精简英国文学教案Week9_英国文学下教案

精简英国文学教案Week9由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便，猜你可能喜欢“英国文学下教案”。

Week9 目的：了解雪莱的生平和代表作

Percy Byhe Shelley was born in 1792, into a wealthy Suex family which eventually attained minor noble rank--the poet's grandfather, a wealthy busineman, received a baronetcy in 1806.Timothy Shelley, the poet's father, was a member of Parliament and a country gentleman.The young Shelley entered Eton, a prestigious school for boys, at the age of twelve.While he was there, he discovered the works of a philosopher named William Godwin, which he consumed paionately and in which he became a fervent believer;the young man wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and devoted his considerable paion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightne of his beliefs.Entering Oxford in 1810, Shelley was expelled the following spring for his part in authoring a pamphlet entitled The Neceity of Atheism--atheism being an outrageous idea in religiously conservative nineteenth-century England.At the age of nineteen, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern keeper, whom he married despite his inherent dislike for the tavern.Not long after, he made the personal acquaintance of William Godwin in London, and promptly fell in love with Godwin's daughter Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he was eventually able to marry, and who is now remembered primarily as the author of Frankenstein.In 1816, the Shelleys traveled to Switzerland to meet Lord Byron, the most famous, celebrated, and controversial poet of the era;the two men became close friends.After a time, they formed a circle of English expatriates in Pisa, traveling throughout Italy;during this time Shelley wrote most of his finest lyric poetry, including the immortal “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark.” In 1822, Shelley drowned while sailing in a storm off the Italian coast.He was not yet thirty years old.Shelley died when he was twenty-nine, Byron when he was thirty-six, and Keats when he was only twenty-six years old.To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticism meant that the movement was always aociated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, and Shelley died young(and never had the opportunity to sink into conservatism and complacency as Wordsworth did), they have attained iconic status as the representative tragic Romantic artists.Shelley's life and his poetry certainly support such an understanding, but it is important not to indulge in stereotypes to the extent that they obscure a poet's individual character.Shelley's joy, his magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics;his expreion of those feelings makes him one of the early nineteenth century's most significant writers in English.1．“Ozymandias” Summary

The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country.Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a maive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand.The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command” on the statue's face indicate that the sculptor understood well the paions of the statue's subject, a man who sneered with contempt for those weaker than himself, yet fed his people because of something in his heart(“The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”).On the pedestal of the statue appear the words: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and level sands,” which stretch out around it, far away.Form : It is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter.The rhyme scheme is ABABACDCEDEFEF.Commentary This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley's most famous and most anthologized poem.Eentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, paionate face and monomaniacal inscription(“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”).The once-great king's proud boast has been ironically disproved;Ozymandias's works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history.The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man's hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the paage of time.Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley's most outstanding political sonnet.But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power--the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations.It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words;as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.2．Ode to the west wind Summary

The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a “destroyer and preserver,” hear him.The speaker calls the wind the “dirge / Of the dying year,” and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him.The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from “his summer dreams,” and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the “saple foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him.The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, “the comrade” of the wind's “wandering over heaven,” then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers.He pleads with the wind to lift him “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”--for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable and proud--he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth.The speaker asks the wind to “make me thy lyre,” to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts acro the universe, “like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.” He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the “trumpet of a prophecy.” Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words to have, the speaker asks: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

Form Each of the 5 parts of “Ode to the West Wind” contains five stanzas--four three-line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter.The rhyme scheme in each part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme scheme employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy.Thus each of the 5 parts of “Ode to the West Wind” follows this scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.Commentary Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both “destroyer and preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a metaphor for his own art, the expreive capacity that drives “dead thoughts” like “withered leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”--that is, to quicken the coming of the spring.Here the spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousne, imagination, liberty, or morality--all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the human mind.Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees.The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience.In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to expre his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expreion.Aignments: How does Shelley's treatment of nature differ from that of the earlier Romantic poets? What connections does he make between nature and art, and how does he illustrate those connections?

Whereas older Romantic poets looked at nature as a realm of communion with pure existence and with a truth preceding human experience, the later Romantics looked at nature primarily as a realm of overwhelming beauty and aesthetic pleasure.While Wordsworth and Coleridge often write about nature in itself, Shelley tends to invoke nature as a sort of supreme metaphor for beauty, creativity, and expreion.This means that most of Shelley's poems about art rely on metaphors of nature as their means of expreion: the West Wind in “Ode to the West Wind” becomes a symbol of the poetic faculty spreading Shelley's words like leaves among mankind, and the skylark in “To a Skylark” becomes a symbol of the purest, most joyful, and most inspired creative impulse.The skylark is not a bird, it is a “poet hidden.”