Ching-Chia Ting

2017年1月5日星期四

The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden (week 17)

The Secret Garden is a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was initially published in serial form beginning in 1910, and first published in its entirety in 1911. It is now one of Burnett's most popular novels.

The first filmed version was made in 1919 by the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation with 17-year-old Lila Lee as Mary and Paul Willis as Dickon, but the film is thought lost.

In 1949, MGM filmed the second adaptation with Margaret O'Brien as Mary, Dean Stockwell as Colin and Brian Roper as Dickon. This version was mostly in black-and-white, but the sequences set in the restored garden were filmed in Technicolor.

A stage play by Jessica Swale adapted from the novel was performed at Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre in Chester 2014.
A multimedia web series adaptation of the novel titled The Misselthwaite Archives was released on YouTube in 2015. The series consisted of 40 episodes, which aired from January through October, as well as fictional letters, emails, text messages, social media accounts, and other documents about the characters.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".

Don Quixote

Don Quixote fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is

considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection that cites Don Quixote as authors' choice for the "best literary work ever written".

The story follows the adventures of a hidalgo named Mr. Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood.

^movies:

2017年1月3日星期二

Literary realism

Literary realism (week 16)

Literary realism is part of the realist art movement beginning with mid nineteenth-century French

literature (Stendhal), and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin) and extending to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.In contrast to idealism, attempts to represent familiar things as they are.

Realist works of art may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or Kitchen sink realism.In the late 18th-century Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the previous Age of Reason and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature found in the dominant philosophy of the 18th century, as well as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, educationand the natural sciences.

Social realism
is an international art movement that includes the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions.
The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slang heard in those regions. The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the genre.

Socialist realism

is the official Soviet art form that was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and was later adopted by allied Communist parties worldwide.This form of realism held that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress.

Naturalism

was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1930s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganized literary movement that sought to depict believable everyday reality.

American realism

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His stories of middle and upper class life set in the 1880s and 1890s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction. His most popular novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).

Initiation

a rite of passage marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society. It could also be a formal admission to adulthood in a community or one of its formal components.
include Hindu diksha, Christian baptism or confirmation, Jewish bar or bat mitzvah, acceptance into a fraternal organization, secret society or religious order, or graduation from school or recruit training. A person taking the initiation ceremony in traditional rites, such as those depicted in these pictures, is called an initiate.

Quest

serves as a plot device in mythology and fiction: a difficult journey towards a goal, often symbolic or allegorical. Tales of quests figure prominently in the folklore of every nationand ethnic culture.

In literature, the object of a quest requires great exertion on the part of the hero, who must overcome many obstacles, typically including much travel.

Journey

Bildungsroman

novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story . is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is extremely important.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived.

Read teacher's「The Wizard Of Oz 」ppt and have comparison with other literaries.

movies:

2016年12月25日星期日

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (week 15)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an American children's novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow, originally published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago on May 17, 1900.The novel is one of the best-known stories in American literature and has been widely translated.

The story chronicles the adventures of a young farm girl named Dorothy in the magical Land of Oz, after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their Kansas home by a cyclone.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is considered the first American fairy tale because of its references to clear American locations such as Kansas and Omaha. Baum agreed with authors such as Carroll that fantasy literature was important for children, along with numerous illustrations, but he also wanted to create a story that had recognizable American elements in it, such as farming and industrialization.

Another influence lay in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A September 1900 review in the Grand Rapids Herald called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a "veritable Alice in Wonderland brought up to the present day standard of juvenile literature".Baum found Carroll's plots incoherent, but he identified the books' source of popularity as Alice herself, a child with whom the child readers could identify; this influenced his choice of a protagonist.Baum was also influenced by Carroll's belief that children's books should have many pictures and bemorals, instead believing that children should be allowed to be children. Building on Carroll's style of numerous images accompanying the text, Baum amalgamated the conventional features of a fairy tale (witches and wizards) with the well-known things in his readers' lives .
pleasurable to read. Carroll rejected the Victorian-era ideology that children's books should be saturated with .

Over the Rainbow
Over the Rainbow" (often referred to as "Somewhere over the Rainbow") is a ballad, with music

by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg.It was written for the movie The Wizard of Oz (1939) and was sung by actress Judy Garland, in her starring role as Dorothy Gale. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became Garland's signature song, as well as one of the most enduring standards of the 20th century.
The "Over the Rainbow" sequence and the entirety of the Kansas scenes were directed by King Vidor, though he was not credited. The song was initially deleted from the film after a preview in San Luis Obispo.

movies:

2016年12月22日星期四

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen （week 14）

H. C. Andersen （April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories, called eventyr in Danish,
express themes that transcend age and nationality.

Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "Thumbelina".

In the spring of 1872, Andersen got off on the wrong side of the bed. He fell out of his bed and was severely hurt; he never recovered. Soon afterward, he started to show signs of liver cancer.

At the time of his death, Andersen was internationally revered, and the Danish Government paid him an annual stipend as a "national treasure".

statue of little mermaid ↓

movies:

Hans Christian Andersen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40GL2_i8_-o

little mermaid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIXcMjGO9kY&list=PL4MDZZOVu08SNX2KKxQufHMelOCSFYI9l

snow queen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV1M1y595_U

The Emperor's New Clothes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9mQoJU-6I0

The Nightingale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOqkSnUuj6Y

Thumbelina

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGMQILuWK9g

The Ugly Duckling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDEWYS4IuUQ

2016年12月13日星期二

Brothers Grimm

Brothers Grimm (week thirteen)

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German

academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing folklore during the 19th century. They were among the best-known storytellers of folk tales, and popularized stories such as "Cinderella" , "The Frog Prince", "Rapunzel", Sleeping Beauty" , and "Snow White" . Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales , was published in 1812.

In addition to writing and modifying folk tales, the brothers wrote collections of well-respected German and Scandinavian mythologies, and in 1838 they began writing a definitive German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch), which they were unable to finish during their lifetimes.

The tales are available in more than 100 languages and have been later adapted by filmmakers including Lotte Reiniger and Walt Disney, with films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty. During the 1930s and 40s, the tales were used as propaganda by the Third Reich; later in the 20th century psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim reaffirmed the value of the work, in spite of the cruelty and violence in original versions of some of the tales, which the Grimms eventually sanitized.

They worked to discover and crystallize a kind of Germanness in the stories that they collected because they believed that folklore contained kernels of ancient mythologies and beliefs which were crucial to understanding the essence of German culture. By examining culture from a philological point of view, they sought to establish connections between German law and culture and local beliefs.

picture books:

Disney films:

Grimm's Fairy Tales:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/

movies:

2016年12月1日星期四

Aesop

Aesop (week twelve)

Aesop was an Ancient Greek fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables. Many of the tales are characterized by animals and inanimate objects that speak, solve problems, and generally have human characteristics.

Scattered details of Aesop's life can be found in ancient sources, including Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch.Depictions of Aesop in popular culture over the last 2500 years have included many works of art and his appearance as a character in numerous books, films, plays, and television programs.

Art and literature:

Ancient sources mention two statues of Aesop, one by Aristodemus and another by Lysippus.

Early on, the representation of Aesop as an ugly slave emerged. The later tradition which makes Aesop a black African resulted in depictions ranging from 17th-century engravings to a television portrayal by a black comedian. In general, beginning in the 20th century, plays have shown Aesop as a slave, but not ugly, while movies and television shows (such as The Bullwinkle Show) have depicted him as neither ugly nor a slave.

Later in the 19th century the subject of Aesop telling his tales was made popular by the painting of him entertaining the maids of Xanthus by Roberto Fontana (1844-1907).A depiction of the fabulist surrounded by laughing young women, it went on to win a prize at the Milanese Brera Academy in 1876 and was then shown at the 1878 International Exhibition and the 11th exhibition of the Società di Belle Arti di Trieste in 1879. A later painting by Julian Russell Story widens Aesop's audience by showing people of both sexes and all ages enjoying his narration.Though Aesop is pictured as ugly in both, his winning personality is suggested by his smiling face and lively gestures.

Portrait of Aesop by Velázquez in the Prado: