SUMMER HOMEWORK - 2^C LINGUISTICO

Here you can read and download the simplified version of the book.

DANIEL DEFOE'S ROBINSON CRUSOE

From Shakespeare’s The Tempest  to the film  Cast Away,  starring Tom Hanks, and  the TV series Lost, life on a desert island has always served as an inspiration for writers.

Numerous stories of real life stranded sailors provided inspiration for the most famous castaway of them all, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe was a bestseller in 1719, the year it was published.  Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character (whose real name is Robinson Kreutznaer),  a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. 

The story was based on the real-life experiences of  Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra", now part of Chile, which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.

Defoe’s focus on the conditions of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made him a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. He rejected the ornate style associated with the upper classes  and  used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel.

With Robinson Crusoe’s theme of solitary human existence, Defoe paved the way for the central modern theme of alienation and isolation.

Here  you can download a PDF Presentation to widen your knowledge of the first real novel in English literature! 

ANOTHER SCHOOL YEAR IS DONE!

JUNE

"The summer morn is bright and fresh,
the birds are darting by
As if they loved to breast the breeze 

that sweeps the cool clear sky."

William C. Bryant

THE MODERN NOVEL

Here you can find a PDF presentation of the Modern novel.

A FATHER'S ADVICE TO HIS SON

William Shakespeare’s timeless words speak across generations and cultures. In Hamlet, I, iii, Polonius  gives some paternal advice to his son Laertes before he leaves for France.  All the advice is good, but the best comes at the end,  “To thine own self be true”  - be a man of honor and integrity, live life in a way that consent to you to look at yourself in the mirror and not be ashamed. Read here and here.

FUNERAL BLUES

W. H. Auden’s poem "Stop all the clocks" – also sometimes known as "Funeral Blues" – is a poem so famous and universally understood that perhaps it is unnecessary to offer much in the way of textual analysis. Continue reading here.

https://soundcloud.com/hiddlestonersargentina/funeral-blues-de-w-h-auden-tom

http://www.shadowofiris.com/wh-auden-funeral-blues-poem/

REFUGEE BLUES

REVISING WILFRED OWEN

Here you can find my previous post on Wilfred Owen, an English poet whose work was characterised by his anger at the cruelty and waste of war, which he experienced during service on the Western Front.

THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a

   saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.

He was married and added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his

   generation.

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their

   education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Here and here you can find a detailed analysis of this poem by W.H.Auden.

THE JAZZ AGE

The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s, ending with the Great Depression, in which jazz music and dance styles became popular, mainly in the United States, but also in Britain, France and elsewhere. Jazz originated in New Orleans as a fusion of African and European music and played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on pop culture continued long afterwards. Read here.

In the 1920s America – known as the Jazz Age, the Golden Twenties or the Roaring Twenties – everybody seemed to have money.  Read here.

HAPPY EUROPE DAY!

LONDON AT A GLANCE - 1^C LINGUISTICO

MODERNISM

The Modernist Period in English literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the 20th century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world.

Continue reading here. 

Click here to read about Modernism.

MAY

"Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves."

John Keats