character： Flat characters are two-dimensional, in that they are relatively uncomplicated.
round character：round characters are complex figures with many different characteristics and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.

fables, parable, and allegory

fables： a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized and that illustrates or leads to a moral, which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim.

parable： a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a type of analogy.
allegory： an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. Allegory has been used widely throughout history in all forms of art, largely because it can readily illustrate complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its viewers, readers, or listeners.


Historical fiction：a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting located in the past. Historical fiction can be an ambiguous term: frequently it is used as a synonym for describing the historical novel; however, the term can be applied to works in other narrative formats, such as those in the performing and visual arts like theatre, opera, cinema, television, comics, and graphic novels.


Foreshadowing or guessing ahead：a literary device by which an author hints what is to come. Foreshadowing is a dramatic device in which an important plot-point is mentioned early in the story and will return in a more significant way. It is used to avoid disappointment. It is also sometimes used to arouse the reader.


flashback：an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory.

in medias res (Classical Latin "into the middle things")： opens in the midst of action.

  
An antihero (or antiheroine)：a protagonist who lacks conventional heroic qualities such as idealism, courage, or morality. These individuals often possess dark personality traits such as disagreeableness, dishonesty, and aggressiveness. These characters are usually considered "conspicuously contrary to an archetypal hero". 


A protagonist ：is the main character in any story, such as a literary work or drama. For example, the protagonist of Spiderman is Peter Parker(Spiderman).


An antagonist：a group of characters, institution, or concept that stands in or represents opposition against which the protagonist(s) must contend. In other words, an antagonist is a person or a group of people who opposes a protagonist.

heroine：the main female character in a novel, play, film, etc

virtual：having the essence or effect but not the appearance or form of
Verisimilitude (or truthlikeness)：a philosophical concept that distinguishes between the relative and apparent (or seemingly so) truth and falsity of assertions and hypotheses. The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.


a boy cry wolf 狼來了


flatmate：an associate who shares an apartment with you in the same floor

bread maker：the one who earn money to raise whole family

pay ~
pay a visit：to visit someone or something
pay respect：to honor someone; to have and show respect for someone
pay compliment：to give someone a compliment.