Approaches to Literature(Week5)

 

• The lady with the Dog

 

"The Lady with the Dog" is 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 story comprises four parts: part I describes the initial meeting in Yalta, part II the consummation of the affair and the remaining time in Yalta, part III Gurov's return to Moscow and his visit to Anna's town, and part IV Anna's visits to Moscow. Vladimir Nabokov declared that it was one of the greatest short stories ever written.

>> Plot

Dmitri Gurov is a Moscow bank worker, married with a daughter and two sons. Unhappy in his marriage, he is frequently unfaithful and considers women to be of "a lower race". While vacationing in Yalta, he sees a young lady walking along the seafront with her small dog, and endeavors to make her acquaintance. The lady, Anna Sergeyevna, is also vacationing, while her husband remains at home in an unnamed provincial town. They are soon engaged in an affair, and spend most of their time together walking and taking drives to nearby Oreanda. Though she is expecting her husband to come to Yalta, he eventually sends for her to come home, saying that something is wrong with his eyes. Gurov sees her off at the station.
Returning to Moscow and his daily routine, working by day and clubbing by night, Gurov expects to soon forget young Anna but finds he is haunted by her memory. On the ruse of going to St. Petersburg to take care of some business, he sets off to her town to find her. Learning the location of the family’s residence from a hotel porter, he finds the house, only to realize that it would be futile to intrude. In despair, he reasons that Anna has probably forgotten him and found someone else, and heads back to his hotel for a long nap.
In the evening, he remembers having seen a sign earlier promoting a performance of The Geisha. Reasoning that Anna and her husband may attend the first performance, he goes to the theater. The couple enters and he watches intently. When the husband goes out for a smoke during the first interval, Gurov greets Anna, who is bewildered and runs from him. After following her through the theater, he confronts her and she confides that she has been thinking of him constantly. Frightened, she begs him to leave and promises to come to see him in Moscow.
She makes excuses to come to Moscow, telling her husband that she is going there to see a doctor, which he "believes and does not believe". Gurov realizes that for the first time in his life he has actually fallen in love, and wonders how they can continue. While they talk of finding a plan, the story ends without a resolution

>> Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov ( 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was 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. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theater. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."

• James Madison

James Madison, Jr. (March 16, 1751 – June 28, 1836) was a political theorist, American statesman, and served as the fourth President of the United States (1809–17). He is hailed as the "Father of the Constitution" for his pivotal role in drafting and promoting the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Madison inherited his plantation Montpelier in Virginia and owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime. He served as both a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and as a member of the Continental Congress prior to the Constitutional Convention. After the Convention, he became one of the leaders in the movement to ratify it, both nationally and in Virginia. His collaboration with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay produced The Federalist Papers, among the most important treatises in support of the Constitution. Madison changed his political views during his life. During deliberations on the constitution, he favored a strong national government, but later preferred stronger state governments, before settling between the two extremes late in his life.

• WASP

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) is an informal, sometimes disparaging term for a group of high-status and influential White Americans of English Protestant ancestry. The term applies to a group who control disproportionate financial, political and social power in the United States. It describes a group whose family education, elite connections, status and wealth allow them a degree of opportunity held by few others.
Scholars agree that the group's influence has waned since the end of World War II, with the growing influence of other ethnic groups in the United States. The term is also used in Australia and Canada for similar elites. The term is occasionally used by sociologists to include all Americans of North European ancestry regardless of their class or power. People rarely call themselves WASPs, except humorously. The acronym is typically used by non-WASPs.

• Narration

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

A narrator is a personal character or a non-personal voice that the creator of the story develops to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot. The narrator may be a voice devised by the author as an anonymous, non-personal, or stand-alone entity; as the author herself/himself as a character; or as some other fictional or non-fictional character appearing and participating within their own story. The narrator is considered participant if he/she is a character within the story, and non-participant if he/she is an implied character or an omniscient or semi-omniscient being or voice that merely relates the story to the audience without being involved in the actual events. Some stories have multiple narrators to illustrate the storylines of various characters at the same, similar, or different times, thus allowing a more complex, non-singular point of view.

Narration encompasses not only who tells the story, but also how the story is told (for example, by using stream of consciousness or unreliable narration). In traditional literary narratives (such as novels, short stories, and memoirs), narration is a required story element; in other types of (chiefly non-literary) narratives, such as plays, television shows, video games, and films, narration is merely optional.

*3C: Computer + Communication + Consumer Electronics

• 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.

• Literacy

Literacy is 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.The concept of literacy is expanding in OECD countries to include skills to access knowledge through technology and ability to assess complex contexts.
The key to all literacy is reading development, a progression of skills that begins with the ability to understand spoken words and decode written words, and culminates in the deep understanding of text. Reading development involves a range of complex language underpinnings including awareness of speech sounds (phonology), spelling patterns (orthography), word meaning (semantics), grammar (syntax) and patterns of word formation (morphology), all of which provide a necessary platform for reading fluency and comprehension.

Approaches to Literature(Week4)

• Alice Ann Munro

 

Alice Ann Munro (born 10 July 1931) 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.

>> Boys and Girls

"Boys and Girls" was first published in 1968 in The Montrealer, before it was collected with fourteen other stories and published in Alice Munro's first edition of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). The story, narrated by a young girl, details the time in her life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind and realizes that to be a "girl" is to be, eventually, a woman. The child begins to understand that being socially typed entails a host of serious implications. Thus becoming a "girl" on the way to womanhood is a time fraught with difficulties for the young protagonist because she senses that women are considered the social inferiors of men. Initially, she tries to prevent this from occurring by resisting her parents' and grandparents' attempts to train her in the likes, habits, behavior, and work of women. This resistance, however, proves to be useless. The girl ends the story clearly socially positioned as a girl, something which she apprehends with some trepidation. The story is thus a feminist parable of sorts, where a girl bucks against a future that will prevent her from doing, socially, whatever she might please. Although most of Munro's work does not have such clear and cogent feminist interest, this story eloquently attests to how women worked during this century to change their social position substantially.

• Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) 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.
Most of his fictional works – initially published as serials in magazines – were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.

>> 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.

*stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, 2 miles (3 km) west of Amesbury and 8 miles (13 km) north of Salisbury. Stonehenge's ring of standing stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds.



>> 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.

• Nelle Harper Lee

 

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016), better known by her pen name Harper Lee, was an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960. 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.

>>To kill a Mokingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explains the novel's impact by writing, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."
As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in the United States with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets.

• The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. A controversial novel originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage angst and alienation. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major languages. Around 250,000 copies are sold each year with total sales of more than 65 million books.  The novel's protagonist Holden Caulfield has become an icon for teenage rebellion. The novel also deals with complex issues of identity, belonging, loss, and connection.

• William Shakespeare

 

William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was 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. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

>> Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.

>> A Midsummer Night's Dream

 

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. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.

>> Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. Originally published in the First Folio of 1623, where it was listed as a comedy, the play's first recorded performance occurred in 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.
Measure for Measure is often called one of Shakespeare's problem plays. It was, and continues to be, classified as comedy, though its tone and setting defy those expectations.

• Danny boy(song)

"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.

 

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.
I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so.

But if you come, and all the flowers are dying,
And I am dead, as dead I well may be.
You'll come and find the place where I am lying.
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.

And I will know, tho' soft ye tread above me
And then my grave will richer, sweeter be.
And you'll bend down and tell me that you love me
And I will rest in peace until you come to me.

 

Approaches to Literature(Week3)

• Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens ( 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was 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 recognized him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.

Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

• Charles Dickens' works

>> A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas,commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall on 19 December 1843. 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.

The book was written at a time when the British were examining and exploring Christmas traditions from the past as well as new customs such as Christmas cards and Christmas trees. Carol singing took a new lease on life during this time. Dickens's sources for the tale appear to be many and varied, but are, principally, the humiliating experiences of his childhood, his sympathy for the poor, and various Christmas stories and fairy tales.

A Christmas Carol remains popular—having never been out of print —and has been adapted many times to film, stage, opera, and other media.

>> A Tale of Two Cities


A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is 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 follows the lives of several characters through these events. A Tale of Two Cities was published in weekly installments from April 1859 to November 1859 in Dickens's new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. All but three of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly installments.

Dickens's famous opening sentence introduces the universal approach of the book, the French Revolution, and the drama depicted within:

"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.

• Western Canon

The Western canon is the body of books and, more broadly, music and art that Western scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes work perceived as the greatest works of artistic merit. Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the development of high culture. The idea of a Canon has been used to address the question What is Art?; according to this approach, a work is art by comparison to the works in the canon—or conversely, any aesthetic law, to be valid, should not rule out any work included in the canon

>> Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Bloom came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the Canon wars of the early 1990s

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book by Harold Bloom on Western literature. It is his best-known book alongside The Anxiety of Influence, and was a surprise bestseller upon its release in the United States. In the book, Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon.The book argues against what Bloom calls the "School of Resentment", in which he includes feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary criticism, Lacanians, New Historicism, Deconstructionists, and semioticians.




>> Canon(music)

In music, a canon is a contrapuntal compositional technique or texture that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration (e.g., quarter rest, one measure, etc.). The initial melody is called the leader (or dux), while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower (or comes). The follower must imitate the leader, either as an exact replication of its rhythms and intervals or some transformation thereof (see "Types of canon", below).

• Roman Fever

"Roman Fever" is 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.

>>Plot Summary

The protagonists are Grace Ansley and Alida Slade, two middle-aged American women who are visiting Rome with their daughters, Barbara Ansley and Jenny Slade. The elder women grew up in Manhattan, New York, and were friends from childhood. A youthful and romantic rivalry led Mrs. Slade to nurture feelings of jealousy and hatred against Mrs. Ansley.

In the opening pages of the story, the two women compare their daughters and reflect on each other's lives. Eventually, Mrs. Slade reveals a secret about a letter written to Mrs. Ansley on a visit to Rome many years ago. The letter was purportedly from Mrs. Slade's fiancé, Delphin, inviting Mrs. Ansley to a rendezvous at the Colosseum. In fact, Mrs. Slade herself had written the letter, in an attempt to get Mrs. Ansley out of the way of the engagement by disappointing her with Delphin's absence (and, it is implied, to get Mrs. Ansley sick with Roman Fever). Mrs. Ansley is upset at this revelation, but reveals that she was not left alone at the Colosseum—she responded to the letter, and Delphin arrived to meet her. Mrs. Slade eventually states that Mrs. Ansley ought not to feel sorry for her, because "I had [Delphin] for twenty-five years" while Mrs. Ansley had "nothing but a letter he didn't write." Mrs. Ansley responds, in the last sentence of the story, "I had Barbara."

>>Analysis

A deeper reading of Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” displays a major emphasis on the multiple figurative dimensions of knitting. Wharton establishes this chief theme early on by making sure that the matter of knitting is the first subject to receive any attention: “let’s leave the young things to their knitting.” The first impression of the knitting women is that they are incapable of anything more than the monotonous act of knitting; this sets the stage for the stereotypical mundane middle-aged woman image to be blasted apart.

It is imperative to note that, of the two protagonists, Mrs. Slade does not even knit, while Mrs. Ansley seems devoted to the craft. As the story progresses, one can even make a correlation between Mrs. Ansley’s mental state and the way in which she handles her needles and skeins. When she is nervous, she picks up her project cautiously, as if to draw as little attention as possible. However, something even as simple as the way she stores her work, crimson silk being “run through” by her needles elicits a very provocative response in the reader.The switch between a “half guilty” extraction of her work to the subtle provocation of the passionate color and style of materials chosen changes the element of knitting from one of complacency to one of increasing complexity.

Mrs. Ansley’s use of knitting in an attempt to blaze a path of forgetting, as she neither wishes to live in the past or the present, introduces an element of dramatic irony in Wharton’s work. This mix is shown in the cautious drawing out of her knitting, indicating feelings of guilt at the mention of the love triangle conversation that Mrs. Slade begins. Thus, her knitting serves two purposes: her knitting allows Mrs. Ansley to refrain from fidgeting and it also serves as an evasion tactic for Mrs. Ansley to avoid uncomfortable conversation. In that respect, her knitting can seem as though it is a psychological weapon wielded against the onslaught of Mrs. Slade’s tongue. It is easy to discern that knitting may be required to dispel the “cold” and “damp” air that has been flowing freely between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley

• 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. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.

Thought:

* What is literature?

* What does literature do?

Prefix / Root / Suffix

mori- / mort- "dead"

moribund (a.) in a dying state; near death
example: The region's heavy industry is still inefficient and moribund.

mortal (a.) subject to death; having a transitory life
example: He received a mortal wound soon after the battle began.