Class Notes

1. Textbook: The Norton Introduction to Literature

2. Orientation: What is literature?

(1). genre: a type of literature works having paticular formal or textual features and conventions, including fiction, poetry and drama.

(2). epic: An epic is traditionally a genre of poetry, known as epic poetry. However, in modern terms, epic is extended to art forms, such as epic theatre, films, music, novels, plays, television series, and video games, where in the story has a theme of grandeur and heroism, just as in epic poetry.

(3). Freytag's Pyramid

3. Movie and Poem

(1). The Reader: Youtube

(2). "Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?" (Sonnet 18)

       Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

       Thou art more lovely and more temporate:

       Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

       And summer's lease hath all too short  a date;

       Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

       And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

       And every fair from fair sometime declines,

       By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.

       But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

       Nor lose possession of tha fair thou ow'st;

       Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

       When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

          So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

          So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.