本单元具体教学内容、教学基本要求、单元重点与难点
第6次课：浪漫主义诗歌
1.教学内容
Romantic Poets
I. Walt Whitman
1. life
2. work: Leaves of Grass (9 editions)
3. themes – “Catalogue of American and European thought”
Major themes in his poems (almost everything):
4. style: “free verse”
5. influence
II. Emily Dickenson
1. life
2. works
3. themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows
4. style
III. Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson
1. Similarities:
2. differences:
IV. Close reading and poems analysis
(1) 1.Because I Can’t Stop for Death
(2) Wild Nights – Wild Nights
(3) Song of myself
(4) Beat, beat, drum
(5) Captain, oh my Captain
(6) A bird came down from the walk
IIV. Cultural change: Whitman and Guo Moruo
2. 教学基本要求
1)To introduce students to some basic knowledge and some information about the two poets, their lives, contribution.
2) To develop students’ understanding of the American and English Romanticist movement.
3) To improve students’ abilities to interpret and appreciate poetry of Romanticism referring to Dickinson and Whitman’s poems.
4) To improve students’ language skills of cross-cultural communication and competence.
5) To improve students’ critical thinking on Romanticism in World literature and Chinese New poetry.
3. 单元重点、难点
重点:
1) Appreciation of the leaves of the Grass.
2) New Americanness in Whitman’s Poetry
3) Whitman and World literature
难点
1) Newness in Whitman’s poetry
2) Worldwide Romanticist movement and Guo Moruo & other poets.
Romantic Poets
I. Walt Whitman
1. life
2. work: Leaves of Grass (9 editions)
(1) Song of Myself
(2) There Was a Child Went Forth
(3) Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
(4) Democratic Vistas
(5) Passage to India
(6) Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
3. themes – “Catalogue of American and European thought”
He had been influenced by many American and European thoughts: enlightenment, idealism, transcendentalism, science, evolution ideas, western frontier spirits, Jefferson’s individualism, Civil War Unionism, Orientalism.
Major themes in his poems (almost everything):
l equality of things and beings
l divinity of everything
l immanence of God
l democracy
l evolution of cosmos
l multiplicity of nature
l self-reliant spirit
l death, beauty of death
l expansion of America
l brotherhood and social solidarity (unity of nations in the world)
l pursuit of love and happiness
4. style: “free verse”
(1) no fixed rhyme or scheme
(2) parallelism, a rhythm of thought
(3) phonetic recurrence
(4) the habit of using snapshots
(5) the use of a certain pronoun “I”
(6) a looser and more open-ended syntactic structure
(7) use of conventional image
(8) strong tendency to use oral English
(9) vocabulary – powerful, colourful, rarely used words of foreign origins, some even wrong
(10) sentences – catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines
5. influence
(1) His best work has become part of the common property of Western culture.
(2) He took over Whitman’s vision of the poet-prophet and poet-teacher and recast it in a more sophisticated and Europeanized mood.
(3) He has been compared to a mountain in American literary history.
(4) Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or form, bears witness to his great influence.
