细心整理Selected Readings of English Literature What Is Literature?The Random House Dictionary definition of the word “literature”: writing regarded as having permanent worth through its intrinsic excellence; the entire body of writing of a specific language, period, people etc.; writing dealing with a particular subject;Comment on the following statements Israel Zangwill: In Literature, everything is true except names and places; in history nothing is true except names and places.Ezra Pound:Literature is “news that stays news.”Picasso: Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truthThe artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.Robert Frost:Literature is “a performance of words.”Franz Kafka: Literature “must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”Jack London: (Good literature) transcends the limits of particularity to reach universality.Thomas Gray: Literature is “thoughts that breathe and words that burn.”Robert Scholes:The sources of pleasure in literary discourse(表达) can be defined as matters of communicative capacity. Literary works offer readers a chance to use a fuller range of their interpretive(说明的) abilities than do non-literary texts. Brainstorming activity What is behind your choice of the elective, Selective Readings of English Literature? What do you think of literature reading? Or why are you fond of reading literature?Forms of Literature In the more specialized sense of the word, literature is the art that uses language as a medium. Literature contains fiction and non-fiction. Under fiction there are four genres - novels, short stories, plays, and poems.Purpose and Means of the Four Genres with the Use of Wordsl words are used to create imaginary persons or events in stories or plays.l words are used to show ideas and feelings in essays or poems.l words are addressed directly to the reader in stories and essays.l words are overheard by the reader in plays or poems.The ways literary forms are communicated to the reader A story, basically a narration through the report of a storyteller to the reader An essay, persuasion A poem, meditation A play, creation of action through the dialogue of imaginary personsWhat do we read for in western literature? (the first level) The most primitive approach to western literature, especially novels, is to read them for emotional satisfaction. Students at this level look for whats going on and whats happened to the characters they can identify with. All they care about is the “story.” To these readers, novels are recreational at least and therapeutic(有益安康的) at most.(the second level) The second level on which literature exists is what can be called the didactic one. Literature is regarded as a depositor of human experience of considerable variety and scope. It gains access to questions of moral philosophy - questions of value and of normative(标准的) judgment. In such belief, readers try to read as many meanings as they can into literary pieces. Literature is read for its hermeneutic(诠释的) function.(the third level) Advanced readers of literature have a distinctive concern over matters beyond didacticism. They are not satisfied with “what is going on,” or “what is said.” They look for “how it is said.” Readers at this level are also aware of artistic weaknesses. They even read texts closely as texts and not to move into the general context of human experience or history.How to approach literature? One must be both inside and outside of the work. One must allow himself be carried away by the work, and at the same time, on reading again and again think about the way the end is connected to the beginning. Eliot says that one has to give himself up, and then recover himself, and the third moment is having something to say, before one has wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. And the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given. Short story People tell stories to entertain or to instruct. Maupassant and Chekhov are two great writers of the later nineteenth century who can be taken as representatives of the two kinds of literature respectively - one of resolution, the other revelation. Much of the best short fiction from Chekhov onward is less concerned with what happens than with how character feels about the happenings. The emphasis is not on external action but in inner action, feeling. Reading IEarly Autumn by Langston Hughes Langston Hughes African-American Writer, Poet, (February 1, 1902 -May 22, 1967)About the writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967): a poet, playwright, novelist, songwriter, biographer, editor, newspaper columnist, translator and lecturer. Born in Joplin, Missouri, on