Approach to Literature week13

Ø  Marguerite Duhas

She is known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist and experimental filmmaker. She is best known for writing the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, which earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Ø  廣島之戀 Hiroshima mon amour (歐亞戀情)

It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness.

Hiroshima mon amour concerns a series of conversations (or one enormous conversation) over a 36-hour long period between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), referred to as Her, and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), referred to as Him. They have had a brief relationship and are now separating. The two debate memory and forgetfulness as She prepares to depart, comparing failed relationships with the bombing of Hiroshima and the perspectives of people inside and outside the incidents. The early part of the film recounts, in the style of a documentary but narrated by the so far unidentified characters, the effects of the Hiroshima bomb on August 6, 1945, in particular the loss of hair and the complete anonymity of the remains of some victims. He had been conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army, and his family was in Hiroshima on that day.

The film uses highly structured repetitive dialogue, mostly consisting of Her narration, with Him interjecting to say she is wrong, lying or confused, or to deny and contradict her statements with the film's famous line "You are not endowed with memory." Although He disagrees and rejects many of the things She says, he pursues her constantly. The film is peppered with dozens of brief flashbacks to Her life; in her youth in the French town Nevers, she was shamed and had her head shaved as punishment for having a love affair with a German soldier, which she juxtaposes with the loss of the hair "which the women of Hiroshima will find has fallen out in the morning."

Ø  Walt Whitman’s "I Celebrate myself, and sing myself"

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,  (← the sentence that I like)

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents

 the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy.

Ø  Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality

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Ø  Free verse

Free verse is an open form of poetry. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

Poets have explained that free verse is not totally free; 'its only freedom is from the tyrant demands of the metered line'

Walt Whitman, who based his long lines in "Leaves of Grass" on the phrasing of the King James Bible, influenced later American free verse practitioners

Although free verse requires no meter, rhyme, or other traditional poetic techniques, a poet can still use them to create some sense of structure. A clear example of this can be found in Walt Whitman's poems, where he repeats certain phrases and uses commas to create both a rhythm and structure.

Ø  草葉集 Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and re-writing Leaves of Grass , revising it multiple times until his death. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades—the first a small book of twelve poems and the last a compilation of over 400. This book is notable for its discussion of delight in sensual pleasures during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral. Leaves of Grass (particularly the first edition) exalted the body and the material world. Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement, itself an offshoot of Romanticism , Whitman's poetry praises nature and the individual human's role in it. However, much like Emerson, Whitman does not diminish the role of the mind or the spirit; rather, he elevates the human form and the human mind, deeming both worthy of poetic praise.

Leaves of Grass was highly controversial during its time for its explicit sexual imagery, and Whitman was subject to derision by many contemporary critics. Collection has infiltrated popular culture and been recognized as one of the central works of American poetry.

Ø  Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven"

"The Raven" is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness. The raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk, mythological, religious, and classical references.

Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically, intending to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explained in his 1846 follow-up essay, "The Philosophy of Composition". The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty by Charles Dickens.Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and makes use of internal rhyme as well as alliteration throughout.

Critical opinion is divided as to the poem's literary status, but it nevertheless remains one of the most famous poems ever written.

Ø  W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature .

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honored for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".

Yeats is considered to be one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize.

Ø  THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Ø   " Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment "

/ ˌ k ʊ b l ə ˈ k ɑː n / is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's Preface to "Kubla Khan", the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium -influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu , the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan . Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a person from Porlock . The poem is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetryA copy of the manuscript is a permanent exhibit at the British Museum in London.While incomplete and subtitled a "fragment", its language is highly stylised with a strong emphasis on sound devices that change between the poem's original two stanzas

Ø  The Other Boleyn Girl (美人心機)

The Other Boleyn Girl is a historical novel written by British author Philippa Gregory, loosely based on the life of 16th-century aristocrat Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne Boleyn, of whom little is known. Inspired by the life of Mary, Gregory depicts the annulment of one of the most significant royal marriages in English history (that of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and conveys the urgency of the need for a male heir to the throne. Much of the history is highly distorted in her account.

During the 16th century, two sisters who hail from a wealthy family join the court of King Henry VIII. Soon rivalry, scandal and hunger for power results in one's downfall.

²  Additional Information

Ø  人間四月天

這齣戲主要描述徐志摩與三位女性（元配張幼儀，心儀對象林徽音，以及最後的伴侶陸小曼）的愛情故事。

林徽音詩作《我說你是人間的四月天》：

“    我說你是人間的四月天，

笑響點亮了四面風；

清靈在春的光艷中交舞著變。

你是四月早天裡的雲煙，

黃昏吹著風的軟，

星子在無意中閃，細雨點灑在花前。

那輕，那娉婷，你是，鮮妍。

百花的冠冕你戴著，

你是天真，莊嚴，你是夜夜的月圓。

雪化後那片鵝黃，你像；

新鮮初放芽的綠，你是；柔嫩喜悅

水光浮動著你夢期待中白蓮。

你是一樹一樹的花開，

是燕在樑間呢喃，

你是愛、是暖、是希望，

你是人間的四月天！”

Ø  江美琪 我多麼羨慕你

²  International events

London elects Khan as first Muslim mayor.