分享 散文阅读第三单元笔记 Unit Three The Future of Reading

Unit Three The Future of ReadingPart 1 Notes to vocabulary and textsI. V ocabulary1. cite: v.a) to mention something as an example, especially one that supports, proves, or explains an idea or situation. E.g. The judge cited a 1956 Supreme Court ruling in her decision.cite something as something else. E.g. Several factors have been cited as the cause of the unrest.b) to give the exact words of something that has been written, especially in order to support an opinion or prove an idea SYN quote. E.g. The passage cited above is from a Robert Frost poem. c) to order someone to appear before a court of law SYN summon. E.g. cite somebody for something / Two managers had been cited for similar infractions.d) (British English) to mention someone by name in a court case. E.g. Sue was cited in the divorce proceedings.e) to mention someone because they deserve praise. E.g. cite somebody (for something) / Garcia was cited for her work with disabled children.2. literacy: n. the state of being able to read and write.3. attendant: adj. relating to or caused by something.4. cortex: n. the outer layer of an organ in your body, especially your brain.5. hunch: n. strong, intuitive feeling, suspicion. / intuitive feeling or a premonition.6. breach: n. an action that breaks a law, rule, or agreement.7. render: v. to cause someone or something in a particular condition.8. amorphous: adj. having no definite shape or features.9. facet: n. aspect, one of several parts of a person's character.10. avocation: an activity taken up in addition to one's regular work or profession, usually for enjoyment; a hobby.11. scriptorium: a writing room; specifically, the room assigned in a monastery for the copying of manuscripts.12. mandarinate: n. the collective body of officials or persons of rank in China.13. besmirch: v. to make dirty or to soil.14. grid: n. the network of roads / the network of electricity supply wires that connect power stations and provides electricity to buildings in an area.II. Expressions from the text1. elemental literacy: n. basic skills of reading and writing for everyday use.2. by heart: by rote, from memory.3. political reach: n. scope of political influence.III. Notes to the text1. Gutenberg:c.1397-1468, German inventor and printer, long credited with the invention of a method of printing from movable type, including the use of metal molds and alloys, a special press, and oil-based inks: a method that, with refinements and increased mechanization, remained the principal means of printing until the late 20th cent. His type, which was hand set with characters of equal height, was printed on handmade paper. Similar printing had been done earlier in China and Korea. In China printing from movable woodblocks was invented by Pi Sheng in 1040, and printing with movable type made of clay was also prevalent; in Korea movable copper type was invented as early as 1392. Europeans who have been thought by some to have preceded Gutenberg in the practice of his art include Laurens Janszoon Koster, of Holland, and Pamfilo Castaldi, of Italy. Early in the 21st cent. scholars, using computer technology, proposed that Gutenberg's movable type may actually have been sand cast, rather than produced in metal molds. If true, this would indicate that the development of Western printing technology was somewhat more gradual than previously thought.Evidence indicates that Gutenberg was born in Mainz, trained as a goldsmith, and entered a partnership in which he taught his friends his secret profession of printing in the 1430s. He lived in Strasbourg for some years, and he may have made his great invention there in 1436 or 1437; he returned to Mainz (c.1446) and formed a partnership with a goldsmith, Johann Fust. Gutenberg's goal was to mechanically reproduce medieval liturgical manuscripts without losing their color or beauty of design. The masterpiece of his press has been known under several names: the Gutenberg Bible; the Mazarin Bible; and in modem times, as the 42-line Bible, for the number of lines in each printed column. Fust's demand (1455) for repayment of sums advanced resulted in asettlement in which Gutenberg abandoned his claims to his invention and surrendered his stock, including type and the incomplete work on the 42-line Bible, to Fust, who continued the business and completed printing the Bible with the help of Peter Schoffer, who later became his son-in-law. Although the work bears no place of printing, date, or printer's name, it is usually dated to 1455. Printed in an edition of about 180 copies, it is the earliest extant Western book printed in movable type.It is thought that Gutenberg reestablished himself in the printing business with the aid of Conrad Humery; works attributed, not unanimously, to him include a Missale speciale constantiense and a Catholicon (1460). The Elector of Mainz, Archbishop Adolf of Nassau, presented him with a benefice (1465) yielding an income and various privileges. There is a Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.(Source: Columbia Encyclopedia: John Gutenberg)2. De QuinceyDe Quincey, Thomas (da kwin'se), 1785-1859, English essayist. In 1802 he ran away from school and tramped about the country, eventually settling in London. His family soon found him and entered him (1803) in Worcester College, Oxford, where he developed a deep interest in German literature and philosophy. He left Oxford in 1808 without completing his degree and settled (1809) at Grasmere, where he made the acquaintance of Wordsworth. By 1817 the opium habit, which he had begun while at Oxford, had reached its height. He achieved literary eminence with the publication of his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), which first appeared in the London Magazine in 1821. It is an account of the progress of his drug habit, including descriptions of the bizarre and spectacular dreams he had while under the influence of opium. He became a prolific contributor to various journals, especially to Blackwood's, Edinburgh, after 1825. Among his best works-all written in a polished, highly imaginative, and discursive prose-are "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," "Suspiria de Profundis," "On the English Mail-Coach," "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," and Autobiographic Sketches (1853).3. Dark AgesA term deployed in the 17th and 18th cents. to indicate the intellectual darkness which was believed to have descended on Europe with the ending of the Roman empire until new light was provided by the Renaissance. In the field of British history it is sometimes applied just to the 5th and 6thcents., which many historians would prefer to designate as sub- or post-Roman.4. ErasmusDesiderius Erasmus(born Oct. 27, 1469, Rotterdam, Holland - died July 12, 1536, Base1, Switz.) Dutch priest and humanist, considered the greatest European scholar of the 16th century. The illegitimate son of a priest and a physician's daughter, he entered a monastery and was ordained a priest in 1492. He studied at the University of Paris and trave1ed throughout Europe, coming under the influence of St. Thomas More and John Co1et. The book that first made him famous was the Adagia (1500, 1508), an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs. He became noted for his editions of Classical authors, Church Fathers, and the New Testament as well as for his own works, including Handbook of a Christian Knight (1503) and Praise of Folly (1509). Using the philological methods pioneered by Italian humanists, he helped lay the groundwork for the historical-critical study of the past. By criticizing ecclesiastical abuses, he encouraged the growing urge for reform, which found expression both in the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Though he saw much to admire in Martin Luther, he came under pressure to attack him; he took an independent stance, rejecting both Luther's doctrine of predestination and the powers claimed for the papacy.(Source: Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Erasmus)5. Montaigne(1533-92). Moralist and author of the Essais, composed during the last 20 years of his life, which have left an indelible impression not only on French but on European culture. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries he was a striking example of a Neostoic author; to the sceptics and libertins of the 17th c. He was their precursor and inspiration; in the following century, Diderot admired him as a philosophe avant la lettre, and Rousseau saw in him the first of the great confessional writers. More recently, Nietzsche praised him as a destructive relativist, and Gide saw in him a proponent of sexual honesty and liberation. One of the peculiar qualities of his Essais is to reflect the intimate preoccupations of their readers; it is thus hardly surprising that for his most modern critics his work is marked by the aesthetics of the fragmentary; that it exemplifies intertextuality (incorporating as it does 1, 264 explicit quotations, as well as countless other allusions); and that Montaigne himself anticipated reader-response theories of interpretation. This protean qualityassures the Essais their status as a classic.Montaigne was born in Gascony of a recently ennobled well-to-do family, and given a solid humanist education at the College de Guyenne. He was destined for a career in the law, and after university studies at either Toulouse or Paris he became in 1557 a minor magistrate at the Parlement de Bordeaux, where La Boetie was his colleague and friend. He sold his post in 1570 in order to 'retire into the bosom of the learned Virgins'. His father had died two years before, leaving him the estate of Montaigne, where he resolved to devote the remainder of his life to reading, contemplation, and writing in the tower of his chateau, which housed his extensive library and whose exposed beams were inscribed with his favourite quotations.His retirement was, however, not entirely uneventful; he left it to travel extensively in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy in 1580-1, leaving an interesting Journal de voyage which was discovered and published in 1774. Subsequently he became mayor of nearby Bordeaux (1581-5). Between 1570 and 1588 he was intermittently involved in highlevel diplomatic negotiations on behalf of Henri III and Henri de Navarre, later Henri IV, the heir presumptive to the throne, both of whom conferred honours on him. He died in 1592, of the painful hereditary disease (the kidney stone) of which his father also died. By that time he was a famous author whose works had run through several editions. He published the first two books of Essais at his own expense in Bordeaux in 1580, and had them reprinted in a revised version in 1582; in 1588 an enlarged edition, which included the third book, appeared in Paris; at the time of his death he was working on a much-expanded edition, which came out in 1595, edited by Marie de Goumay, his 'fille d'alliance'.This bare outline of his life does not reveal the intense and exciting intellectual journey on which he embarked when he retired in 1570, and which ended only at his death. He may have intended only to read and meditate; but he soon began to write, and scholars have been able to establish with some certainty the order in which he wrote the Essais. ,Why he began to write is not altogether clear, even though he offered various reasons. An important factor might well be the death of his closest friend, the moralist Etienne de la Boetie, in 1563; it has been plausibly suggested that the Essais are a one-sided continuation of their conversations together. Another factor could be the existence of loosely organized books of gleanings from the ancients, which offered Montaigne a model for arranging by theme and subject the notes he himself made from his reading. In givinghis work the novel title 'Essals'; which suggests 'experiments' or 'trials', Montaigne may well be alluding to aspects of this work of compilation and reflection. It is the very reverse of a confident or assertive title. Nor did Montaigne claim to be writing for the benefit of anyone other than his intimates and immediate family; indeed, the prologue of 1580 tells the casual reader that he would do better not to bother with the book at all.The subjects which most interest him initially are those closest to his own preoccupations and to those of his contemporaries. Montaigne belonged to the post- Reformation generation for whom the schism in the Church was an irreversible fact and a burning personal issue: some of his own siblings had become Protestants, although he was to remain a staunch Catholic. The optimistic era of humanist learning was past: but attention was still paid to the principal topics of humanist concern: education, war, moral philosophy, history, politics, and the higher disciplines of law and medicine. Montaigne's early interests revolve around human inconsistency, ambition, and above all pain and death in this broad context. His reading and writing are designed to console him and strengthen him against what he perceives as future threats: death from a painful disease, social disorder, religious uncertainty, personal perplexity. This is often said to be his Neostoic phase, characterized by his essays on philosophizing as learning to die (1, 20) and solitude (1, 40), in which the wise man is said to withdraw from public life and even social contact and to make himself master of his own happiness QY steeling himself against misfortune. But even in this phase, Montaigne's penchant for paradox and issues of doubt is clear, and his awareness of the bewildering diversity of human character and experience is explicit (1, 23; 1,31).A major development in his writings - sometimes called the 'sceptical crisis' - occurred in the middle years of the 1570s when Montaigne had a medal struck with the device 'Que scay-je?' It is sometimes connected with the incident he records in the chapter on practice (Il, 6), in which the experience of falling off a horse and apparently drifting towards death makes him realize that his policy of steeling himself against future misfortune is misplaced. But it may have much more to do with his defence of Raymond Sebond (Sabunde), which he was apparently commissioned to write by Marguerite de Valois, the Catholic wife of Henri de Navarre. Montaigne had translated the 15th-c. Sebond's Theologia naturalis in 1569 at the behest of his father; it is a work which purports to prove God's existence by rational means, and which describes man's preeminence in God's creation. Montaigne's 'Apologie de Raymond Sebond' (11, 12) - an apologia presumablyagainst Protestant critiques - is a thoroughgoing though unsystematic exercise in Pyrrhonism. It constitutes a withering sceptical attack on all forms of dogmatic philosophy and on all of man's intellectual pretensions. Man is shown to be no higher than the animals; his reason, weak and faulty; his senses, through which he acquires all knowledge, fallible and untrustworthy; and his moral convictions, lacking secure rational bases. Diversity and difference, not similarity and consensus, are shown to be ubiquitous; and the whole universe, in continual, incommensurable flux. Man, his faculty for judging and reasoning, and the objects of his perception are perpetually changing and unstable. Not only Sebond's adversaries, but arguably Sebond himself was demolished by this radical sceptical critique.But it did not produce despair in Montaigne: instead, in his later Essais, he began cautiously to search for new bases for human enquiry. Ancient moral philosophies had failed to come up with a way of achieving happiness which was generally applicable; it was clear, therefore, that everyone had to search for their own answers by beginning their enquiries with that which they knew best: themselves. Personal anecdotes had been related by Montaigne from the very beginning of his writing; but they did not amount to fully fledged self-study. Self-study requires a method, however; Montaigne's was a unique form of non-self-indulgent introspection. This had to be honest, and unconstrained by convention; it had to be unselective; it had to take into account the fundamental mutability of man. As a practice, it led to self-portrayal: the recording of facts and opinion about the self in an infmitely extendable list. Because man changes constantly, the self-portrait cannot be revised, only augmented. In Book 3 of the Essais, and in the additions inserted in the first two books, the results of this method unfold. Montaigne records his most intimate sexual and gastronomic practices, as well as his most lofty thoughts; he leaves contradictions and inconsistencies in his text as a proof of its veracity; his arguments and discussions are rarely sustained for more than a paragraph or two (indeed, the titles of the Essais seldom indicate adequately their contents, and sometimes, playfully, have nothing to do with them whatsoever); he records his judgements on other people and other subjects as evidence about himself as much as about these people or subjects.The conclusions of this enquiry are, if anything, yet more surprising for their day. Man is seen as a corporeal more than a rational being. He is an amalgam of vice and virtue, in which the two elements are inseparable. He is irreducibly individual, but every man 'porte la forme entiere del'humaine condition' (111, 2). All men share the same nature, but their social, political, and (implicitly) religious institutions are relative to specific societies, political systems, and religions. This relativistic attitude leads to a plea for toleration and the expression of horror at unjustifiable repression in the name of law, religion, or 'reason': the chapters which deal with the burning of witches and the Spanish treatment of Amerindians (1, 31; Ill, 6; Ill, II) are especially eloquent condemnations of intolerance. But Montaigne himself derives political and religious conformism from his relativistic and sceptical stance.The Essais accumulated additions (with few amendments) over the period of their composition; one can only imagine that, had Montaigne lived longer, they would have continued to do so, because he tells us that he has discovered an inexhaustible vein of rich material to exploit. As his confidence in his enterprise grows, the Essais become more complex, more paradoxical, more playful, more idiosyncratic in expression. Indeed, one of their most remarkable features is their style.By adding to his own essays Montaigne becomes an alien reader of his own writing, and offers many penetrating insights into the reading process itself. Towards the end of Book 3 the Essais become a celebration of reading and writing, of human conversation and friendship, of living life to the full, which contrasts with the stiffly Neostoic attitudes expressed in the first period. Experience, not Seneca or Cato, has taught him the best way of managing pain; he is able to rejoice in the legitimate pleasures of life, and the very last quotation in his Essais has a distinctly pagan, hedonistic ring to it. But to suggest that this is the conclusion of such a multifaceted and complex work would be wrong. Just as scepticism is present from the beginning, so also is a certain sort of Stoicism present at the end. Plausible it may be to see a development in the Essais from one philosophical stance to another: but it is more plausible to see them all as expressions of the complex personality of an author whose investigation into human nature marks a turning-point in man's enquiry into man.(Source: French Literature Companion: Michel de Montaigne)6. the Morgan LibraryThe Morgan Library & Museum (formerly The Pierpont Morgan Library) is a museum and research library in New York City, USA. It was founded to house the private library of J. P. Morgan in 1906, which included, besides the manuscripts and printed books, some of them in rare bindings, hiscollection of prints and drawings. The library was designed by Charles McKim from the firm of McKim, Mead and White and cost $1.2 million. It was made a public institution in 1924 by his son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr.The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966.7. Missa SolemnisSolemn mass; it has become the name by which Beethoven's Mass in D op.123 (1823) is known. Structure of Miss a SolemnisLike most masses, Beethoven's Missa solemnis is in five movements:Kyrie: Perhaps the most traditional of the mass movements, The Kyrie is in a traditional ABA' structure, with stately choral writing in the first movement section and more contrapuntal voice leading in the Christe, which also introduces the four vocal soloists.Gloria: Quickly shifting textures and themes highlight each portion of the Gloria text, in a beginning to the movement that is almost encyclopedic in its exploration of 3/4 time. The movement ends with the first of the work's two massive fugues, on the text "In gloria Dei patris. Amen", leading into a recapitulation of the initial Gloria text and music.Credo: One of the most remarkable movements to come from Beethoven's pen opens with a chord sequence that will be used again in the movement to effect modulations. The Credo, like the Gloria, is an often disorienting, mad rush through the text. The poignant modal harmonies for the "et incamatus" yield to ever more expressive heights through the "crucifixus", and into a remarkable, a cappella setting of the "et resurrexit" that is over almost before it has begun. Most notable about the movement, though, is the closing fugue on "et vitam venturi" that includes one of the most difficult passages in the choral repertoire, when the subject returns at doubled tempo for a thrilling conclusion.The form of the Credo is divided into four parts: (I) allegro ma non troppo through "descendit de coelis" in B-flat; (11) "Incarnatus est" through "Resurrexit" in D; (Ill) "Et ascendit" through the Credo recapitulation in F; (IV) Fugue and Coda "et vitam venturi saeculi, amen" in B-flat. Sanctus: Up until the benedictus of the Sanctus, the Missa solemnis is of fairly normal classical proportions. But then, after an orchestral preludio, a solo violin enters in its highest range ¬representing the Holy Spirit descending to earth - and begins the Missa's most transcendently beautiful music, in a remarkably long extension of the text.Agnus Dei: A setting of the plea "miserere nobis" ("have mercy on us") that begins with themen's voices alone yields, eventually, to a bright D-major prayer "dona nobis pacem" ("grant us peace") in a pastoral mode. After some fugal development, it is suddenly and dramatically interrupted by martial sounds (a convention in the 18th century, as in Haydn's Missa in tempore belli), but after repeated pleas of "miserere!", eventually recovers and brings itself to a stately conclusion.(Source: adapted from Wikipedia)。