外国文学双语教学课程教学大纲

外国文学双语教学课程教学大纲

Bilingual Course for Foreign Literature

(Syllabus)

Introduction

This course tends to teach Western literature bilingually, and the students who will attend the class are from the Chinese Department. Western literature here refers to European literature from Greek literature to the twentieth literature and American literature since the 19th century, including non-English and English speaking countries’ literature, although the teacher may often focus on the literature of some English-speaking countries.

The students are required to be familiar with the basic knowledge of Western literature, its development, and the important literary movements, as well as celebrated literary figures. At the same time, they are asked to read some famous pieces, especially some masterpieces, which are to be printed as hand-outs.

This course consists roughly of two parts: lectures and discussions. In the former part, the teacher plays the leading role, while in the later, the students are encouraged to express themselves in English.

Equipment Required: multimedia classroom.

Number of students restrained: 50 per class.

Time required: 3 hours per week, 18-19 weeks per term, in 2 terms.

Total teaching hours: 112-114

Contents of the Course

I.Ancient Literature ( 15 periods)

Introduction

The background of Greek literature and its position in European literature and culture; How the Mediterranean played an important role in the formation of Greek Culture; The achievements of Greek literature: myths and legends; Hesiodos’ poetry and its reality-oriented theme; The ―Tenth Muse‖Sapho and her lyrics; A brief introduction Homer’s epics; A brief introduction to Greek drama; Aesop’s fables and Aesop’s age; Greek literary theory and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; The difference and relationship between Greek and Roman culture.

Greek literature

1. Mythology

Greek mythology and Greece: its origin; Four sources of Greek mythology: A. Homeric Creation Myth; B. Pelasgian Creation Myth; C. Orphic Creation Myth; D. Olympian Creation Myth

Greek mythology and the disposition of Greeks; The Characteristics of Greek mythology and anthropocentricism; The stories of the beginning of the heavens and earth and major gods on Olympus; Significance of Greek mythologies and legends and their influence.

2. Homer

(1) Homer and Homeric Epics

(2) Contents of Homeric Epics

The Iliad

The Odyssey

(3) Characters in Homeric epics

Achilles

Hector

Odysseus

(4)Significance of Homeric epics

It is the reflection of clannish and ancient Greece.

Courage and bravery

Its influence upon later European literature

(5)Art

Structure

Character depiction

(6)Supplementary readings

3. Drama

The origin of Greek drama and the Festival of Dionysus; Life and writing of Aeschylus; Life and writing of Sophocles; Life and writing of Euripides.

Works to be analyzed:

Aeschylus: The Oresteia (a trilogy)

Sophocles: Oedipus the King

Euripides: Medea

Roman literature

Formation and geographical situation of Rome; Historic periods of Rome; Roman literary achievements; Relationship between Rome and Greece; How Romans borrowed even stole from Greece.

Virgil (70-19 B. C.): His writing and The Aeneid

Christian literature

Europe and Hebraic and Hellenic traditions; Judaism and Jesus Christ; Origin and formation of Christianity; Promulgation of Christianity in Greece and Rome; Rome’s acceptance of Christianity; Christianity in Medieval Europe.

Four Gospels and Christian literature:

Mathew

Mark

Luke

John

II. Medieval Culture and Literature(6 periods)

Introduction

1. Historical background

2. The collapse of Western Roman Empire and the rise of Byzantine Empire

3. Emergence of nations or tribes

4. Christianity and the Medieval Ages

National epics

▲Beowulf

▲The Edda(13th century)

▲The Saga

▲The Song of Roland(La Chanson de Roland, <罗兰之歌>)

▲S ong of the Nebelungs (Das Nibelungenlied, <尼布龙根之歌>)

▲The Song of the Cid (<熙德之歌>)Eleventh-Century Spain

▲The Tale of Igor's Campaign (<伊戈尔远征记>)

Romance of Chivalry

1. The backcloth of Chivalry literature

THE MILITARY ASPECTS

THE SOCIAL ASPECTS

THE RELIGIOUS ASPECTS

2. What is a chevalier (or knight)?

3. What is the spirit of chivalry?

4. What is the content of chivalry literature?

Civic literature

1. Rhymed stories

2. Le Roman de Renard (The legend of Renard)

3.Civic lyrics

Dante Alghieri (1265-1321)

1. His time

The historical period Dante lived in was the late Middle Ages, especially the XIV century. This century would see, just after Dante, the agony and death of the traditional Medieval culture, that was the one formed mainly by the influence of the Church, the Roman classical tradition and the German populations. Politically speaking, two were the authorities in the world: the Emperor and the Pope: the former represented the temporal power, the latter the religious power.

In Italy, there was no political union, but the country was divided into many different town councils. The political parties were two: the Guelfi and the Ghibellini. The former ones were in favor of the Pope and the latter ones were in favor of the emperor. At the beginning of the XIV century, the Guelfi led most of the councils in Italy. In Florence, the Guelfo party split in two parts: the whites (bianchi, in favor of the Emperor) and the blacks (neri, in favor of the Pope). Dante was a white guelfo. The years around 1300 where the ones in which political fights between whites and blacks became stronger and more dramatic.

2. His life

3. His writing

(1) The New Life and ―The New Style‖

(2) On the Vernacular

(3) The Banquet

(4) On Single Government（On Monarchy）

4. The Divine Comedy

The work

The genre

Plots

Protagonists

Figures and religion

How to read the work

His purpose

Hell

Purgatory

Paradise

III. Renaissance Literature (15 periods)

Introduction

The Historical Background of the Renaissance

A transient from slavery to feudalism

Great inventions in China and geographical discoveries

Renewal of the antiquity

The Renaissance and Humanism

Literature during the Renaissance

Italy

France

Spain

England

Germany

Miguel de Cervantes(1547-1616)

1. His life and literary career

2. The book Don Quixote (1605, 1615)

(1) The author’s motivation for writing such a book

(2) The main content of the book

(3) How to evaluate the book

(4) Characters in the book

A. Don Quixote

B. Sancho Panza

(5) The significance of the book(Cervantes’ influence upon later literature)

William Shakespeare

1. Shakespeare’s life and literary career

2. Division of Shakespeare’s writings

3. Shakespeare’s poetry

4. History plays

5. Comedies

6. Tragedies

7. Tragicomedies

8. Legendary plays

9. Hamlet

IV. The 17th Century Literature (9 periods)

Introduction

1. Background of 17th century literature

Seventeenth-Century France

Seventeenth-Century England

2. Literature in the 17th century

1) Neo-classicism literature

(1) The basis of the origin of Neo-classicism

A. It was the product of tyrannic politics

B. The founding of French Academy

C. Literary theory of Boileau (1636-1711)

D. Philosophy of Descartes (1596-1650)

(2) Characteristics of Neo-classicism

A. Its political tendency—vindicating the benefit of the kingship

B. Reason is glorified

C. Worshiping the antiquity.

D. Being formalistic

2) Baroque literature

3) English Literature and John Milton

4) Puritan literature (John Bunyan and others)

Moliere (1622-1673)

1. His life

Four stages of his career

Stage I (1643-1658)

Stage II (1659-1663)

Stage III (1664-1668)

Stage IV (1668-1673)

2. Tartuffe, ou L'imposteur (1664, Tartuffe, or the Impostor)

Theme of the play

Characters in the play

Tartuffe

Orgon

Dorine

3. Moliere’s position

V. The 18th Century Literature (12 periods)

Introduction

1. Historical Background of the 18th century Europe

(1) The history

(2). Enlightenment

The main components of Enlightenment thought can be concluded as follows: ?The universe is fundamentally rational, that is, it can be understood through the use of reason alone;

?Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt;

?Human experience is the foundation of human understanding of truth; authority is

not to be preferred over experience;

?All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the same way the natural world can be understood; once understood, human life, both social and individual, can be manipulated or engineered in the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered;

?Human history is largely a history of progress;

?Human beings can be improved through education and the development of their rational facilities;

?Religious doctrines have no place in the understanding of the physical and human worlds.

2. Enlightenment literature in Europe

(1). England

Pope, Alexander (1688–1744)

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)

Henry Fielding (1707–54)

Tobias George Smollett (1721–71)

Robert Burns(1759-1796)

William Blake(1757-1827)

Sentimentalism and its representative writers.

Laurence Sterne（1713–68）

Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)

Thomas Gray （1716–71）

Edward Young (1683–1765)

(2) France

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (1689–1755),

V oltaire(Francois-Marrie Arouet V oltaire 1694-1778)

Diderot (Denis, 1713–84),

Rousseau (Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778)

Beaumarchais (Pierre Augustin Caron de, 1732–99),

(3) Germany

1.Enlightenment and German literature:

2. Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress,―狂飙突进运动‖)

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803),

3．Classicism in Germany

4. Schiller, Friedrich von (1759–1805),

Voltaire(Francois-Marrie Arouet Voltaire, 1694-1778)

1. Early life

2. Work in England and Cirey

3. Berlin and Geneva

4. Ferney Years and Candide

5. The final chapter

6. V oltaire’s Style

7. V oltaire’s philosophy

Rousseau (Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778)

1. Life and Works

Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité des hommes (1754),

Julie, ou La Nouvelle Hélo?se (1761),

émile (1762),

Du contrat social (1762);

Confessions

2. Rousseau’s Thought

3. Rousseau’s Influence

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

1. His life and writings

2. Robinson Crusoe (1719)

3, Selected readings

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1749–1832),

1．Life and writings

E arly life and works

Weimar years

Italian and French influences

Novels and poetry

Other accomplishments

2. Faust

five stages of Faust’s life:

1. Life as a scholar

2. Life of love

3 Life of politics

4. Life of beauty

5. Cultivating the nature

VI. The 19th Century Literature : Part One (15 periods)

Introduction

1. Background of Romanticism

(1) It is one product of the Enlightenment.

(2) Influenced by the philosophy of Kant and Utopianism.

(3) It is the inevitable stage of European literature

2. Characteristics of Romanticism in the 19th century

a.Spontaneity: Wordsworth wrote, ―All good poetry is the s pontaneous overflow

of powerful feeling.‖ According to Wordsworth, although the writing of a poem may be preceded by reflection and followed by second thoughts and revisions, the immediate act of composition, if a poem is to be genuine, must be spontaneous that is, arising from impulse, and free from all the rules and conventions of his neoclassical predecessors. Poems are the products of an unconscious creativity.

b.Subjectivism: Much of romantic poetry represented the poets themselves.

Romantic poems take as their subject matter the experience, thoughts and feelings of the individual writer, or natural and human objects as they modified by the writer’s feelings.

c.Singularity (Uniqueness): The Romantic period is also an age of radical

individualism. Emphasis was placed on individual. Man was no longer viewed as limited being in a strictly ordered and essentially unchanging world, but regarded as having infinite potentialities and creative power. The Romantic Movement was the expression of individual genius, which was marked by strong reaction and protest against the bondage of rules.

d.Worship of Nature: To an extraordinary degree, Romantic writers took the

world of nature as a persistent subject of their poetry, and described it with an accuracy of observation unprecedented in earlier writers.

e.Simplicity: (esp. The use of language)

f.Note of Melancholy: In the works of Romantics, we can often sense a gloomy

mood of melancholy and loneliness, resulting from the frustration of their efforts in revolting against the established code and convention.

g.Form (freer, poetic form) of heroic couplet

h.To learn from the folklore

3. The development of Romanticism in European countries

(1)England

The older-generation romanticists

William Wordsworth (1770-1850),

Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834),

Robert Southey (1774-1842).

The younger-generation Romanticists

Byron(1788–1824),

Shelley(1792–1822)

Keats(1795–1821).

(2) Germany

German Romanticists:

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829)

August Wilhem Schlegel (1767-1845)

Novalis (1772-1801)

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853)

Arnim (1781-1831)

Chamisso (1781-1838)

Eichendorff (1788-1857)

Hoffmann (1767-1822)

Grimm borthers

Jacob Grimm (1785-1863)

Wilhem Grimm (1786-1859)

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

(3) France

(1)Germaine de Sta?l,(1766–1817)

Delphine (1802),

(De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 1800),

De l'Allemagne (1810)

(2) Chateaubriand, Fran?ois René, vicomte de (1768–1848),

―Atala‖ (1801)

―René‖ (1802),

(4) Russia

Introduction

Pushkin and Russian romanticism

(5) America

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

1. His life and writing

2. His collaboration with Coleridge

3. Lyrical Ballads and its position in history

4. Analysis of I wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’ver vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shines

And twinkle on the milk way,

They stretche’d in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:--

A poet could not but be gay

In such a jocund company!

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills

And dance with the daffodils.

Hugo, Victor Marie(1802–1885)

1. His life and writing

(1) The preface to his drama Cromwell(1827) and its position in history of crticism

(2) His major poetry selections, Les Orientales (1829), Les Feuilles d'automne (1831), Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), Les Rayons et les ombres(1840), Les Chatiments(1853), Les Contemplations(1856), and La Légende des siècles (1859)

(3) Hernani (1830) and its break-through significance in French romanticism

(4) Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Hugo’s Humanism

(5) Les Travailleurs de la mer(1866,Toilers of the Sea), Quatre-vingt-treize (1874, Ninety-three).

2. Les Misérables (1862)

(1) The writing

(2) Three stages of Valjean

(3) Myriel and Christian Love

(4) Realistic approach and romantic color

VII. The 19th Century Literature: Part Two (15 periods)

Introduction

1. Rise and significance of Realism

2. Development of realism in European countries

(1)France

Stendhal

Balzac

Proper Mérimmé (1703-1870)

(2)England

Charles Dickens

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

Charlotte Bront? (1816-1855)

Emily Bront? (1818-1848)

Anne Bront? (1820-1849)

Elizabeth Gaskell（1810-1865）

Chartist Movement (1839 to 1859) and Chartist literature

(3)Russia

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814-1841)

Vissarion Grigor’evich Belinskii (1811-1848)

Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov (1812-1891)

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828–89)

Dostoyevsky or Dostoevsky (Feodor Mikhailovich, 1821-1881)

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837)

Stendhal

1. His life and writing

DE L'AMOUR (On Love),

his Racine and Shakespeare (1823-1825)

2. The Red and the Black (1830)

Writing characteristics:

A. psychological realism

B. Typical characters and typical environment

C. Monologue

The implication of the title of The Red and the Black:

Discussion questions:

1. Does it matter whether or not Stendhal's detailed, vivid, deeply and fully realized "history" is accurate? It is brilliantly presented, massively marshaled; characters and action ring powerfully true. But is it trustworthy?

2. Julien not only surrenders quite readily to the death penalty: he fairly embraces it. Is this, like so many of his actions throughout the book, yet more reckless romanticism? Or is it in some way different and deeper? Does the earlier part of the book fit with/lead up to this ending? Or, as has sometimes been suggested, is the ending either tacked on or, still worse, melodramatic?

3. Stendhal's France is portrayed–at every level–as an immensely materialistic society. In the final analysis, is P鑢e Sorel either more or less materialistic than the Marquis de La Mole? Would this social portrait have been

different if Stendhal had been a native American and was writing about the United States?

4. Mathilde de La Mole and Madame de Rênal are almost startlingly unlike, in virtually all respects. Yet both of them are passionately in love with Julien Sorel, a man who is completely unlike either of them or their expectations and dreams for themselves. Does Julien earn their love? Does he deserve it?

5. Julien Sorel hungers for epic success, and very nearly achieves it. We learn that he has had a grindingly difficult experience of lower bourgeois existence as well as the Church. He has had an almost equally chilling experience of both high bourgeois and aristocratic life. Where–if anywhere–could he possibly have found himself at home?

6. Julien Sorel's weaknesses are perhaps easier to see than his strengths, which tend to be simple and basic. Stendhal repeatedly notes that Julien does not have a first-rate mind. (Stendhal himself had exactly the same astonishing memory he gives to Julien.) In The Red and the Black, do simple, basic virtues succumb to or prevail over more complex and rigorously intellectual capabilities? In any case, Stendhal is emphatically not a utopian. But what image of a good, or perhaps merely a better, society finally emerges from his book?

7. The Church plays an enormous role in the entire novel, much of it decidedly negative. But does the large roster of Church officials, ranging from very high to very low, support the frequently heard claim that Stendhal was fiercely and fundamentally anticlerical?

8. Napoleon, too, figures hugely in the novel (though not as an active character), but this is not simply because he has had an enormous and continuing influence on Julien Sorel. Napoleon's entire career, and especially his long reign as ruler of France, is subjected to intense examination, and from many different perspectives. Again, it has often been said that Stendhal was more or less a Napoleon worshiper. Is this true?

9. Stendhal himself had been a soldier–he had endured, and survived, the Grand Army's devastating retreat from Moscow. Many of the novel's characters are or have been military men; military issues are frequently discussed and debated. In The Red and the Black, is there a clearly cohesive, or even a straightforward, view of war and either its advocates or its critics? Or is Stendhal here, too, attempting a broader and multivalenced portrayal than critics sometimes seem to recognize?

10. For roughly half a century, Balzac was virtually the only significant figure in French literature to express appreciation of and deep respect for Stendhal's fiction.

This is plainly not an accident. What makes these two novelists similar? Dissimilar? Why did the twentieth century see an enormous rise in Stendhal's literary reputation and influence, exactly as he himself had predicted?

11. Love, in all its many aspects, plainly fascinated Stendhal the novelist, as it clearly fascinated him as a man. Yet it has often been argued that, properly considered, Stendhal (born in 1783) was not in fact a Romantic. How does the evidence proffered in The Red and the Black support or contradict this argument?

12. There can be no doubt that Stendhal finds social relationships and the customs and rules that regulate them to be of the very highest interest. Is this either an essentially French or an essentially nineteenth-century preoccupation? Are there twentieth-century novelists, in France or elsewhere, who share Stendhal's profound interest in manners?

13. The Marquis de La Mole is about as fully and fairly drawn as any character in the history of fiction. We see him magnificent, we see him base. He can be open-minded and generous; he can be closed-minded, autocratic, and even niggardly. We see him love, and we see him hate. What does Stendhal intend us to understand from this remarkable portrait?

14. Stendhal's evocations of place ("descriptions" would surely be too meager and inadequate a word to describe them) are dazzling. He evokes with the same glowing three-dimensionality countryside, towns, cities, and entire countries. In The Red and the Black, place receives very nearly as much authorial attention as does character, even though it is fair to say that Stendhal is as sensitive and attuned to his characters as any fiction writer in history. Why does place receive such large attention? Is it deserved? Is it necessary? Is it perhaps excessive? Or is it exactly right for Stendhal's purposes?

15. Stendhal's style– the way he writes–is almost magically effective. The very rhythms and shapes of his sentences help him to evoke the fullest possible shades of meaning. What stylistic role is played by Stendhal's choice of individual words? What kinds of words does he favor? What kinds does he shun? Is he consistent in such matters? Who–if anyone–does his style seem to resemble, in any significant way(s)?

Balzac

1. His life and writing

Balzac is a French writer, one of the creators of realism in literature. Balzac's

huge production of novels and short stories are collected under the name La Comédie humaine, which originated from Dante′s The Divine Comedy. Before his breakthrough as an author, Balzac wrote without success several plays and novels under different pseudonyms. Despite prolific output, Balzac lived in debt.

"Balzac himself always speaks of his characters as of natural phenomena, and when he wants to describe his artistic intentions, he never speaks of his psychology, but always of his sociology, of his natural history of society and of the function of the individual in the life of the social body. He became, anyhow, the master of the social novel, if not as the 'doctor of the social sciences', as he described himself, yet as the founder of the new conception of man, according to which 'the individual exists only in relation to society'." (Arnold Hauser in Social History of Art, vol. 4, 1962)

"...Well, Balzac was politically a legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the irreparable decay of good society; his sympathies are with the class that is doomed to extinction. But for all that, his satire is never keener, his irony never more bitter, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles..." (Friedrich Engels in 1888)

2. Le Père Goriot (Old Goriot, 1835)

Dickens

1. His life and writing

The first stage (1837-1842)

Nicholas Nickleby 1838-1839.

Barnaby Rudge(1841)

The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841)

The second stage (1842-1850).

American Notes (1842)

Martin Chuzzlewit(1843-1844)

A Christmas Carol (1843)

Domby and Son(1846-1848)

The third stage (1850-1870).

David Copperfield (1849-1850)

Bleak House (1852-1853)

Hard Times (1854)

Little Dorit (1855)

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Great Expectation(1860-1861)

Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865)

2. A Tale of Two Cities(1859)

(1) The story of the book.

(2) Comments on the novel

(3) Dickens’ huamnistic at titude toward the Revolution

(4)Dickens’ ambivalence toward the Revolution

(5)Dramatic plots

(6)

3. Selected readings of Charles Dickens

VIII. The 19th Century Literature :Part Three (12 periods)

Introduction

1. Pluralism in literature

2. Rise of Naturalism

3. Rise of Aestheticism

4. Rise of Symbolism

5. Development of literature in Europe and America

Emile Zola(1840-1902)

1.His life and writing

2.His theory of Naturalism

3. His Rougon-Macquart Series and Naturalism

4. His Germinal (1885)

Thomas Hardy(1840-1928)

1. His life and writing

2. His Wessex Series

3. His beliefs

4. His poetry

5. Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

1. His life and writing

2. His religious and political beliefs

3. Anna Karenina

IX. The 20th Century Literature (12 periods)

1.Introduction

2. Realism writers in the 20th century

3. Modernism writers in the 20th century

Teacher: Prof. Chen Yihai