WEEK 01 文導筆記

1. Introduction 

a. textbook

The Norton Introduction to Literature, Eleventh Edition, is a diverse, flexible, and balanced text that offers the most carefully edited apparatus and the most interesting and useful treatment of the contexts of literature. A best seller since its first edition, The Norton Introduction to Literature continues to meet the needs of today’s students and instructors, offering trusted guidance for analyzing texts, writing thoughtfully, and appreciating literature. 

b.  allusion

biblical allusion
A biblical allusion is a very quick or indirect reference to something in the Bible, such as a particular scripture, character or story. Examples could include comparing a modern place to somewhere in the Bible, like the Garden of Eden or Sodom and Gomorrah, or comparing a person to the Good Samaritan.

classical allusion
A classical allusion is a reference to a particular event or character in classical works of literature, such as ancient Roman or Greek works. This type of allusion can be made to a particular work, usually a famous work such as the plays of Homer, in which case they can be exact quotes or merely specific references to events in a literary work.  

c. genre (literary type) 

Genre is any category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres form by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones is discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. 

d. story structure

What is the rising action of fiction plot?
→ A series of troubling events that leads to the plot's major conflict. 

e. figurative language

Figurative language can be found in literature and poetry where the writing appeals to the senses. It can do this by giving a word or phrase a specific meaning that may be different than the literal definition. Sometimes figurative language compares two things in such a way that you find the comparison interesting and descriptive.

2. extra information

a. romance

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight-errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest, yet it is "the emphasis on love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic, in which masculine military heroism predominates." Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic, satiric or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and hearers' tastes, but by c. 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in his novel Don Quixote.

b. Shakespeare Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,a
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

( poem with three quatrains and a couplet ) 

3.  prefix, root and suffix

nov : new                                       eg. novel, renovate, innovative
renovate (v.) means to make something old look new again by repairing and improving it, especially a building

 

sub : under                                    eg. subgenre, subject, subway