Approaches to literature week seventeen

Writing about Literature

Final paper

First paragraph

your choice

why become your choice

hypothesis: explain in your own words

Last paragraph can’t be too long

Format：

第一頁左上角 (i.e. timeèMay 1, 1965)

第一頁不要寫頁碼

Work Cited 也要頁碼

標題前後空一行

第二到五頁頁碼置中下(或右上)

Title:

Response Paper on­ _______’s “     ”

若要分成兩行，下面要比上面長

The elements of the essay

Tone (and Audience)

Remember that the purpose of your essay is to persuade readers to see the text your way. That process begins with persuading them that you deserve their attention and respect. The tone of your paper should be serious and straightforward, respectful toward your readers and the literary work. But its approach and vocabulary, while formal enough for academic writing, should be lively enough to interest someone like you.

Thesis

A thesis is to an essay what a theme is to a short story, play, or poem: it’s the governing idea, proposition, claim, or point. Good theses come in many shapes and sizes. A thesis cannot always be conveyed in one sentence, nor will it always appear in the same place in every essay. But you will risk both appearing confused and confusing the reader if you can’t state the thesis in one to three sentences or if the thesis doesn’t appear somewhere in your introduction, usually near its end.

Structure

an essay needs to have a beginning (or introduction), a middle (or body), and an ending (or conclusion). Each of these parts has a distinct function

Beginning: The Introduction

Middle: The Body

Ending: The Conclusion

Death of a salesman

a 1949 play written by American playwright Arthur Miller. It was the recipient of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. The play premiered on Broadway in February 1949, running for 742 performances, and has been revived on Broadway four times, winning three Tony Awards for Best Revival. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest plays of the 20th century.

Themes

The American Dream

Willy believes wholeheartedly in what he considers the promise of the American Dream—that a “well liked” and “personally attractive” man in business will indubitably and deservedly acquire the material comforts offered by modern American life. Oddly, his fixation with the superficial qualities of attractiveness and likeability is at odds with a more gritty, more rewarding understanding of the American Dream that identifies hard work without complaint as the key to success. Willy’s interpretation of likeability is superficial—he childishly dislikes Bernard because he considers Bernard a nerd. Willy’s blind faith in his stunted version of the American Dream leads to his rapid psychological decline when he is unable to accept the disparity between the Dream and his own life.

Symbols

Seeds

Seeds represent for Willy the opportunity to prove the worth of his labor, both as a salesman and a father. His desperate, nocturnal attempt to grow vegetables signifies his shame about barely being able to put food on the table and having nothing to leave his children when he passes. Willy feels that he has worked hard but fears that he will not be able to help his offspring any more than his own abandoning father helped him. The seeds also symbolize Willy’s sense of failure with Biff. Despite the American Dream’s formula for success, which Willy considers infallible, Willy’s efforts to cultivate and nurture Biff went awry. Realizing that his all-American football star has turned into a lazy bum, Willy takes Biff’s failure and lack of ambition as a reflection of his abilities as a father.

Additional Supplement

college degree: is the state of recognized completion of studies at a school or university. A diploma is generally issued in recognition of having satisfactorily completed the prescribed course of study. The most common degree awarded today is a Bachelor's degree.

tuition: tuition payments are charged by educational institutions in some countries to assist with funding of staff and faculty, course offerings, lab equipment, computer systems, libraries, facility upkeep and to provide a comfortable student learning experience. In most countries, especially non-English-speaking countries, there are no or only nominal tuition fees for all forms of education, including university and other higher education.

I’ve got tuition waver.

assistantships: are an arrangement in which financial support is given to a graduate student who engages in teaching and/or research in furtherance of the university’s academic mission, as well as his or her graduate education.

cliff notes

are a series of student study guides available primarily in the United States. The guides present and explain literary and other works in pamphlet form or online. Detractors of the study guides claim they let students bypass reading the assigned literature. The company claims to promote the reading of the original work, and does not view the study guides as a substitute for that reading.

Speech by Christopher Walken: two little mice

Catch me if you can

The true story of Frank Abagnale Jr. who, before his 19th birthday, successfully conned millions of dollars' worth of checks as a Pan Am pilot, doctor, and legal prosecutor.

Three websites to learn

Beowulf

gradesaver beowulf study guide

sparknote

Suzanne Collins

is an American television writer and novelist, best known as the author of The New York Times best selling series The Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games trilogy (which consists of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay).

Veronica Roth

s an American novelist and short story writer known for her debut New York Times bestselling Divergent trilogy, consisting of Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant; and Four: A Divergent Collection. Divergent was the recipient of the Goodreads Favorite Book of 2011 and the 2012 winner for Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Honest Trailers

Rip Van Winkle

is a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819. Written while Irving was living in Birmingham, England, it was part of a collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Although the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains, Irving later admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills." The story's protagonist, also called Rip Van Winkle, is a Dutch-American villager living around the time of the American Revolutionary War.

Approaches to literature week sixteen

Quiz

Willy Loman: is a fictional character and the protagonist of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which debuted on Broadway with Lee J. Cobb playing Loman at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949. Loman is a 63-year-old travelling salesman from Brooklyn with 34 years of experience with the same company who endures a pay cut and a firing during the play. He has difficulty dealing with his current state and has created a fantasy world to cope with his situation. This does not keep him from multiple suicide attempts.

foil: is a character who contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in order to highlight particular qualities of the other character. In some cases, a subplot can be used as a foil to the main plot. This is especially true in the case of metafiction and the "story within a story" motif. A foil usually either differs dramatically or is extremely similar but with a key difference setting them apart. The concept of a foil is also more widely applied to any comparison that is made to contrast a difference between two things. Thomas F. Gieryn places these uses of literary foils into three categories, which Tamara A. P. Metze explains as: those that emphasize the heightened contrast (this is different because ...), those that operate by exclusion (this is not X because...), and those that assign blame ("due to the slow decision-making procedures of government...").

verbal irony[mock]: occurs when a speaker speaks something contradictory to what he intends to. It is an intentional product of the speaker and is contradictory to his/her emotions and actions. To define it simply, it means when a character uses statement with underlying meanings contrasting with its literal meanings, it shows that the writer has used verbal irony. Writers rely on audience’s intelligence for discerning hidden meanings they intend to convey. Writers also use ironic similes to convey exactly the opposite of what they intend to say, such as “soft like concrete.”

Classical unites

The classical unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics. In their neoclassical form they are as follows:

unity of action: a play should have one action that it follows, with minimal subplots

unity of time: the action in a play should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours

unity of place: a play should exist in a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place

Vocabulary

verbal: something to do with the verb

ant: people [suffix standing for profession]

contestant

meaning: a person who takes part in a contest

Example: The judges passed on each contestant.

applicant

meaning: someone who formally asks for something (such as a job or admission to a college) : someone who applies for something

Example: He is a job applicant.

flight attendant

meaning: a person whose job is to help passengers who are traveling in an airplane

Example: She is a flight attendant.

or:people

actor

meaning: a person who acts in a play, movie, et

Example: He is a failed actor.

ist:people

artist

meaning: a person who creates art : a person who is skilled at drawing, painting, etc

Example: She is an artist.

al: is a suffix standing for noun

approval

meaning: permission to do something : acceptance of an idea, action, plan, etc.

Example: The plan had the approval of the school authorities.

Video

What is literature for?

Shakespeare dating tips

Understanding APA and MLA Style

APA[American Psychological Association]

In APA style, the in-text citation tells the last name of the person and the year of publication. The reference is organized as follows: author’s last name, initial of first name, year of publication, title, place of publication, and publishing company, and if the source was found online, the web address. If you see et al., you know that there are other authors who are not listed.  

MLA[Modern Language Association]

In APA style, the in-text citation tells the last name of the person whose work is being cited and the page in his or her book from which the information came. The reference is organized as follows: the person’s name, first name, title, place of publication, publishing company, year of publication and format.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

is a comedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1590 and 1597. It 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.

William Shakespeare

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 plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories, and these are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Quotes of A Midsummer Night’s dream

Ay me, for aught that I could ever read,

Could ever hear by tale or history,

The course of true love never did run smooth. . . .

Lysander speaks these lines to soothe Hermia when she despairs about the difficulties facing their love, specifically, that Egeus, her father, has forbidden them to marry and that Theseus has threatened her with death if she disobeys her father (I.i.132–134). Lysander tells Hermia that as long as there has been true love, there have been seemingly insurmountable difficulties to challenge it. He goes on to list a number of these difficulties, many of which later appear in the play: differences in birth or age (“misgrafted in respect of years”) and difficulties caused by friends or “war, death, or sickness,” which make love seem “swift as a shadow, short as any dream” (I.i.137, I.i.142–144). But, as Hermia comments, lovers must persevere, treating their difficulties as a price that must be paid for romantic bliss. As such, the above lines inaugurate the play’s exploration of the theme of love’s difficulties and presage what lies ahead for Lysander and Hermia: they will face great difficulties but will persevere and ultimately arrive at a happy ending.

Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.

But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so.

He will not know what all but he do know.

And as he errs, doting on Hermia’s eyes,

So I, admiring of his qualities.

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

Love can transpose to form and dignity.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

Helena utters these lines as she comments on the irrational nature of love. They are extremely important to the play’s overall presentation of love as erratic, inexplicable, and exceptionally powerful (I.i.227–235). Distressed by the fact that her beloved Demetrius loves Hermia and not her, Helena says that though she is as beautiful as Hermia, Demetrius cannot see her beauty. Helena adds that she dotes on Demetrius (though not all of his qualities are admirable) in the same way that he dotes on Hermia. She believes that love has the power to transform “base and vile” qualities into “form and dignity”—that is, even ugliness and bad behavior can seem attractive to someone in love. This is the case, she argues, because “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”—love depends not on an objective assessment of appearance but rather on an individual perception of the beloved. These lines prefigure aspects of the play’s examination of love, such as Titania’s passion for the ass-headed Bottom, which epitomizes the transformation of the “base and vile” into “form and dignity.”

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom.

Bottom makes this bombastic speech after he wakes up from his adventure with Titania; his human head restored, he believes that his experience as an ass-headed monster beloved by the beautiful fairy queen was merely a bizarre dream (IV.i.199–209). He remarks dramatically that his dream is beyond human comprehension; then, contradicting himself, he says that he will ask Quince to write a ballad about this dream. These lines are important partially because they offer humorous commentary on the theme of dreams throughout the play but also because they crystallize much of what is so lovable and amusing about Bottom. His overabundant self-confidence burbles out in his grandiose idea that although no one could possibly understand his dream, it is worthy of being immortalized in a poem. His tendency to make melodramatic rhetorical mistakes manifests itself plentifully, particularly in his comically mixed-up association of body parts and senses: he suggests that eyes can hear, ears see, hands taste, tongues think, and hearts speak.

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended:

That you have but slumbered here,

While these visions did appear;

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend.

If you pardon, we will mend.

Puck speaks these lines in an address to the audience near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, extending the theme of dreams beyond the world of the play and putting the reality of the audience’s experience into question (V.epilogue.1–8). As many of the characters (Bottom and Theseus among them) believe that the magical events of the play’s action were merely a dream, Puck tells the crowd that if the play has offended them, they too should remember it simply as a dream—“That you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear.” The speech offers a commentary on the dreamlike atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and casts the play as a magical dream in which the audience shares.

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

In this soliloquy, Helena ponders the transforming power of love, noting that Cupid is blind. The lovesick Helena has been abandoned by her beloved Demetrius, because he loves the more attractive Hermia. Helena, while tall and fair, is not as lovely as Hermia. Helena finds it unfair that Demetrius dotes on Hermia's beauty, and she wishes appearances were contagious the way a sickness is so that she might look just like Hermia and win back Demetrius. The connection of love to eyesight and vision are matters of vital importance in this play about love and the confusion it sometimes brings.

Apple of Discord

is a reference to the Golden Apple of Discord (Greek: μῆλον τῆς Ἔριδος) which, according to Greek mythology, the goddess Eris (Gr. Ἔρις, "Strife") tossed in the midst of the feast of the gods at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis as a prize of beauty, thus sparking a vanity-fueled dispute among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite that eventually led to the Trojan War (for the complete story, see The Judgement of Paris). Thus, "apple of discord" is used to signify the core, kernel, or crux of an argument, or a small matter that could lead to a bigger dispute.

mirror mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all

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