About the Course
本課旨在學生賞析、了解,並進而討論英文文學作品。文學作品就像是人生珠玉,是其所屬的時代和時刻的結晶。但藉由我們的研讀和討論,它們也可以對我們說話,呈現我們的感情和問題。
u 主題:愛情、家庭關係、年少生活、自我認同和人生抉擇。
u 討論不同文體、時代和作家﹐以呈現英文文學文體之豐富。
u 訓練學生閱讀、分析英文文學作品之能力。
·
To
introduce readers to classic short stories and poems in English
·
To
cover a broad scope of styles, periods and authors in order to
represent the myriad styles of writing in English
·
To
help students develop their critical English reading ability
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Purposes:
Being far
away in Europe, I have designed this course for you Taiwanese
high school teachers with the hopes that this project will help
you learn more about how to analyse shorter forms of English
literature (short stories and poems) so that you can enrich your
lives, and by extension your students', through appreciating the
language of these literary "gems" and thinking about the issues
in which they are engaged.
In this course, we can savour two kinds of distance-my
distance from you, as well as the distance between us and the
literary texts we discuss. To bridge the second type of
distance, I am choosing topics which I think Taiwanese high
school teachers and their students may be interested in: Love,
Family Relations, Teen Life, Self-Identity and Choices of Life.
Literary works, among other things, are "gems of life," or
verbal crystallizations of lived moments and thoughts specific
to the society to which they belong. But in one way or
another they still speak to us, presenting our feelings and
dealing with problems that are often still very much a part of
life today.
As for my
distance from you, hopefully the online lectures and reading
supports will help bridge it. Also, you are welcome to
write emails to me asking questions or for clarifications.
It was very strange for me to be "teaching" a group that was not
there, but oddly, by the end of the sixteen lessons I felt that
we had come on a journey together. Hopefully, you will
feel the same way.
Each
lesson follows the same structure:
-
pre-lesson introduction
(one page) - general ideas about the text.
-
lecture -
-
cultural and social
background of the text and the author;
-
explication and text
analysis;
-
today's cultural and
thematic relevancies (this isn't always specifically
stated, but it's usually implied through the
lecture).
-
post-lesson questions
Let's
start, then, this mental journey over space and time to the
literary gems of life.