● Greek Literature

Ancient Greek literature refers to literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until roughly the rise of the Byzantine Empire.

Epic poetry: An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.

Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey), Virgil (the Aeneid), Dante (the Divine Comedy)

Ancient Greek drama: The Theatre Of Ancient Greece, Or Ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece 700 BC. The city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and military power during this period, was its centre, where it was institutionalised as part of a festival called the Dionysia, which honoured the god Dionysus.

Tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), comedy (Aristophanes), and satyr play (Euripides' Cyclops)

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● Vocabulary

assassin (n.) /əˈsæsɪn/

someone who kills a famous or important person, especially for political reasons, or someone who is paid to kill a particular person

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vir-/ver-: truth, almost true

e.g., veritas 真理 (Havard University's motto)

e.g., 

e.g., verify (v.) /ˈverɪfaɪ/ to check or to prove that something is true or correct

e.g., virtual (adj.) /ˈvɜː(r)tʃʊəl/ almost the same as the thing that is mentioned [for example, virtual reality]

e.g., verisimilitude (n.) /ˌverɪsɪˈmɪlɪtjuːd/ the appearance of being real 逼真；擬真

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pamper (v.) \ˈpam-pər\

to treat (someone or something) very well

to give (someone or something) a lot of attention and care

e.g., They really pamper their guests at that hotel.

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-ium: a place for doing something

e.g., aquarium (n.) a building people can visit to see water animals and plants

e.g., auditorium (n.) a large room or building where people gather to watch a performance, hear a speech, etc.

e.g., museum (n.) a building in which interesting and valuable things (such as paintings and sculptures or scientific or historical objects) are collected and shown to the public

e.g., colosseum (n.) an outdoor arena built in Rome in the first century A.D.

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-tude: indicating state or condition

e.g., attitude (n.) manner, disposition, feeling, position, etc., with regard to a person or thing; tendency or orientation, especially of the mind

You've got attitude problem. 你態度有問題

e.g., altitude (n.) the height of anything above a given planetary reference plane, especially above sea level on earth

e.g., aptitude (n.) capability; ability; innate or acquired capacity for something; talent

She has a special aptitude for mathematics.

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I'm virtually impaires. 我累死了

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● Three Unities

The classical unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics. In their neoclassical form they are as follows:

1. unity of action: a play should have one action that it follows, with minimal subplots.
2. unity of time: the action in a play should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours.
3. unity of place: a play should exist in a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities

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● Irony

www.litlovers.com/litcourse-course8-lecture?start=1

* Irony is all over the place! Loosely defined, it's the opposite of what is expected or intended. Unintended consequences, Deviation from a pattern, Deceptive appearances

* Irony is part of life. Things rarely go the way we intend them to, expect them to, or hope they will— which is why authors use irony. Irony mimics life.

 Authors use irony to . . .

* Authors have been using literary irony for thousands of years. It comes in 4 distinct flavors: 

Verbal irony—what's said is not what's meant. Sarcasm is a type of verbal irony.

* Verbal Irony

Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)—in his famous oration to the crowd, Marc Anthony calls Brutus "an honorable man," knowing that Brutus was one of Caesar's assassins.
"Carnal Knowledge" (a story by T.C. Boyle)—a character reads a "comfortingly apocalyptic" book about the planet's demise, comforting because he feels virtuous reading it and doing so relieves him of taking action. A nicely ironic phrase.

* Situational Irony

"The Gift of the Magi" (O'Henry)—a young wife cuts and sells her hair to buy her husband a watch chain. The husband sells the watch to buy her a comb.
Pride and Prejudice (Austen)—Elizabeth, charmed by Wickham, believes he is the victim and Mr. Darcy the villain. The opposite is true.
"The Story of an Hour" (Chopin)—Mrs. Mallard dies of sorrow when her supposedly dead husband walks through the door.

* Dramatic Irony

Othello (Shakespeare)—we know full well that Iago is plotting against Othello, yet Othello remains unaware of Iago's duplicity.
A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)—Nora's husband treats her as a child; all the while she has been protecting him from scandal. We know...but Torval is clueless.
The Good Soldier (Ford Maddox Ford)—the book's narrator is oblivious to his wife's betrayal, yet the clues he provides readers enable us to see quite clearly her dishonesty.

* Cosmic Irony

Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)—Oedipus's fate, to kill his father and marry his mother, is the inescapable working out of a curse.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)—Tess suffers as part of some larger scheme of fate over which she has no control.
The Trial (Franz Kafka)—the protagonist finds himself on trial for unknown reasons and held accountable by powerful, unknowable forces.

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● Realism

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. Literary realism, in contrast to idealism, attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of using a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.  Subsequent related developments in the arts are naturalism, social realism, and in the 1930s, socialist realism.

Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality", realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism as a movement in literature was based on "objective reality", and focused on showing everyday, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle or lower class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization.

Gustave Flaubert's (1821–1880) acclaimed novels Madame Bovary (1857), which reveals the tragic consequences of romanticism on the wife of a provincial doctor, and Sentimental Education (1869) represent perhaps the highest stages in the development of French realism. 

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● Author

Raymond Carver

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s.

Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. Carver's first published story, "The Furious Seasons", appeared in 1961. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and can now be found in the recent collections, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.

Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described himself as "inclined toward brevity and intensity" and "hooked on writing short stories".

-- Cathedral (a short story written by American writer and poet Raymond Carver.)

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Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.

Despite not publishing her first novel until she was forty, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer. In addition to her fifteen novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.

-- Roman Fever (a short story by American writer Edith Wharton)

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● Fate

In Oedipus the King, the Chorus may believe that people learn through suffering.

www.sparknotes.com/drama/oedipus/canalysis.html

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● Chapel, Church, Cathedral

Church, chapel, and cathedral are the trio of terms most commonly used to denote a religious space, but how are they different?

chapel: a very broad term, and can apply to anything from a section of a much larger church or cathedral, to small buildings

church: a word that covers pretty much everything given above... generally any building set aside "in perpetuity for the public exercise of Divine worship."

cathedral: the chief church of a diocese in which the bishop has his throne

Elvis Presley - Crying In The Chapel

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kLA20ZTWeg