英美文学重点

一、I’m am Nobody! Who are you?

1.The speaker wants to be a Nobody，because she feels peaceful and quiet. Being

Nobody won’t be disturbed by others and can do what we want to do. The author is proud of being Nobody, and she wants to find somebody to be her friend, who is also Nobody, too. And being Somebody will face the facts that they will be watched by others, their life will be disturbed by others with many noisy.

Furthermore, there will be less private room.

2）Form

1.Satire 讽刺作品on the folly荒唐of seeking fame

2.Soliloquy独白

3. 2 stanzas两节

4.Iambic tetrameter (they follow an ABCB rhyme scheme)

5.Dashes破折号: to create a dramatic effect and to create more emotion; to forcefully

interrupt lines and interfere with the flow of her poem.

3) Theme

Satire on the folly of seeking fame; identity of self; love

4)Why does the speaker choose that frogs as her representative of a public creature?

It's because frogs make a lot of noise. The poem says that frogs, though they can croak and make themselves heard and be noticed, are noticed only by "an admiring bog." The bog is the frog's environment, not the frog's friend. So, who cares what the bog thinks? That's what the poem says about being a "somebody" who gets noticed by an admiring public. Frequently, the relationship is impersonal and distanced, not like a real friendship. Somebodies may have many admirers, but they might not be able to make those personal connections that real friendship offers.

2.rhetorical device/figure of speech

1）metaphor /simile暗喻

2）conversation

3）soliloquy

4）contrast/comparison：somebody and nobody

5）capitals：emphasize/refer to a particular type of person

3.P6 speaker; P15 image; P38 symbol; P55 setting; P81music

Speaker: The speaker is the voice, or mask or persona that speaks the poem. Image: Image is a concrete representation of an object or sensory experience/ Image is whatever appeals to any of our senses (including sense of hearing as well as of sight, smell, taste, touch and sound).

Symbol: Symbols are a part of our everyday lives. A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. A symbol is an image but an image is not necessarily a symbol.

Setting: The time and location in which a story takes place—place, time, weather conditions, social conditions, mood and atmosphere

Figurative比喻的language: metaphor暗喻(is), simile明喻(as, like), personification 拟人

Musical effect: Alliteration头韵: the repetition of initial consonant sounds

Assonance元韵: the repetition of vowel sounds

Consonance辅韵: the repetition of final consonant sounds

Rhyme: the combination of assonance and consonance

I’m nobody! who are you; I wondered lonely as a cloud: 抑扬四步格iambic tetrameter

When you are old: 抑扬五步格iambic pentameter

二、A clean well-lighted place

1、Hemingway:极简主义Minimalism 、冰山原则Ice Principle、存在主义哲学理念Existentialist Ideal

1）对话形式dialogue: expect us to engage in the narratives and stir up our imagination to understand the emotional core

2）no any adjective or adverb: It is able to make readers feel the emotion of the character directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without conventionally emotive language and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs.

2、Theme

Failure to communicate; loneliness; futility/despair; old age; loss of faith, nothingness; existentialism; grace under pressure;no hope, no solace安慰, no escape

3、writing style

1)economy of words- simple but suggestive

2)reliance on dialogue-showing rather than telling, highly suggestive of personality

3)repetition-foregrounding the theme

4)antithesis对照-binary oppositions used to contrast different values and forces

5)Ambiguity 含糊

6)Symbolic meaning

a.Light: represents and device man uses to distract himself from the darkness. The

story’s image of the lighted café in the sea of dark nothingness perfectly symbolizes Hemingway’s nihilistic虚无主义的view of a world.

b.Café: a refuge from despair(loneliness), where those lonely can pass their time

with dignity.

c.Shad/shadow: comfort/ warmth

d.Darkness: death, fear, loneliness, despair

e.Brandy: mental/ spiritual anesthesia精神麻醉

3、Character:

The old man: drown his sorrows in the drink and his sorrows grow out of loneliness The old waiter: compassionate, in the process of understanding and coming to terms with loneliness

The young waiter: acerbic尖酸刻薄的, resist the idea that one day he will also be the old man, think youth and confidence with last forever, immersed in专心于happiness, has little understanding for those lonely

4、code-hero

The old waiter：A compassionate man who understands why the old man may want to stay late at the café. The older waiter enjoys staying late at cafés as well. He thinks it’s very important for a café to be clean and well lit, and he sees the café as a refuge from despair. Rather than admit that he is lonely, he tells himself that he has insomnia. can understand the old man

四、Rice

1.Characters

Women images: (1) Mom: weak/ submissive顺从的; obedient服从的;Nurturing培养(2) The speaker: rebellious反抗的/ independent/ intelligent; Na?ve/ biased结果偏倚的(3) Grandma: The real victim who eternalized永恒the value of the institution/ institutionalized/ indoctrinated灌输、教导; Demonized妖魔化的/ stereotyped

Contrasting形成鲜明对比的culture: patriarchal家长的, hierarchical等级的, monotonous, exclusive排外的, superstitious迷信的, frugal节俭的, democratic民主的, dynamic, exciting, inclusive包含的

2.Symbolic meaning of rice

1）Chinese traditional value: rice is important in agriculture in society

2）A tool of living

3）The fate of the writer. The writer didn’t like eating rice and didn’t eat rice when she left home, but her husband asked her to cook a bowl of rice for him when they

got married.

4）The daily life of writer’s family. In the writer’s family, they have rice in each meal.

Even though her mother quarreled with her father, she stilled asked the writer to give her father a bowl of rice.

3、中心思想：the realization of one's true identity。

Younger generation is confused with the conflict between the traditional value of their parents and the modern value of the West. The author firstly wanted to escape her traditional value of her family, and the marriage of her is a combination of tradition and Westernization. But at last she no longer dismissed it as old fashion. She can accept some of the traditional value after she has some contact with western ones. When people are challenged., they are forced to think about their present status. Through thinking process, they gain better understanding of their own identity. Even though we reject、try to escape or ignore our identity，it may still come around as we have contact with other people. We still have our own identity no matter where we are.

三、I wandered lonely as a cloud

1、rhyme scheme: iambic tetrameter ABABCC

2、rhetorical device:

1）metaphor /simile

2）images：

daffodils:

a.Imply an inherent内在的unity between men and nature (line 1-3)

b.The daffodils proliferate in splendor along the shore of the lake without the need of human attention (line 3-8)

c.Loneliness turns into joy; the shift of the mood manifests the great influence of nature upon human (line 8-18)

d.When they are combined, it appeals richly to the senses and the imagination of human(最后一节)

e. happiness、friendship、beauty，joy

Cloud: lonely、isolation、tranquility平静、安静、graceful悠然的、lost、aimless、confused、free、relaxed

3）symbolic images:

Daffodil: symbolize the beauty of nature；symbolize living a life as rich in experience and sensation as would make a life worth living；a spiritual pursuit精神追求

Wave: the ugly reality

3）拟人personification

4）反复reiteration：I gazed -and gazed-but little thought（语态不同，emphasize he is attracted by the beautiful scene.）

3、theme

happiness; man, and the natural word (nature’s beauty uplifts human spirit); spirituality; memory and the past

四、Araby

1、setting: The blind end, a dead end with no vision, symbolize the circumstances the boy situated in—there is no escape and no choice.

The other surroundings that sent forth disgusting odor was exactly the darkness and corruption of Dublin, indicated that I doomed to fail reaching my romantic dream in such a social circumstance.

2、symbolic meaning

a.Apple trees: the garden of Eden, a symbol for the boy’s first love, a wish to try

something new. But the tree was in a “wild garden” suggests that the tree might not grow up robustly. This means that a trial for a new thing wasn’t encouraged by the Irish society, and the boy’s love towards Mangan’s sister couldn’t breed some results.

b.The priest: The priest had gone, just like his “rusty bicycle-pump”, deserted and

forgotten by other Dubliners. So, the priest is a symbol of the vital past, a contrast to the “blind” and paralyzed present. It tells us that the freedom of the Ireland has gone and people then had no passion for a bright future.

c.The street was blind, the surroundings were all unpleasant: represent the whole

Ireland, center of paralysis麻痹、无力、停顿, indeed a sterile waste land, bad economy, corrupted church; secularized世俗的church, loss of local identity;

colonization殖民by England.

d.Blind: These are the two “blind” used in the novel

Adj. Symbolizes paralysis of Dublin as well as Ireland; indifferent to the outside world or dreams

n. Manan’s sister couldn’t “me”; the blind also prevented me from seeing her clearly. Indicate a childish dream (Mangan’s sister)/fantasy: it is hard to be realized

for “I” only “watched it from a blind”.

e.Araby: a real festival in Dublin.

The boy’s dream and love, the ideal and braw life, is the place where the

boy’s dream begins and ends

3、Theme

a.Epiphany顿悟—sudden realization

b.Maturing: growing-up (anguish and anger)

c.Gap between the ideal and the reality

d.Disillusion: love, passion of life

e.The sense of isolation

f.Spiritual paralysis: The loss of devout catholic faith represented by the priest.

The unexamined faith seen in Ms. Mercer who collected

stamps (money) for pious reasons (the church)

4、为什么结尾那里写着我的眼睛充满痛苦和愤怒？

Because Araby symbolized the boy’s dream and pure love before he went there. However, after he arrived there, he found that Araby actually was a trite（陈腐的）bazaar，just along with material and philistine（市侩的）people, which is completely different from what he thought about. Also, at that time the boy had little money, and it was dark, which all made it so hopeless. The ending shows us that the boy’s idealized vision of Araby is destroyed, along with his idealized vision of Mangan’s sister, and of love. So, it said that “my eyes burned with anguish and anger”.

It is from an innocent ,idealized boy to an adolescent dealing with harsh realities, which is called “epiphany”（顿悟）between the reality and dream.

2.Characters:

Narrator: a young, sensitive (almost neurotic) boy who confuses a romantic crush and religious enthusiasm.

Mangan’s sister: described in reverential terms which call to mind the Virgin Mary.

This dual image description of Mangan’s sister represents the religious and romantic confusion of the narrator.

Narrator’s aunt: a mother figure; religious; exhibits empathy

Narrator’s uncle: self-centered; very unreliable; bears resemblance to his own

father; symbolizes the general public of Dublin.

Mercer, Mrs.: pawnbroker’s window who has an unexamined faith

五、Sonnet 130

1、Form

A sonnet has 14 lines

A sonnet must be written in iambic pentameter抑扬五步格

A sonnet must follow a special rhyme scheme, depending on the type of sonnet

A sonnet can be about any subject, though they’re often about love or nature

A sonnet introduces a problem or question in the beginning, and a resolution is offered after the turn.

2. theme

To subvert and reverse the conventions of love poems; mockery of old tradition; challenging the conventions of love poems

a.No use of grand宏伟的metaphor暗喻or allusion暗示

b.No comparison of his love to Venus

c.No evocation唤起to Morpheus睡神, etc.

d.The ordinary beauty and humanity of his lover

e.Deliberately uses typical love poetry metaphors against themselves

f.Making fun of the cliché/ mocking of the writing convention

g.Reflect men’s desire towards women (objectification客观化of women/

sexual desire)

h.Love (beauty is in the eyes of the beholder/ beauty is only skin-deep/ a

fickle lover/ a teasing lover/ a cruelty honest lover/ a unfortunate lover)

i.The girl as a metaphor of imperfection (state of life/ the poet himself/

writing skills)

j.The universal standard/ criteria of beauty

k.Racial problems

3.Insteading of exaggerating the beloved’s physical features by comparing them to the sun, coral, snow, roses, perfumes, goddess, the speaker declares that he can proclaim his love for her while maintaining her humanness

The speaker swears that he loves his mistress just as much as those poets who exaggerate their beloved’s features. He loves her simply because she’s rare or a unique individual. He wishes to proclaim his love but in truthful, human terms.

4. iambic pentameter: a. Is a sound pattern; b. IAMB: one unaccented (or unstressed) syllable with one accented syllable; c. It’s like a heartbeat: ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bud. Five “ba-bum”s in a row make one line of iambic pentameter (10-syllable lines)

六、When you are old

1、rhetorical device/figure of speech

1）imagination：old、clumsy、warm、fragrant、bitter

2）Contrast：attractive girl and the old lady；other people's love and his love；reality and imagination；false and true；glad grace and changing face；beauty and pilgrim soul

3）Capitals：Love: goddess of love Aphrodite

4）Images：

fire: warmth；

mountains: tough、sublimation升华

stars: forever love

2.rhythm scheme韵律

1)iambic pentameter

2)Musical effect: weary repetition

The repeated use of “and” gives a slow pace to the poem, contributing to the stagnant atmosphere and slow movements of the old woman.

3.Themes: despite its surface simplicity, this poem is thematically complex

a.Love, loss and regret

b.The fleeting nature of life and love

c.False love vs. Truth love

d.Ideal love

七、The story of an hour

1.Setting: early 20th century

2. Themes:

a. gender issues

b. language

c. freedom and confinement

d. time

e. mortality

3. She put much concentration and emphasis on women’s lives and their continual

struggles to create an identity of their own within the boundaries of the patriarchy. Chopin undermines patriarchy by endowing the other, the woman, with an individual identity and a sense of self which the letters she leaves behind voice.

Women’s contradictory roles in marriages and feminine identity

a.Women as property

b.Isolation vs. solitude

c.The demands of society vs. the needs of individuals

d.The purity of sexual vs. artistic desire

e.Escape from control

f.Motherhood vs. self-determination

g.Birds vs. wildlife

h.Sleep vs. rest