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十四、迟来的关注马特•米勒在美国，许多人并不了解日本帝国军队在侵略中国时所犯下的滔天罪行。
在日本，许多人甚至试图否认南京大屠杀。
艾里斯•张写的《南京大屠杀》，就是要提醒人们牢记六十年前犯下的罪行。
下面这篇文章是对这本书的评论。
六十年前，日本帝国军队发动的南京大屠杀，在人类所犯下的集体罪行记录中位置醒目。
在不到两个月的时间里，日军杀害了15-30万手无寸铁的中国公民，强奸折磨了10多万中国妇女。
这是一次野蛮的集体暴行，至今许多日本人不能解释，或根本不承认曾经发生过这样的事情。
在美国，有一系列会议安排在南京大屠杀周年日召开-- 自12月13日起持续近六周的时间-- 试图重新激起对这一恐怖事件长期冷漠了的兴趣。
多数美国人根本不了解发生于1937年12月至1938年1月的大屠杀，也不清楚它与二战之间的关系。
在这次试图重新激起人们关注活动中起中心作用的，是伊瑞斯•张的新作《南京的强奸》。
张，二十九岁，住在加利福尼亚矽谷桑尼威尔市，它位于旧金山以南一百公里。
一位美籍华人作家在美国科技腹地正率先对日军进行谴责，既要求日方承认罪行，担负责任，又要求得到美国大众的认可，这并非偶然。
张和她的著作是美国国内的一场重大运动的标志。
它要求共享历史。
随着少数民族群体逐渐在经济、社会和政治方面树立起了信心，他们努力工作，向前迈进，好让人们听到自己的历史故事。
“这是对全体美国人提出的要求，要他们融合其他民族的历史，壮大自己，”薇拉•施瓦茨说。
她是康涅狄格州韦斯勒因大学的中国历史教授。
这场运动在任何地方都比不上在加利福尼亚的一些富有的亚裔美国人社区更引人注目。
“我去了学校图书馆，发现这方面的资料竟如此之少，非常震惊。
”住在洛杉矶的韩裔美国作家李赫利说。
她那本颇受批评家好评的回忆录《生存之粮》，讲述了她祖母在落入日军魔掌后战胜巨大困难的故事，非常引人入胜。
她说：“作为亚裔美国人，我们应该提供资料，应该说出来。
”南京大屠杀为美籍华人提供了一个令人信服的兴趣点，他们施加压力，使旧金山联合校区把大屠杀写入高中的历史课程。
What is Literature?College of Foreign LanguagesZheng BorenDefinition of Literature⏹For centuries, writers, literary historians, and others have debated bout butfailed to agree on a definition for this term.⏹Some assume that literature is simply anything that is written, therebydeclaring a city telephone book, a cook book, and a road atlas to be literary works along with David Copperfield and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.⏹Derived from the Latin littera, meanin g “letter,” the root meaning of literaturerefers primarily to the written word and seems to support this broad definition.However, such a definition eliminates the important oral traditions on which much of western literature based, including Homer’s Ili ad and Odyssey, the English epic Beowulf, and many Native legends.⏹To solve this problem, others choose to define literature as an art, therebyleaving open the question of its being written or oral. This further narrows its meaning, equating literature to works of the imagination or creative writing.⏹Whether one accepts this definition, many argue that a text must have certainpeculiar qualities before it can be dubbed literature. For example, the artist’s creation or secondary world often mirrors the au thor’s primary world, the world in which the creator lives and moves and breathes. Because reality or the primary world is highly structured, so must be the secondary world. To achieve this structure, the artist must create plot, character, tone, symbols, conflict, anda host of other elements or parts of the artistic story, with all of these elementsworking in a dynamic relationship to produce a literary work.⏹Some would argue that it is the creation of these elements—how they are usedand in what context—that determines whether a piece of writing is literature.⏹What literary work may contain is a peculiar aesthetic quality—that is, someelement of beauty—that distinguishes it as literature from other forms of writing.⏹Still other critics add the test-of-time criterion to their essential components ofliterature. if a work withstands the passage of time and is still being read centuries after its creation, it is deemed valuable and worthy to be called literature.Functions of Literature (1)⏹Literature helps us grow, both personally and intellectually;⏹it helps us connect ourselves to the broader cultural, philosophic, and religiousworld of which we are a part;⏹it enables us to recognize human dreams and struggles in different places andtimes that we would never otherwise know;⏹it gives us the knowledge and perception needed to appreciate the beauty oforder and arrangement, just as a well-structured song or a beautifully done painting can;⏹it provides the comparative basis from which we can see worthiness in the aimsof all people, therefore helping us see beauty in the world around us;Functions of Literature (2)⏹it exercises our emotions through interest, concern, tension, excitement, hope,fear, regret, laughter, and sympathy.⏹Through cumulative experience in reading, great literature shapes our goals andvalues by helping us clarify our own identities, both positively, through acceptance of the admirable in human beings, and negatively, through rejection of the sinister. It helps us shape our judgments through the comparison of the good and the bad.⏹Both in our everyday activities and in the decisions we make as individuals andas citizens, it enables us to develop a perspective on the events that occur around us and in the world at large, thereby enabling us to gain understanding and control.Types of Literature: the Genres⏹1) narrative,⏹2) poetry,⏹3) drama,⏹4) nonfiction prose⏹All are art forms, each with its own internal requirements of structure and style. Narrative⏹ A narrative is an account of a series of events, usually fictional, althoughsometimes events in fiction may also be historical.⏹The two kinds of narrative fiction you will read most often are s hort stories andnovels. Myths, parables, romances, and epics are also part of the genre.Short Story⏹ A short story is usually about one or two characters undergoing difficulty orfacing a problem.⏹The relationships among the characters are described briefly, for the shortenedform of the story does not permit leisurely or extensive development of gradual changes in character.Novel⏹the full and sometimes exhaustive development of interactions, for it is adeliberately longer form.⏹Like the short story, the novel usually focuses on a small number of characters. Poetry⏹Poetry is a broad term that includes many subtypes, such as sonnet, lyric,pastoral, ballad, song, ode, drama, epic, and dramatic monologue.⏹Poetry is a compressed, and often deeply emotional, form.⏹It is this compactness of expression, combined with the broadness of application,that makes poetry unique.Drama⏹ A drama or play is designed to be performed on a stage by living actors.⏹Drama presents speech and action which render the interactions that causechange in the characters and resolve the conflicts among the characters.⏹The dramatic types are tragedy, comedy, and farce.⏹Tragedy: human disasters/ elevate human values/ show the most admirablequalities of human beings⏹Comedy: treats people as they are/ laughing at them or sympathizing with them/showing them to be loving and successful.⏹Farce: exaggerates human foolishness/ gets the characters into improbable andlunatic situations, and laughs at everyone in sight.Nonfiction Prose⏹This is a broad term including short forms like essays and articles and alsolonger non-fictional and non-dramatic works.⏹The essay or article is a form for idea, interpretations, and descriptions.⏹The topics are unlimited; they may be on social, political, artistic, scientific, andother subjects.Literary Studies⏹Literary Study is not innocent, but sophisticated. It includes following threeaspects:⏹Study of Literary history⏹Study of Literary works⏹Study of Literary criticismLiterary History⏹It traces the development of literature in a chronological order from a historicalpoint of view.⏹Every individual writer exists in a certain milieu—the political and economiccontext, the social institutions, the emotional and intellectual climate.Literary Works⏹A work of literature is written by an individual, marked by his special personalityand personal past.⏹The literary work represents in a deep way the writer’s attempt to confront andfind meaning in his experience.Literary Criticism⏹“Three R’s”—the writer, the writing, and the reader⏹Relationships: complex rather than simple, dynamic rather than static⏹Assumption 1: there is no such thing as an innocent reading of a text.⏹Whether our responses to a text are emotional and spontaneous or will-reasonedand highly structured, all such interactions are based upon some underlying factors that cause us to respond in a particular fashion. What elicits these responses and how a reader makes sense out of a text is what really matters. And it is the domain of literary theory to question our initial and final responses, our beliefs, our feelings, and our overall interpretation.⏹Assumption 2: Since our responses to a text have theoretical bases, I presumethat all readers have a literary theory.⏹Consciously or unconsciously, we as readers have developed a mind-setconcerning our expectations when reading any text (be it a novel, a short story, a poem, or any other type of literature). Somehow, we make sense out of printedmaterial. The methods we use to frame our personal interpretations of any text involve us in the process of literary criticism and theory, and automatically make us practicing literary critics whether we know it or not.⏹My third assumption rests on the observation that each reader’s literary theoryand accompanying methodology is either conscious or unconscious, complete or incomplete, informed or ill-informed, eclectic or unified.⏹Since an unconscious, incomplete, ill-formed, eclectic literary theory morefrequently than not leads to illogical, unsound, and disorganized interpretations, I believe that a well-defined, logical, and clearly articulated theory will enable readers to develop their own methods of interpretation, permitting them to order, clarify, and justify their personal appraisals of any text in a consistent and rational manner.Can a story have multiple meanings?(can a text have more than one interpretation?)⏹Not all readers interpret texts in the same way. In fact, they voiced theirunderstandings of the story gave fundamentally different interpretations.⏹Our response to any text is largely a conditioned or socially constructed one; thatis, how we arrive at meaning in fiction is in part determined by our past experiences. Consciously or unconsciously, we have developed a mindset or framework concerning our expectations when reading a novel, short story, poem, or any other type of literature. In addition, what we choose to value or uphold as good or bad, moral or immoral, or beautiful or ugly within a given text actually depends on this ever-evolving framework. When we can clearly articulate our mental framework when reading a text and explain how this mindset directly influences our values and aesthetic judgments about the text, we are well on our way to developing a coherent, unified literary theory.⏹The relationship between literary theory and a reader’s per sonal worldview isbest illustrated in the act of reading itself. When reading, we are constantly interacting with the text.⏹According to Rosenblatt’s text The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), during theact or event of reading, “A reader brings to the text his or her past experience and present personality. Under the magnetism of the ordered symbols of the text, the reader marshals his or her resources and crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new order, a new experience, which he/she sees as the poem.This becomes part of the ongoing stream of the reader’s life experience, to be reflected on from any angle important to him or her as a human being.”⏹Accordingly, Rosenblatt declares that the relationship between the reader and thetext is not linear, but transactional; that is, it is a process or event that takes place at a particular time and place in which the text and the reader condition each other. The reader and the text transact, creating meaning, for meaning does not ex ist solely within the reader’s mind or within the text, Rosenblatt maintains, but in the transaction between them. To arrive at an interpretation of a text, readers bring their own “temperament and fund of past transactions to the text and live through a process of handling new situations, new attitudes, new personalities,[and] new conflicts in value. They can reject, revise, or assimilate into the resource with which they engage their world.” Through this transactional experience, readers consciously and unconsciously amend their worldview.How to Analyze and Approach an English Poem?⏹I. Suggestions:⏹ 1. Read not only once⏹ 2. look into reference books (dictionary, Bible, etc.)⏹ 3. Read so as to hear the sound yourself⏹ 4. Pay a careful attention to what the poem is saying⏹ 5. Read affectionatelyII. A Number of Questions :⏹ 1. Who is the speaker? What kind of person is he?⏹ 2. To whom is he/she speaking?⏹ 3. What is the occasion?⏹ 4. What is the setting in time?⏹ 5. What is the setting in place?⏹ 6. What is the central purpose of the poem? State a central idea.⏹7. Discuss the theme of the poem.⏹8. How does it achieve?⏹9. a. Outline the poem so as to show the structure of the poem/ b. Summarize theevents of the poem⏹10. Paraphrase the poem⏹11. Discuss the diction of the poem. Point out words that are particularlywell-chosen and explain why.⏹12. Discuss the imagery of the poem. What kind of imagery is used?⏹13. Point out examples of metaphor, simile, personification, and metonymy;explain their appropriateness.⏹14. Point out and explain any symbols. Explain allegory⏹15. Point out and explain examples of paradox, overstatement, understatement& irony. What are their functions?⏹16. Compare the poetic language involved in a poem with the common language.⏹17. What have you learned from the poem in terms of its moral, aesthetic andartistic value?⏹18. Do you like or dislike the poem? Give a brief account for your response.⏹19. Could you liken/ compare this English poem to certain Chinese poetic work?⏹20. Try to translate the English poem into Chinese.How to Read Novels (6 Parts)⏹I. Narrator: Two types1. First person narrator (First Person Point of View)⏹1). First Person as Central Character: David Copperfield⏹2). First Person as Secondary Character: The Great Gatsby2. Third Person⏹1). Omniscient narrator⏹2). Narration limited to the point of view of major characterII. Plot + Structure:⏹Is there a direction? Where is it going? How does it develop? (Four Patterns) III. Character⏹How are characters introduced? (age, name, appearance, morality, etc.)⏹Who is the central character? (protagonist vs. antagonist)⏹What are his or her distinguished characteristics?⏹By what means the author demonstrate?⏹To what extent is the character defines by contrast with minor characters? Orby conflict with his or her environment?⏹Does the novel or story show the growth of change of character?⏹How much of the meaning (theme) depends on the growth of change?IV. Theme/ Purpose⏹Does the novel or story make a general statement about life or experience?V. Techniques:⏹What techniques or devices has the author employed? Any symbols? Anyallusions?⏹ 1. allusion- The Bible, the Greek or Roman Mythology, the Classical works⏹ 2. Stream of consciousness⏹ 3. Rhetoric devices (metaphor, simile)IV. Language + Style⏹What is the style of the novel?⏹What are the characteristics of the language? (simple words?/bigwords?/repetition?/ colloquial or formal?)。
阅读解读英文短篇小说英文短篇小说是文学作品中的一种，其特点在于篇幅较短、情节紧凑、语言简练。
每个故事都有其独特的主题和寓意，通过阅读和解读，我们可以领略其中的内涵，并且从中获得启示和思考。
在解读英文短篇小说时，首先需要理解作者传递的核心信息和主题思想。
了解故事的背景、人物和情节发展是理解故事意义的基础。
观察作者在故事中所传达的情感和情绪，并分析作者的写作手法和语言表达。
通过解读故事中个别情节和对话，我们可以挖掘出更多的细节和隐含意义。
举个例子，我们选取一篇经典的英文短篇小说《The Necklace》，这是法国作家莫泊桑创作的一部作品。
故事讲述了一个美丽但贫穷的女主人公，由于偷偷借了朋友的一条项链，却在还给朋友时遗失了。
女主人公隐瞒了事实，并且与丈夫共同工作多年，还清了债务，可是此时才意识到毫无意义的努力。
最后，她发现原本那条被视为珍贵的项链其实只是一条廉价的仿制品。
这个故事通过一个简单的情节展现了人们对物质的追逐和欲望的盲目，对真实价值的误判。
女主人公沉溺于虚荣和奢侈，却最终失去了自己的幸福和快乐。
故事通过暗示和隐喻，给我们提供了对生活的深刻思考。
莫泊桑通过这个故事告诫读者，不要为了追求虚荣和物质而忽略了身边的真正价值。
解读英文短篇小说并不仅仅是理解故事本身，还需要将故事中展现的主题和情感联系到现实生活中。
我们可以从中获得启示，思考人生，反思自己的行为和价值观。
通过阅读解读英文短篇小说，我们可以扩展自己的词汇量，提升阅读理解能力和英语写作水平。
同时，我们还可以感受到不同文化的魅力和多样性，从而开阔自己的思维。
阅读英文短篇小说也是学习英语的一种有效方式，通过阅读和分析英文原文，我们可以更好地理解和运用英语语言。
总结来说，阅读解读英文短篇小说是提升自己的阅读能力和文学品味的一种方式。
通过理解故事的主题和情感，我们可以丰富自己的思维和认知，同时也可以提升自己的英语水平。
愿每个人在阅读解读英文短篇小说的过程中，都能够获得满满的收获和惊喜。
