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

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.

SONNET 18

It is the best known and most well-loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most direct in language and intent.

The poet starts the praise of his dear friend without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of a perfect being. He is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the beginning of the third quatrain (line 9), the speaker states with a renewed assurance that “thy eternal summer shall not fade” and that his friend will preserve his beauty and even cheat Death and Time by becoming eternal. He achieves this through his sonnet. The final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long as there is breath in mankind, his lines too will live on, and ensure the immortality of the “fair youth”.

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

SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS

In the late 16^th century  it was fashionable for English gentleman authors to write sonnets, lyric poems composed of 14 lines. The sonnet is composed with a formal rhyme scheme, denoting different thoughts, moods, or emotions, sometimes summed up in the last lines of the poem.

The two main forms of the sonnet are the Petrarchan (Italian) and the Shakespearean (English).

Sonnets had been glorified by Petrarch in Italy more than 200 years before English poets even knew about them. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were among the first to introduce the sonnet into England. William Shakespeare's first and second years in London were spent writing in the Petrarchan style. The Petrarchan sonnet has an eight-line stanza, or octave, and six-line stanza, or sestet. The octave has two quatrains, rhyming abba, abba, but avoiding a couplet; the first quatrain gives the theme, and the second develops it. The sestet is built on two or three different rhymes; the first three lines reflect on the theme, and the last three lines bring the whole poem to an end.

The English sonnet  is divided into three quatrains, each rhymed differently, with an independently rhymed couplet at the end. Its rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Each quatrain takes a different appearance of the idea or develops a different image to express the theme. In his lifetime William Shakespeare composed 154 sonnets  which  were in this form and can be divided into three groups:

1. twenty-six sonnets written mostly to a young man, seventeen  of them urging marriage;

2. one hundred and one sonnets, also written to a young man (probably the same young nobleman as in the first twenty-six). These have a variety of themes, such as the beauty of the loved one; destruction of beauty; competition with a Rival Poet; despair about the absence of a loved one;  and reaction toward the young man's coldness;

3. the remaining twenty-seven sonnets are written mainly to a woman, popularly known as  "the Dark Lady." Seemingly Shakespeare had a love affair with this woman.

Most Elizabethan sonnets were written about joys and sorrows of love. Some of Shakespeare's sonnet arrangements are thought to be autobiographical. This is why scholars have tried to learn about William Shakespeare's life from his sonnets. But some of the critics view the sonnets as "purely literary exercises."  

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by John Keats when he was just 20 years old. Essentially, it is a poem about poetry itself, describing a reading experience so profound that an entire world seems to come to life. 

The poem talks specifically about a translation of Homer, the Classical Greek poet, by George Chapman, an Elizabethan poet whose translations were more concerned with the reader's experience of the text than loyalty to the original form.  Read here. 

VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO

 

Virginia Woolf was a well-known English writer in the 20th century. She was best-known for her novels, but she was also a writer of essays, biographies, letters, and diaries. Her writing fell into the Modernist Movement, which was a literary movement that took place between World War I and World War II.

https://www.iispandinipiazza.edu.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/virginia-woolf.pdf

WILFRED OWEN - DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Wilfred Owen immortalized mustard gas in his indictment against warfare, "Dulce et Decorum Est." Written in 1917 while at Craiglockart, and published posthumously in 1920, the poem details what is, perhaps, the most memorable written account of a mustard gas attack.

The Latin title is from Horace (1^st century BC)  and it means “it is sweet and proper”. This is followed by the phrase pro patria mori, or “to die for one’s country” in English.

The poem is known for its horrific imagery and condemnation of war. It combines two sonnets and is formed by 28 lines. Read here.

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2017/05/revising-wilfred-owen.html