Thursday 31 December 2020
Sunday 27 December 2020
GIGI PROIETTI AND EDMUND KEAN
Last night, December 26th, at 10.50 pm, Rai1 broadcast “Gigi Proietti in Edmund Kean” from the Silvano Toti Globe Theatre in Rome. The , written by Raymund Fitzsimons and performed by the British actor Ben Kingsley, was played in 2016 and 2017 by the actor who passed away on his 80th birthday. Edmund Kean was one of the greatest actors of the English tradition. His life was characterized by numerous intemperances and scandals which at the time, in the first half of the 19th century, undermined his career and reputation.
Saturday 26 December 2020
Friday 25 December 2020
THE QUEEN'S CHRISTMAS SPEECH
The
Queen told the nation of the need for "life to go on" in her
Christmas Day broadcast to millions. In a touching message, after such a
terrible year, Her Majesty spoke of the importance of getting through the
Coronavirus pandemic. She described how she had been “inspired” by
the tens of thousands of Brits who had volunteered to help during the
crisis. And she paid tribute to the NHS staff who risked their own lives
to care for Covid-19 victims saying we all owed them a “debt of
gratitude.” Read here.
Thursday 24 December 2020
Tuesday 22 December 2020
Wednesday 16 December 2020
CELEBRATING THE BIRTH OF JANE AUSTEN
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, the seventh
of eight children of a clergyman in a country village in Hampshire, England. Read here.
Some beautiful articles about our beloved novelist can be read here and here.
"We read Jane Austen because she seems to know us better than we know ourselves, and she seems to know us so intimately for the simple reason that she helped determine who we are both as readers and as human beings." Harold Bloom
Sunday 13 December 2020
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—in
opposition to the Italianate style of neoclassical building more appropriate to
the Augustan Age—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 machinery
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, somewhat
perversely, enjoyed for their own sake.
Read here.
Friday 11 December 2020
GLOBAL ENGLISH - 3^C LINGUISTICO
More people speak Spanish than English as their first language. Nearly three times as many speak Mandarin Chinese in their family homes. Yet few would dispute that English is the leading world language. Read here.
Wednesday 9 December 2020
LORD BYRON, MANFRED AND THE BYRONIC HERO
"We are all the fools of time and terror: Days steal on us and steal from us; yet we live, loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”
Manfred is a dramatic poem written in 1816–1817 by Lord Byron. It contains supernatural elements, in keeping with the popularity of the ghost story in England at the time. It is a typical example of a Romantic closet drama. It was adapted musically by Robert Schumann and later by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed by the poem's depiction of a super-human being, and wrote some music for it.
To say that Manfred is a Byronic hero in the Promethean mold is not new: not only the text of Manfred, but also Byron himself, as well as literary critics from his time until now, suggest it. Read here.
Here you can find a detailed analysis of the figure of the Byronic hero.
Tuesday 8 December 2020
LORD BYRON - 5^C LINGUISTICO
Lord Byron was the Romantic poet whose poetry and
personality captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist”
of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18)
in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the
satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24). Read here.
He created the concept of the "Byronic hero" - a rebellious, moody, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his
past.
Lord Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting
has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by
his contemporaries.
Monday 7 December 2020
THE BYRONIC HERO
The character type of the Byronic
hero was first developed by the famous 19th-century English Romantic
poet Lord Byron. Most literary scholars and historians consider the
first literary Byronic hero to be Byron's Childe Harold, the protagonist of
Byron's epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. However, many
literary scholars and historians also point to Lord Byron himself as the first
truly Byronic hero, for he exemplified throughout his life the characteristics
of the sort of literary hero he would make famous in his writing.
A Byronic hero can be conceptualized
as an extreme variation of the Romantic hero archetype. Traditional
Romantic heroes tend to be defined by their rejection or questioning of
standard social conventions and norms of behaviour, their alienation from
larger society, their focus on the self as the centre of existence, and their
ability to inspire others to commit acts of good and kindness. Romantic heroes
are not idealized heroes, but imperfect and often flawed individuals who often
behave in a heroic manner.
According to many literary critics
and biographers, Lord Byron developed the archetype of the Byronic hero in
response to his boredom with traditional and Romantic heroic literary
characters. According to critics and biographers, he wanted to introduce a
heroic archetype that would be not only more appealing to readers but also more
psychologically realistic.
The archetype of the Byronic hero is
similar in many respects to the figure of the traditional Romantic hero. Both
Romantic and Byronic heroes tend to rebel against conventional modes of behaviour
and thought and possess personalities that are not traditionally heroic.
However, Byronic heroes usually have a greater degree of psychological and
emotional complexity than traditional Romantic heroes.
Byronic heroes are marked not only by
their outright rejection of traditional heroic virtues and values but also
their remarkable intelligence and cunning, strong feelings of affection and
hatred, impulsiveness, strong sensual desires, moodiness, cynicism, dark humour,
and morbid sensibilities.
Byronic heroes also tend to only seem
loyal to themselves and their core beliefs and values. While they often act on behalf
of greater goods, they will rarely acknowledge doing so.
Byronic heroes tend to be intelligent and
arrogant. Read more here.
Tuesday 1 December 2020
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
On
1 December 1860 Charles Dickens's Great Expectations began serialization in the December 1
issue of "All the Year Round."
One of Charles Dickens’s most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows
the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an
anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman. From the
young Pip’s first terrifying encounter with the
convict Magwitch in the gloom of a graveyard to the splendidly morbid set
pieces in Miss Havisham’s mansion to the magnificently realized boat chase down
the Thames, the novel is filled with the transcendent excitement that Charles Dickens
could so abundantly provide. Written in 1860, at the height of his maturity, it
also reveals the novelist’s bittersweet understanding of the extent to which
our deepest moral dilemmas are born of our own obsessions and illusions.
DECEMBER
“May and October, the best-smelling months? I’ll make a case for December: evergreen, frost, wood smoke, cinnamon.” Lisa Kleypas
Monday 30 November 2020
WILLIAM BLAKE'S ARTISTIC TALENT AND PROFOUND POETRY
Sunday 29 November 2020
GIACOMO LEOPARDI - 5^C LINGUISTICO
Leopardi is considered the greatest Italian poet of the 19th century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world, as well as one of the most renowned Romantics; his constant reflection on existence and on the human condition - of sensuous and materialist inspiration - has also earned him a reputation as a deep philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century, but generally compared to his older contemporary, Alessandro Manzoni, despite expressing completely opposite positions. Although he lived in a secluded town in the conservative Papal States, he came into contact with the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and through his own literary evolution, created a outstanding poetic work, related to the Romantic era. Read here.
His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are an amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, his poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a “criticism of life.”
Leopardi was a contemporary of the great English
Romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats and Byron who lived in Italy, though he never had the
chance to meet them. Read here.
Friday 27 November 2020
Thursday 26 November 2020
Monday 23 November 2020
Thursday 19 November 2020
SHAKESPEARE'S DICTIONARY
https://www.bellenglish.com/blog/shakespeares-influence-language-quiz/
https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-english-language-owes-great-debt-to.html
http://www.projectink.com.sg/shakespeares-influence-in-our-everyday-speech/
https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/words-shakespeare-invented/
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html
Saturday 14 November 2020
Tuesday 10 November 2020
WHAT IS ETYMOLOGY?
Sunday 8 November 2020
JOE BIDEN ELECTED 46TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump to become the 46th president of the United States, positioning himself to lead a nation gripped by a historic pandemic and a confluence of economic and social turmoil.
Kamala Harris made history as the first Black woman to become vice president, an achievement that comes as the U.S. faces a reckoning on racial justice. The California senator, who is also the first person of South Asian descent elected to the vice presidency, will become the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in government, four years after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Read here.
Sunday 1 November 2020
OGNISSANTI HOLIDAY ON 1ST NOVEMBER
1st November is a national holiday in Italy known as la Festa di Ognissanti or Tutti i Santi. The date is the day of a Catholic feast and is celebrated as All Saints Day in Italy. Though the origins of the holiday are religious, All Saints Day is also a public holiday in Italy meaning that government offices, schools, and many private businesses close.
Read here.
NOVEMBER
"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear."
William Cullen Bryant
Saturday 31 October 2020
SEAN CONNERY DIES AGED 90
The Oscar-winning Scottish actor Sean Connery was best known for his portrayal of James Bond, being the first to bring the role to the big screen and appearing in seven of the spy thrillers. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000. Read here.
Wednesday 21 October 2020
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period. Read here.
Here you can download a PDF
presentation.
Saturday 3 October 2020
NATURE IS EVERYWHERE
How do you define "nature?" If we define it as that which is untouched by humans, then we won't have any left, says environmental writer Emma Marris. She urges us to consider a new definition of nature - one that includes not only pristine (=unspoiled) wilderness, but also the untended patches of plants growing in urban spaces - and encourages us to bring our children out to touch and tinker (=play) with it, so that one day they might love and protect it. Here you can listen to her TED Talk.
Thursday 1 October 2020
TONI MORRISON
The author Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and best known for her nuanced discussion of race in America. Read here.
Wednesday 30 September 2020
Sunday 27 September 2020
Tuesday 15 September 2020
IF SHAKESPEARE HAD HAD A SISTER ...
Virginia Woolf often questioned why men had always had
power, influence, wealth, and reputation, while women had nothing but children.
She believed that there would be female Shakespeare in the future only if women
found the first two keys to freedom: independent incomes (=money) and “rooms of their
own” (=privacy), a metaphor for women having access to their own private space. When A Room of One's Own was first published in 1929, it was considered
revolutionary. Most people considered
women less intelligent than men, they did not think about women's
freedom and certainly no one was writing about it, let alone as convincingly as
Virginia Woolf. Her essay became a classic in the movement toward equality.
Even today it is hardly dated, for the reason that there are still some men
(and women) who suppose that men are “the superior sex”.
If women were equal to men, people asked, why had none
of them produced great literature like Shakespeare's? Virginia Woolf
replied that this lack of achievement had nothing to with innate ability and
everything to do with women's lack of opportunity.
To illustrate
this, Virginia Woolf imagined a Judith Shakespeare,
William's sister, going to London to make her fortune as a playwright.
Unfortunately, she was regarded as a sex object, so rather than being taken
seriously as a writer, she was lied to and seduced, she became pregnant and
eventually committed suicide.
Monday 14 September 2020
Sunday 6 September 2020
IMPROVING YOUR ENGLISH
On www.test-english.com you will find lots of free practice tests and materials to help you improve your English skills and be more prepared for your English exams.
Here you can read a very interesting blog post!
Here you can read a very interesting blog post!
Tuesday 1 September 2020
SEPTEMBER
"For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure."
Monday 31 August 2020
REMEMBERING DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
On this day 23 years ago, news of Princess
Diana's death in a car crash in Paris sparked a global outpouring of
grief. The Princess
of Wales, 36, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul died after the
Mercedes they were travelling in struck a concrete pillar in the Pont de l'Alma
tunnel in Paris around 12:30am on 31 August 1997. Read here.
Sunday 23 August 2020
BARACK OBAMA GIVES BITING CRITIQUE OF TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY
Barack Obama criticized President Trump in his comments at the Democratic National Convention, saying Mr. Trump had shown “no interest” in using the office to help anyone but “himself and his friends.” He compared Mr. Trump's use of the White House to “a reality show”.
Saturday 1 August 2020
Saturday 25 July 2020
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ'S SPEECH ABOUT MISOGYNY
Following sexist harassment from Republican Ted Yoho, referred to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest
Democrat in Congress gave a powerful speech in the House of Representatives to denounce the abuse faced by women in Congress
and across the nation. Read here and here.
She said: “You can take photos and project an image to the world of
being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of
impunity. It happens every day in this country”.
Friday 24 July 2020
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published in 1886. The
names of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the two alter egos of the main
character, have become shorthand for the exhibition of wildly contradictory
behaviour, especially between private and public selves.
Sunday 19 July 2020
THE OUTLANDER SERIES
Outlander is a Starz Original Series based on the Outlander series of books by Diana Gabaldon.
It follows the story of Claire Randall, a married combat nurse from 1945 who is mysteriously swept back in time to 1743, where she is immediately thrown into an unknown world where her life is threatened. After she demonstrates her medical abilities, rebel Scottish Highlanders keep her as a healer for the clan. When she is forced to marry Jamie, a chivalrous and romantic young Scottish warrior, a passionate affair is ignited that tears Claire's heart between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives. The Outlander series spins the genres of romance, science fiction, history, and adventure into one epic tale.
Here’s eight reasons as to why you need to watch this show, or perhaps even rewatch it for the second or third time!
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