Reading Another Culture, Another Time, through Literature. Matthew DeCoursey ENG 1293E Introduction to Literary Studies II

Transcription

1 Reading Another Culture, Another Time, through Literature Matthew DeCoursey ENG 1293E Introduction to Literary Studies II

2 The past is a foreign country.

3 Link to Lit Studies I In the last module, you learned how to read a text inside itself. You learned to: Read narrative effectively. Recognize figures of speech. Relate literary technique to themes. But texts do not exist alone. They come to being in a time and a place, most often not yours. This is a problem and an opportunity.

4 You need to know about a time before you read a text It helps to be able to picture what it looked like: what people wore, what they did in the evening, what their house looked like, what they saw on the way to the shops.

5 Reading a Picture

6 Social behaviour

7 The Ideas of the Time It also helps if you know something about the ideas of the time and place: In Jane Austen s time, only poor women got jobs. Elizabeth Bennett, from Pride and Prejudice couldn t become a business executive or a shop attendant. Ladies were supposed to be accomplished. This meant being able to sing, sew, draw, play the piano and speak French.

8 A Lady

9 A Governess

10 A Working Woman: The Shrimp Girl

11 But the text can also teach you about the time and place this morning we were obliged to dispense with the ceremony of washing: the water in the pitchers was frozen. (Jane Eyre, Ch. 6, p. 62) This tells you that the story takes place in a cold climate, and that there is no running water. You also know that it is normally expected that people will wash every morning.

12 Before the long hour and a half of Bible reading was over, I was ready to perish with cold. (Jane Eyre ch. 6, p. 62) These people read the Bible for a long time every morning. You will guess that they are Christians, and they put time into religion. They must be a kind of Christian that puts a lot of emphasis on Bible reading.

13 You read in a circle To learn about a text, you must first suppose things about the world of the text. If you ve seen a picture or a movie from that world, this will help. As you read the text, you learn more about its world, its time and place, the technology, the religion, the social life. This process can be a great pleasure.

14 What we will do We will do pre-reading. We will present material from the time, with pictures, films and lectures, to give you an idea before you start. After you have read a work, we will give you a chance to interpret it.

15 Jane Eyre One novel, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. It is not short and not especially easy, but it is a classic, and we will help you read it. You will read five chapters a week. In the first week that means 50 pages. Every week, we will put half an hour into discussing what you have read, and pre-reading what comes next. Start by reading a plot summary (the Web is full of them), by reading the novel in Chinese (it s in the library) or by watching one of the films.

16 Jane Eyre There is an online sound-and-text version on the library website. e&searchscope=5&sort=d/xjane+eyre& searchscope=5&sort=d&extended=0&s UBKEY=jane%20eyre/1%2C62%2C62%2 CB/frameset&FF=Xjane+eyre&searchscop e=5&sort=d&2%2c2%2c It is a short version, not the whole novel.

17 Resources Read the Wikipedia article at It will be handy if you get lost. Explore the Jane Eyre website on Victorian Web at /cbronte/eyreov.html Do your own search on Google.

18 We will move roughly forward in time. Romantic / Regency Victorian Edwardian Modernism

19 This week William Blake ( ) A romantic poet, a mystic, a painter, a very strange person who wrote brilliant poetry.

20 rduren.files.wordpress.com Blake

21 Blake s World He was contemporary with Jane Austen. He lived in the same world of great social inequality and gender division

22 The Chimney Sweeper lliam_blake?uselang=ja

23 This was traditional society, and responses to it Things changed, however. Dr. Banerjee will present something about changes and the reasons for them.