Approach to Literature week 6

Ø  WASP 美國夢喜福會

Ø   The Joy Luck Club

A best-selling novel written by Amy Tan. It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco who start a club known as The Joy Luck Club, playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods. The book is structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters. The three mothers and four daughters (one mother, Suyuan Woo, dies before the novel opens) share stories about their lives in the form of vignettes. Each part is preceded by a parable relating to the game.

Ø  Life of systems of human body

The human body is the entire structure of a human being and comprises a head, neck, trunk (which includes the thorax and abdomen), arms and hands, legs and feet. Every part of the body is composed of various types of cells, the fundamental unit of life.

The study of the human body involves anatomy and physiology. The human body can show anatomical non-pathological anomalies known as variations which need to be able to be recognised. Physiology focuses on the systems and their organs of the human body and their functions. Many systems and mechanisms interact in order to maintain homeostasis.

 Ø  SARS (sever acute respiratory syndrome)

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory disease of zoonotic origin caused by the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV).

Signs and symptoms

Initial symptoms are flu-like and may include fever, myalgia, lethargy symptoms, cough, sore throat, and other nonspecific symptoms. The only symptom common to all patients appears to be a fever above 38 °C (100 °F). SARS may eventually lead to shortness of breath and/or pneumonia; either direct viral pneumonia or secondary bacterial pneumonia.

Ø  Airy nothing a local habitation and a name ( A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM) (Act 5, Scene 1)

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name. (Strong imagination)

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy.

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Ø  To kill a Mockingbird

 

Ø  The Grasshopper and the Cricket Summary

Yasunari Kawabata

Summary

Walking along the wall of a university, the narrator hears an insect’s voice from behind the fence of a school playground. The fence gives way to an embankment, at the base of which the narrator sees a cluster of bobbing, multicolored lanterns.

The narrator now imagines that one of the neighborhood children, having heard an insect sing on the slope one night, returns the next night to search for the insect. The next night, another child joins the first one, and so on. When the narrator comes on the insect hunting party, he counts twenty children among its members.

The narrator imagines a scenario in which one child, unable to afford a store-bought red lantern, creates his own from a small carton. Others follow his example. The narrator pictures the children coloring and drawing on paper they then stretch over the various-shaped windows they have cut out of the cartons, each making a singular pattern. Eventually, the child who bought his lantern grows dissatisfied with it and discards it. The narrator supposes that each day the children—whom the narrator likens to artists—create new lanterns. Brought back to the present, the narrator notices on the lanterns the names of the children who made them, cut in letters of the syllabary.

A boy who has been peering into a bush away from the other children suddenly asks if anyone wants a grasshopper. A number of children gather around; he calls again, and more children flock to him. 

Ø   Yasunari Kawabata

(川端 康成 11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.

Ø  Vocabulary

Ø   Ann-; enn- = year

l   Anniversary: a date when you celebrate something that happened in a previous year that is important to you

l   Annual: happening once a year

Annual fee, annual meeting

Ø   Gene- (gen-): something produced

l   Genesis: the beginning, birth, or origin of something

l   Generation: a group of people in society who are born and live around the same time

l   Genus: a group that includes all living things that have similar features. It usually has a Latin name.