● Think in English

原文章: Think in English! 現在開始培養英文思考術，用英文學英文！

【TED】6個月掌握流利的外語學習方法 (How to learn any language in six months)

* 必須避免的壞習慣：別用中文邏輯學英文、別習慣逐字翻譯、注重「語意」不是「單字」

* 需要做的事：英英字典、少看中文字幕、試著了解文化

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● Gothic Fiction

Gothic fiction, which is largely dominated by the subgenre of Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines fiction, horror and Romanticism. A subgenre of fiction conventionally featuring plots that involve secrets, mystery, and the supernatural (or the seemingly supernatural) and large, gloomy, and usually antiquated (especially medieval) houses as settings. Examples include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher."

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● Elegy 悼亡詩/輓歌

In English literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.

(1) since the Renaissance, usually a formal lament on the death of a particular person, but focusing mainly on the speaker’s efforts to come to terms with his or her grief; (2) more broadly, any lyric in sorrowful mood that takes death as its primary subject. An example is W. H. Auden’s "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."

p.s. "Stop All the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone" is also an elegy.

Funeral Blues - Four Weddings and a Funeral

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-- note: lament (v.) to show publicly that you feel sad or disappointed about something

                             e.g., Some older people lament the loss of close local communities.

-- note: lamen (n.) a song, poem, piece of music etc in which sadness is expressed

                             about a death or loss

                             e.g., a young mother’s lament for the death of her son

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● "Leda and the Swan"

www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172064

Poet: William Butler Yeats

School/Period: Modern

Subjects: Mythology & Folklore

p.s. Leda was admired by Zeus, who seduced her in the guise of a swan. As a swan, Zeus fell into her arms for protection from a pursuing eagle. Their consummation, on the same night as Leda lay with her husband Tyndareus, resulted in two eggs from which hatched Helen (later known as the beautiful "Helen of Troy"), Clytemnestra, and Castor and Pollux.

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Metamorphoses, by Ovid

The Metamorphosis, by Kafka

p.s. morph: shape, form (e.g., morphology, metamorphosis, amorphous etc.)

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● Danaë (Titian series)

The Danaë (sometimes known as Danaë and the Shower of Gold) series comprises at least five oil-on-canvas paintings by the Venetian master Titian, completed between 1553 and 1556. The works are based on the mythological princess Danaë. According to Ovid she was isolated in a bronze dungeon following a prophecy that her firstborn would eventually kill her father. Although aware of the consequences, Danaë was seduced and became pregnant by Zeus (in Roman mythology Jupiter), who, inflamed by lust, descended from Mount Olympus to entice her as a shower of gold.

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● 西方文學發展

● Doubting Thomas

A doubting Thomas is a skeptic who refuses to believe without direct personal experience—a reference to the Apostle Thomas, who refused to believe that the resurrected Jesus had appeared to the ten other apostles, until he could see and feel the wounds received by Jesus on the cross.

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● Io (mythology)

Io was, in Greek mythology, a priestess of Hera in Argos, a mortal who was seduced by Zeus, who changed her into a heifer to escape detection from his jealous wife, Hera.

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● Europa (mythology)

In Greek mythology Europa was a Phoenician woman of high lineage, for whom the continent Europe was named. The story of her abduction by Zeus in the form of a white bull was a Cretan story; as Kerényi points out "most of the love-stories concerning Zeus originated from more ancient tales describing his marriages with goddesses. This can especially be said of the story of Europa".

Europa's earliest literary reference is in the Iliad, which is commonly dated to the 8th century B.C. Another early reference to her is in a fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, discovered at Oxyrhynchus. The earliest vase-painting securely identifiable as Europa, dates from mid-7th century B.C.

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● Poetry

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172053

by William Butler Yeats

lonely

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"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174790

by William Wordsworth 

solitude

p.s. gay: happy

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● Modernism

Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped Modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief.

rebuilt the order within the artistic innovation

anarchy

For example:

[in Just-] by e.e.cummings

[l(a] by e.e.cummings

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● Vocabulary

hop-scotch 跳格子