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NHCE Book IV Reading and Writing Student’s Book
Unit 1
Preview
A person’s reputation is one of the most important things he possesses and it deserves protecting. The key to building a good name is to be consistent. You will not win the favor of the public or the people around you overnight. In fact, it will take many years of efforts before you establish your proper place in society. Once you have earned a good name, be careful to maintain it through civility, integrity and humility. ---1---
Section A
Pre-reading Activities
First Listening
Listen to a passage about Oscar Wilde and quotations from him.
Oscar Wilde was famous not only for his plays and offensive public behavior, but also for his cynical quotations. Here are two quotes and their meanings. The first quote is, “No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” It means that a person should be careful about the choices he or she makes in life, because some mistakes can never be corrected later. The second quote is, “Men become old, but they never become good.” It means that while men may get older, they never learn to be good. Wilde seemed to have very little faith in himself or his fellow man.
Second Listening
Listen to the passage again and answer the following questions according to what you hear. The last question is open-ended and may have different answers. 1. For what was Oscar Wilde famous?
Oscar Wilde was famous for his plays, offensive public behavior and his cynical quotations.
2. What does the quote “Men become old, but they never become good” mean? It means that while men gradually become older, they never learn how to be good.
3. Here is another quote from Wilde: “Life is never fair… And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.” How do you understand this quote?
● Background Information
1. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was an American writer whose plays are mainly about people with emotional problems and are set in the Southern State. As a playwright Williams began his career while studying at the University of Missouri and Washington University, St. Louis. The first critical triumph came in 1945 with The Glass Menagerie. The Glass Menagerie ran on Broadway for over a year and received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Williams’ next major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won the Pulitzer Prize, and established him as a major American dramatist. Williams also received the Pulitzer Prize for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), about the moral decay of a Southern family, and for The Night of the Iguana (1961). For more information about Williams, visit http://www.tennesseewilliams.net.
2. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous American novelists, short story writers and essayists, whose deceptively simple prose style has influenced a wide range of writers. Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature.
Hemingway’s first books, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and In Our Time (1924), were published in Paris. The Torrents of Spring appeared in 1926 and Hemingway’s first serious novel, The Sun Also Rises, in the same year. The novel deals with a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of the disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation. Hemingway wrote and rewrote the novel in various parts of Spain and France between 1924 and 1926. It became his first great success as a novelist. Although the novel’s language is simple, Hemingway used understatement and omission, which make the text multilayered and rich in allusions. ---1---
After the publication of Men Without Women (1927), Hemingway returned to the United States, settling in Key West, Florida. In Florida he wrote A Farewell to Arms, which was published in 1929. In 1937 Hemingway observed the Spanish Civil war firsthand. As many writers did, he supported the cause of the Loyalists. In Madrid he met Martha Gellhorn, a writer and war correspondent, who became his third wife in 1940. In For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Hemingway returned again in Spain. He dedicated the book to Gellhorn – Maria in the story was partly modeled after her. They divorced in 1945.
The Old Man and the Sea, published first in Life magazine in 1952, again restored his fame. The 27,000 word novella told a story of an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago, who finally catches a giant marlin after weeks of not catching anything. As he returns to the harbor, the sharks eat the fish lashed to his boat.
On July 2, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide with his favorite shotgun at his home. For more information about Hemingway, visit http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hemingwa.thm and http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/.
3. Robert Frost (1874-1963) was one of America’s leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal.
He unquestionably succeeded in realizing his life’s ambition: to write “a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.”
Visit the websites http://www.pro-net.co.uk/home/catalyst/RF/rfcover.html, http://www.ketzle.com/frost/ and http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/frost.htm for more information about Frost and his poems.
4. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a poet, playwright, and critic. Born in St. Louis, after Harvard he studied in Europe, in 1927 becoming a British citizen. He won the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of 20th-century poetry. Never compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction had been immense. For more information about Eliot, visit http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/eliot.htm.
5. Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French painter who was involved in starting Impressionism, best known for his picture of the countryside in which he was concerned to show the effects of light. ---2--- To learn more about Monet, visit http://www.academic.scranton.edu/student/KOSINSKIK2/Life.html and http://www.giverny.org/monet/biograph.
6. Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a famous French painter, and one of the founders and exponents of the Impressionist Movement. His works are characterized by an extraordinary richness of feelings, warmth of response to the world and the people in it. Renoir once said: “Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.” For more information about Renoir, visit http://www.renoir.org.yu/ and http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/renoir.
7. Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was a Spanish surrealist painter known for his strange life and habits. He painted his dreams and bizarre moods in a precise illusionistic fashion. Visit http://www.dalionline.com/dalilif2.htm or
http://www.dali-gallery.com to find more about Dali’s life and his works.
8. Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was a British filmmaker. He was essentially concerned with depicting the tenuous relations between people and objects and rendering the terror inherent in commonplace realities. Visit http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000033/ and http://www.imdb.com/Name?Hitchcock,+Alfred for more information.
9. Federico Fellini (1920-1993), Italian film director, began as an exponent of poetic Neorealism, and later became the cinema’s undisputed master of psychological Expressionism and surrealist fantasy. Visit the following websites to learn more about him: http://www.italian.vassar.edu/fellini/fellinihome.htm, http://www.inblackandwhite.com/FedericoFelliniv2.0 and http://www.imdb.com/Name?Fellini,+Federico.
10. Steven Spielberg (1946-) is perhaps Hollywood’s best-known director and one of the wealthiest filmmakers in the world, and also one of the most influential film personalities in the history of film. Spielberg has directed or produced many of the top-grossing films in Hollywood history, including E.T.: The Extra-Terrestria, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, etc. To get more information about Spielberg, please visit http://imdb.com/name/nm0000229/ and http://www.spielbergfilms.com.
11. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His opulent language and unique literary style have elevated his life to legendary status through his four autobiographical novels: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), From Death to Morning (1935), The Story of a Novel (1936). These books, along with many short stories published in magazines, complete the works that appeared during his lifetime. For more information about him, visit http://www.library.uncwil.edu/wolfe/wolfe.html, http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/sections/hs/wolfe/wolfe.htm and www.wolfememorial.com.
12. Look Homeward, Angel is Thomas Wolfe’s first novel. Published in 1929, it is slightly autobiographical, and Wolfe uses the main character, Eugene Gant, as a stand-in for himself. ---3---
It shows his maturing from birth to the age of 18 in the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, which many believe to be a not-so-subtle mirror of his hometown, Asheville, North Carolina. Many of the characters of Look Homeward, Angel were also strongly based on real people from Asheville, and were often not portrayed in a pleasing manner. This resulted in a certain estrangement between Wolfe and his hometown, and it is speculated that this formed some of the basis for his later work You Can’t Go Home Again.
13. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer. He is universally recognized as one of the greatest composers of the Western European music tradition. Beethoven’s works crowned the classical period and also effectively initiated the romantic area in music. His astonishing Third Symphony (1803) was the thunderclap that announced the romantic century, and it embodies the titanic but rigorously controlled energy that was the hallmark of his style. He began to lose his hearing from c. 1795; by c. 1819 he was totally deaf. For his last 15 years he was unrivaled as the world’s most famous composer. In musical form he was a considerable innovator, widening the scope of sonata, symphony, concerto, and string quartet. His greatest achievement was to raise instrumental music, hitherto considered inferior to vocal, to the highest plane of art. The websites http://www.lucare.com/immortal/ and http://www.madaboutbeethoben.com provide more information about him and his works.
14. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer. Known for his wit and flamboyance, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years of hard labor after being convicted of the homosexual offences. The following websites contain the information about Oscar Wilde’s biography, career highlights, photos and quotes: http://www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/,
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/wildeov.html and http://www.ucc.ie/celt/wilde.html.
15. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) was a Swiss educational reformer. Between 1805 and 1825 he directed the Yverdon Institute, which drew pupils and educators from all over Europe. His teaching method emphasized group rather than individual recitation and focused on such participatory activities as drawing, writing, singing, physical exercise, model making, collecting, mapmaking, and field trips. Among his ideas, considered radically innovative at the time, were making allowances for individual differences, grouping students by ability rather than age, and encouraging formal teacher training. The following websites have more information about Pestalozzi: http://www.heinrich-pestalozzi.de/en/zurbiographie/kurzbiographie and http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/pestaloe.PDF. ---4---