WEEK 10 西概筆記(Western Literature)

1. extension of quiz and orientation

a. Drama

Drama divides into two part : one is comedy, and another is tragedy.
Drama is the specific mode of narrative, typically fictional, represented in performance.

b. Confession

Confessions is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written in Latin between AD 397 and 400. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published under the title The Confessions of St. Augustine in order to distinguish the book from other books with similar titles. Its original title was Confessions in Thirteen Books, and it was composed to be read out loud with each book being a complete unit. It is generally considered one of Augustine's most important texts. 

c. Greek tragedy

Athenian tragedy—the oldest surviving form of tragedy—is a type of dance-drama that formed an important part of the theatrical culture of the city-state. Having emerged sometime during the 6th century B.C.E, it flowered during the 5th century B.C.E (from the end of which it began to spread throughout the Greek world), and continued to be popular until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. No tragedies from the 6th century and only 32 of the more than a thousand that were performed in the 5th century have survived. We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

d. Dionysus

Dionysus is the god of the grape harvest, wine-making and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy in Greek mythology. Alcohol, especially wine, played an important role in Greek culture with Dionysus being an important reason for this life style. He is a god of epiphany, "the god that comes", and his "foreignness" as an arriving outsider-god may be inherent and essential to his cults. He is a major, popular figure of Greek mythology and religion, and is included in some lists of the twelve Olympians. Dionysus was the last god to be accepted into Mt. Olympus. He was the youngest and the only one to have a mortal mother. His festivals were the driving force behind the development of Greek theatre. Modern scholarship categorises him as a dying-and-rising god.

e. Apollo

Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in classical Greek and Roman religion and Greek and Roman mythology. The ideal of the kouros (a beardless, athletic youth), Apollo has been variously recognized as a god of music, truth and prophecy, healing, the sun and light, plague, poetry, knowledge, and more. Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto, and has a twin sister, the chaste huntress Artemis.

2. Other stories

a. Dionysia

The Dionysia was a large festival in ancient Athens in honor of the god Dionysus, the central events of which were the theatrical performances of dramatic tragedies and, from 487 BC, comedies. It was the second-most important festival after the Panathenaia. The Dionysia actually consisted of two related festivals, the Rural Dionysia and the City Dionysia, which took place in different parts of the year. They were also an essential part of the Dionysian Mysteries. 

b. Detachment

Doublethink:
To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they are false. An example of this in your everyday life. I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable. our young men today, they are being told that women are whores, bitches. things to be screwed, beaten, shit on, ashamed. this is a marketing holocaust, 24 hours a day, for the rest of our lives. the power that be, a harder of work, dumbing us to death. so ,to defend ourselves, and fighting against the stimulating of this dumbs into our thought processes, we must learn to read, to stimulate our imagination, to cultivate, our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need these skills, to defend, to preserve our minds。