Week 3

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.


Roman Fever
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.

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."

Discussion of textbook (pg.1~9 Introduction)

1. What is Literature?

2. What does Literature do?

3. What are the Genres of Literature?

4. Why read Literature?

5. Why study Literature?

Conclusion: Three tips

I. Take a literary work on its own terms.

-Adjust to the work; don't make the work adjust to you. Be prepared to hear things you do not want to hear. Not all works are about your ideas, nor will they always present emotions you want to feel. But be tolerant and listen to the work first; later you can explore the ways you do or don't agree with it.

II. Assume there is a reason for everything.

-Writers do make mistakes, but when a work shows some degree of verbal control it is usually safest to assume that the writer chose each word carefully; if the choice seems peculiar, you may be missing something. Try to account for everything in a work, see what kind of sense you can make of it, and figure out a coherent pattern that explains the text as it stands

III. Remember that literary tests exist in time, and times change. 

-Not only the meanings of words, but whole ways of looking at the universe vary in different ages. Consciousness of time works two ways: Your knowledge of history provides a context for reading the work, and the work may modify your nation of a particular age.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) 

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.

Harold Bloom 

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

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:

• William Shakespeare
• Dante Alighieri
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Miguel de Cervantes
• Michel de Montaigne
• Molière
• John Milton
• Samuel Johnson
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• William Wordsworth
• Jane Austen
• Walt Whitman
• Emily Dickinson
• Charles Dickens
• George Eliot
• Leo Tolstoy
• Henrik Ibsen
• Sigmund Freud
• Marcel Proust
• James Joyce
• Virginia Woolf
• Franz Kafka
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Pablo Neruda
• Fernando Pessoa
• Samuel Beckett

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. The book also contained four appendices that listed works that at the time he considered canonical, stretching from earliest scriptures to Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Bloom would later disown the list, saying that it was written at his editor's insistence and distracted from the book's intention.

Pachelbel - Canon in D Major

(click to the link)