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 :
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
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.
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.
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, obstacleobscurity (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
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