W.H. AUDEN - 5^C LINGUISTICO

English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. He grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his extraordinary intellect and wit. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 with the help of T.S. Eliot. Just before World War II broke out, he emigrated to the United States where he met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong lover. W.H. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety. Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. Read here.

THE 2030 AGENDA FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

 

The Global Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development seek to end poverty and hunger, realise the human rights of all, achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, and ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources.  The Global Goals are integrated and indivisible, and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental.  Read here.

https://sdpd.elionline.com/public/resources/agenda2030/Global-Goals-in-Action.pdf

https://www.iberdrola.com/sustainability/committed-sustainable-development-goals

https://www.globalgoals.org/goals/

https://slideplayer.com/slide/11361997/

https://www.eda.admin.ch/agenda2030/en/

https://www.agenda-2030.fr/en/agenda-2030/presentation

STUDYING VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. She was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Virginia Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. She represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal … With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.”  Read here.

JANE AUSTEN AND THE NOVEL OF MANNERS - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Jane Austen’s novels are unrivalled for their success in combining two sorts of excellence that all too seldom coexist. Meticulously conscious of her artistry, she is also constantly attentive to the realities of ordinary human existence. From the first, her works unite subtlety and common sense, good humour and acute moral judgment, charm and conciseness, deftly marshalled incidents and carefully rounded characters.

Jane Austen’s critics have spoken of her as a “limited” novelist, one who, writing in an age of great men and important events, portrays small towns and petty concerns, who knows (or reveals) nothing of masculine occupations and ideas, and who reduces the range of feminine thought and deed to matrimonial scheming and social pleasantry. Read here. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

SAINT LUCIA'S DAY, THE FESTIVAL OF LIGHT AND HOPE

 

St Lucia's Day is celebrated on the 13th of December, very close to the Winter Solstice. It is one of the most special days in the calendar and as integral to Scandinavia as glögg and herring. One of the biggest celebrations in December, aside from Christmas, it is an annual celebration born from stories that were told about how Christianity came to Sweden.

St Lucia was a young Christian girl who was martyred, killed for her faith, in 304. The most common story told about St Lucia is that she would secretly bring food to the persecuted Christians in Rome, who lived in hiding in the catacombs under the city. She would wear candles on her head so she had both her hands free to carry things. Lucy means “light” so this is a very appropriate name.

The 13th of December was also the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, in the old Julian Calendar and a pagan festival of lights in Sweden was turned into St. Lucia's Day.

On St Lucia’s Day, you can expect to see churches, town halls, schools, offices and restaurants become a twinkling sea of candlelight. The day is celebrated with a Lucia train procession in which a young girl elected to portray St Lucia leads the way wearing a white gown, with a red sash and crown of candles  which is made of Lingonberry branches, evergreen symbolising  new life in winter. She is trailed by Lucia handmaidens, star boys and gingerbread men  who all carry candles and sing carols.  The tradition dates back to the original story of Lucia, who delivered food to the persecuted Christians, leading her way with candlelight. A popular food eaten at St. Lucia's day are “Lussekatts”, S-shaped buns flavoured with saffron and dotted with raisins which are eaten for breakfast.

St Lucia's Day first became widely celebrated in Sweden in the late 1700s. St Lucia's Day is also celebrated in Denmark, Norway, Finland, Bosnia, and Croatia. In Denmark it is more a of a children's day and in some parts of Italy, children are told that St Lucy brings them presents. They leave out a sandwich for her and the donkey that helps carry the gifts.

https://www.goodcatholic.com/festival-of-light-celebrate-st-lucy-and-st-lucys-day/

JANE AUSTEN'S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN

 

The monster has always been the true subject of the Frankenstein story, and Kenneth Branagh’s retelling understands that. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” has all of the usual props of the Frankenstein films, brought to a fever pitch: the dark and stormy nights, the lightning bolts, the charnel houses of spare body parts, the laboratory where Victor Frankenstein stirs his steaming cauldron of life.  Read here. 

https://fsharetv.co/movie/mary-shelley's-frankenstein-episode-1-tt0109836

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and has the potential to bring significant advancements to various industries. As to education, AI holds great promise in transforming the learning experience for students. It is worth  exploring the potential benefits that AI can bring to students in the future, revolutionizing the way they learn, engage, and excel academically.  Read here.

Despite all the fanfare around AI, it is an undeniable fact that there is no subject in the world which is more human-centric than language teaching. We didn’t learn our native language from grammar books, exercises or even software programs – we learned it from people.  Read here.

AI offers benefits like personalized guidance, interactive engagement and progress tracking. Anyway, it raises concerns about diminished human interaction, potential impacts on learners' autonomy, and the evolving role of language teachers.  

Finally yet importantly, the ideal language learning experience often combines the strengths of both human teachers and AI technologies.  Read here.

MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN - 5^C LINGUISTICO

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2014/08/mary-shelley-s-frankenstein.html

https://www.iispandinipiazza.edu.it/mary-shelley.pdf

THE GOTHIC NOVEL

The first Gothic fiction appeared with works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796), which opposed 18th-century “rationalism” with scenes of mystery, horror, and wonder. Gothic was a designation derived from architecture, and it carried connotations of rough and primitive grandeur. 

The atmosphere of a Gothic novel was expected to be dark, tempestuous, ghostly, full of madness, outrage, superstition, and the spirit of revenge.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which maintains its original popularity and even notoriety, has in overplus the traditional Gothic ingredients, with its weird God-defying experiments and its monster. 

Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric devices continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals.

Gothic fiction asks to be considered as ingenious entertainment; the pity and terror are not aspects of a cathartic process, but transient emotions to be enjoyed for their own sake.

Read here.

https://research.dom.edu/gothicliterature/historyandkeyelements

https://www.invaluable.com/blog/elements-of-gothic-literature/

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE - 4^C LINGUISTICO

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-elizabethan-theatre.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-general-view-of-shakespeares-works.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-elizabethan-theatre-4c.html

https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/shakespeares-world/

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 5^C LINGUISTICO

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2018/12/william-wordsworth-5c-linguistico.html

THE ROMANTIC AGE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism

https://www.thoughtco.com/romanticism-definition-4777449

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-romantic-age.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2017/10/romanticism-5c-linguistico.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2016/10/english-romanticism.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2016/12/romanticism-in-literature-and-art.html

https://spunkynotes.com/characteristics-of-the-romantic-age/

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-romantic-age.html

SONNET 130

 

Here and here you can read a short commentary on this sonnet.