WEEK 07 文導筆記

Spring Break

WEEK 06 文導筆記

1. Information 

a. American dream (以物質財富來衡量成功)

→ The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club (1989) is a best-selling novel written by Amy Tan. It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco who start a club known as The Joy Luck Club, playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods. The book is structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters. The three mothers and four daughters (one mother, Suyuan Woo, dies before the novel opens) share stories about their lives in the form of vignettes. Each part is preceded by a parable relating to the game.

→ Horizons Lointains (Far and Away)

Far and Away is a 1992 romantic adventure drama film directed by Ron Howard from a script by Howard and Bob Dolman. Cruise and Kidman play Irish immigrants seeking their fortune in 1890s America, eventually taking part in the Land Run of 1893.
This was Cyril Cusack' s final film before his death the following year.

b. Obama' s speech on America Dream

part of speech
BETTENDORF, Iowa (CNN) -- It's wonderful to be here today. I feel right at home in Bettendorf, which is just a stone's throw from my home state of Illinois. But the truth is, we share more than the banks of a great river.
If you spend time in Washington, you hear a lot about the divisions in our country. About how we're becoming more separated by geography and ideology; race and religion; wealth and opportunity. And we've had plenty of politicians who try to take advantage of these divisions - pitting Americans against one another, or targeting different messages to different audiences.
But as I've traveled around Iowa and the rest of the country these last nine months, I haven't been struck by our differences - I've been impressed by the values and hopes that we share. In big cities and small towns; among men and women; young and old; black, white, and brown - Americans share a faith in simple dreams. A job with wages that can support a family. Health care that we can count on and afford. A retirement that is dignified and secure. Education and opportunity for our kids. Common hopes. American dreams. 

c. Midsummer Night's Dream

Act 5, Scene 1

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 1835
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, 1840
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 1845
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; 1850
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

d. motif and symbols

motif → the recurring structure

symbols →objects, characters to represent abstract ideas or concepts

theme → the main subject of something such as a book, speech, art exhibition, or discussion

e. "To Kill a Mockingbird"

quote :

“Remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

SparkNotes :

These lines from Chapter 10 are the source of the novel’s title and introduce one of the key metaphors of the book: the idea of “mockingbirds” as good, innocent people who are destroyed by evil. Boo Radley, for instance, is like a mockingbird—just as mockingbirds do not harm people but only “sing their hearts out for us,” Boo does not harm anyone; instead, he leaves Jem and Scout presents, covers Scout with a blanket during the fire, and eventually saves the children from Bob Ewell. Despite the pureness of his heart, however, Boo has been damaged by an abusive father. The connection between songbirds and innocents is made explicitly several times in the book: in Chapter 25, Mr. Underwood likens Tom Robinson’s death to “the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children”; in Chapter 30, Scout tells Atticus that hurting Boo Radley would be “sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird.” The moral imperative to protect the vulnerable governs Atticus’s decision to take Tom’s case, just as it leads Jem to protect the roly-poly bug from Scout’s hand. 

2. extra information

a. list of systems of the human body

The main systems of the human body are as follows:
1. Cardiovascular/ Circulatory system:
Circulates blood around the body via the heart, arteries and veins, delivering oxygen and nutrients to organs and cells and carrying their waste products away
2. Digestive system/ Excretory system:
Mechanical and chemical processes that provide nutrients via the mouth, esophagus, stomach and intestines. Eliminates waste from the body.
3. Endocrine system:
Provides chemical communications within the body using hormones.
4. Integumentary system/ Exocrine system:
Skin, hair, nails, sweat and other exocrine glands.
5. Lymphatic system/ Immune system:
The system comprising a network of lymphatic vessels that carry a clear fluid called lymph. Defends the body against disease-causing agents.
6. Muscular system/ Skeletal:
Enables the body to move using muscles. Bones supporting the body and its organs.
7. Nervous system:
Collects and processes information from the senses via nerves and the brain and tells the muscles to contract to cause physical actions.
8. Renal system/ Urinary system:
The system where the kidneys filter blood.
9. Reproductive system:
The sex organs required for the production of offspring.
10. Respiratory system:
The lungs and the trachea that bring air into the body.

 

3.  prefix, root and suffix 

ann : year                                      eg. anniversary, annual fee 
anniversary (n.) happening once a year
annual fee (n.) Any fee that is charged on an annual (yearly) basis.

gen : birth, beginning                    eg. genesis, generator, generation

genesis (n.) the beginning, birth, or origin of something

generator (n.) a machine that produces electricity

 

WEEK 05 文導筆記

1. Information 

a. The Reader 

 

"The Reader" opens in post-WWII Germany when teenager Michael Berg becomes ill and is helped home by Hanna, a stranger twice his age. Michael recovers from scarlet fever and seeks out Hanna to thank her. The two are quickly drawn into a passionate but secretive affair.
Michael discovers that Hanna loves being read to and their physical relationship deepens. Hanna is enthralled as Michael reads to her from "The Odyssey," "Huck Finn," and "The Lady with the Little Dog." Despite their intense bond, Hanna mysteriously disappears one day and Michael is left confused and heartbroken.
Eight years later, while Michael is a law student observing the Nazi war crime trials, he is stunned to find Hanna back in his life this time as a defendant in the courtroom. As Hanna's past is revealed, Michael uncovers a deep secret that will impact both of their lives. "The Reader" is a haunting story about truth and reconciliation, about how one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another.

b. point of view

Narration is the use of—or the particularly chosen methodology or process (also called the narrative mode) of using—a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration encompasses a set of techniques through which the creator of the story presents their story, including:
Narrative point of view: the perspective (or type of personal or non-personal "lens") through which a story is communicated 
Narrative voice: the format (or type presentational form) through which a story is communicated 
Narrative time: the placement of the story's time-frame in the past, the present, or the future

c. The Way Through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet, 

 “It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.”

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods ...
But there is no road through the woods.

2. extra information

a. literacy

James Madison said,“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.”

3.  prefix, root and suffix  

ant, er : people                              eg. defendant, accountant, attendant, Protestant

accountant (n.) means someone whose job is to prepare financial records for a company or person

attendant (n.) means someone whose job is to help customers or people who visit a public place
Protestant (n.) means a member of a group of Christian churches that separated from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century

spect : to look                               eg. spectator, inspect, spectacular
spectator (n.) someone who watches a public activity or event, especially a sports event

spectacular (adj.) extremely impressive
  
omni : all                                       eg. omnipresent, omnipotent  

omnipresent (adj.) able to be everywhere at the same time

omnipotent (adj.) powerful enough to do everything

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jamesmadis135446.html

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jamesmadis135446.htm
 

WEEK 04 文導筆記

1. Information 

a. 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 "related to education and teaching", and signified learning in a fascinating and intriguing manner.

b. Alice Munro

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize winner. Munro' s work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."
Munro' s fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style^. Munro' s writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."

c. Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee, better known by her pen name Harper Lee, was an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960.(The most famous novel of hers.)  Immediately successful, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. 
The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. The novel was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

d. Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was 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. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy's poetry, though prolific, was not as well received during his lifetime. It was rediscovered in the 1950s, when Hardy's poetry had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin.

e. Humanities

Humanities are academic disciplines that study human culture. In the Middle Ages, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently contrasted with natural, physical and sometimes social sciences as well as professional training.
The humanities use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences. The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, art and musicology.

f. Theseus and Hippolyta

Hippolyta is the Amazon Queen (很會射箭) who marries Theseus (off-stage in Act 4, Scene 1). Shakespeare bases Hippolyta' s character on the ancient historian Plutarch's portrayal of her in his "Life of Theseus," which covers the big, mythological battle between Theseus and the Amazons. (The Amazons are a mythological group of warrior women.)
the part of 'Mid Summer Night's Dream' :

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

                                                    moon

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. 

g. 'Boys and Girls'

→ The first person point of view

→ 小女孩的筆調(句子很短)

Whenever she shares her daily routine farm-work with her father, the young narrator is taken to be a boy by visitors. She tries to keep away from any work in her mother's range of tasks because she does not really take any interest in that kind of work. The narrator remembers that by the time she was eleven years old she was faced with more and more expectations of what a girl should be like and what she should do or not do. Her role in the family began to change, and the narrator concludes with telling the story of an event in which she behaved according to her intuition, is squealed on by her younger brother and subsequently is being assigned the new gender role by her father. The narrator's last comment reads: ″Maybe it was true.″   

h. Danny Boy

 
"Danny Boy" is a ballad written by English songwriter Frederic Weatherly and usually set to the Irish tune of the "Londonderry Air". It is most closely associated with Irish communities.
It is an Irish traditional song.
lyrics :

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling
It's you, it's you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow
It's I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be

(在 'Boys and Girls' 裡，主角對爸爸殺狐狸的感受)
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an ave there for me.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be
For you will bend and tell me that you love me
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

2. extra information

a. Shakespeare : Romeo and Juliet

Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man.    

b. Tess of the d'Urbervilles

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 fictional 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.

c. Jude the Obscure

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. Its protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man, a stonemason, who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion and marriage.

d. Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. It was published under the full title, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer)—a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers, before ultimately being rescued.

3.  prefix, root and suffix  

obs : negative                                    eg. obscurity, obstacle
obscurity (n.) a state in which a person or thing is not well known or not remembered

prime : 主要的；首要的                     eg. primary, primitive, prime minister