En16 văn học anh mỹ bài 18

Môn học nhằm cung cấp các khái niệm cơ bản về văn học, và các tác phẩm văn học Anh-Mỹ tiêu biểu. Với phương pháp trích giảng, sinh viên vận dụng các kiến thức về lịch sử xã hội Anh-Mỹ đã học vào việc phân tích và cảm nhận tác phẩm. Trong quá trình học sinh viên có cơ hội thể hiện sự hiểu biết của mình về các tác phẩm và tác giả bằng cách tham gia vào các vở kịch, thảo luận, viết bài luận phân tích.

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY MID -TERM TEST ON ENGLISH AND AMERICAN

LITERATURE

FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH (No 2)

Subject Code: EN16 Full name:

Date of birth:

Group:

I Answer the following questions: (50 points )

1 What three languages were spoken in England in the 11th - 13th centuries, and whom were they spoken by? Mention some reasons

2 What is a romance, a fabliaux, a bestiaria? In what language were they written?

(The file sent will be named after each student’s name Plagiarism will lead to failure)

ANSWER:

1 What three languages were spoken in England in the 11th - 13th centuries, and whom were they spoken by? Mention some reasons.

Three languages were spoken in England in the 11th - 13th centuries are French, Latin and Anglo-Saxon

- French was spoken by nobility In 1066 the Normans conquered England and it affected strongly the language The Norman conquest changed the whole course of English The most important influence upon the language was the Norman Conquest of

1066, when William the Conqueror, a prince of Normandy (a part of France) conquered England William made French the official language of the aristocracy and the law courts Anglo-Norman French was an elite language, and the common people did not necessarily learn it as children, but it was the official language of the nation Latin: churchmen, Anglo-Saxon: common people

- Saxon was spoken by common people Old English language or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest recorded form of the English language When the Anglo-Anglo-Saxons first came to England from northern Germany (Saxony) in the fifth and sixth centuries, they brought their language with them It is a Germanic language and has some fundamental similarities to Modern German.The English language developed from the West Germanic dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and other Teutonic tribes who participated in the invasion and occupation of England in the fifth and sixth centuries

- Latin was spoken by churchmen The Church used Latin for centuries because it was born in the Roman Empire and when that empire fell, it kept it as a way to unify Catholics around the entire world

2 What is a romance, a fabliaux, a bestiaria? In what language were they written?

- Romance told of love and adventure and expresses the ideals of knighthood in feudal society In the strictest academic terms, a romance is a narrative genre in literature thatinvolves a mysterious, adventurous, or spiritual story line where the focus is on a questthat involves bravery and strong values, not always a love interest However, moderndefinitions of romance also include stories that have a relationship issue as the mainfocus.- In the academic sense, an example of a romance is a story in which the maincharacter is a hero who must conquer various challenges as part of a quest Eachchallenge could be its own story and can be taken out of the overall story withoutharming the plot.Romance is associated with languages That use was sealed a bit earlier, back when the noun referred to Old French; the term Romance language now refers to a number of languages that developed from Latin, including French, Italian, and Spanish

- Fabliaux told funny stories about town-people A fablia is often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca 1150 and 1400 The standard form of the fabliau is that of Medieval French literature in general Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined According to R Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism in Europe Fabliaux originally come from the Orient and were brought to the West by returning crusaders; from fabliaux comes the French drama Fabliaux was written in French language

- Bestiaries told stories in which characters were animals Originating inthe ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumesthat described various animals and even rocks The natural history and illustration of eachbeast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson This reflected the belief that the worlditself was the Word of God and that every living thing had its own special meaning Forexample, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to lifewith its own blood, was a living representation of Jesus Thus the bestiary is also areference to the symbolic language of animals in Western Christian art and literature.-Medieval bestiaries contained detailed descriptions and illustrations of speciesnative to Western Europe, exotic animals and what in modern times are considered to beimaginary

animals Descriptions of the animals included the physical characteristicsassociated with the creature, although these were often physiologically incorrect, alongwith the Christian morals that the animal represented The description was then oftenaccompanied by an artistic illustration of the animal as described in the bestiary A large number of bestiary manuscripts are written in Latin, in the Middle Ages the common language of scholars and clerics, with many more written in vernacular languages, mostly French The Latin bestiary was primarily a product of England, though a few were produced elsewhere, particularly in France

II Comments (50 points )

Write what you know about the life and works of Geoffrey Chaucer - The founder

of English realism

Geoffrey Chaucer (c 1343 – October 25, 1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat (courtier), and diplomat, who is best known as the author of The Canterbury Tales As an author, he is considered not only the father of English literature, but also, often of the English language itself Chaucer's writings validated English as a language capable of poetic greatness, and in the process instituted many of the traditions

of English poesy that have continued to this day He was also, for a writer of his times, capable of powerful psychological insight No other author of the Middle English period demonstrates the realism, nuance, and characterization found in Chaucer Ezra Pound famously wrote that, although Shakespeare is often considered the great "psychologist" of English verse, "Don Geoffrey taught him everything he knew."

The life of Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer was born around 1343 His father and grandfather were both London wine merchants and before that, for several generations, the family had been merchants in Ipswich Although the Chaucers were not of noble birth, they were extremely well-to-do

The young Chaucer began his career by becoming a page to Elizabeth de Burgh, fourth Countess of Ulster In 1359, Chaucer traveled with Lionel of Antwerp, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army in the Hundred Years' War After his tour of duty, Chaucer traveled in France, Spain and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps as a religious pilgrim In 1367, Chaucer became a valet to the royal family, a position which allowed him to travel with the king performing a variety of odd jobs

On one such trip to Italy in 1373, Chaucer came into contact with medieval Italian poetry, the forms and stories of which he would use later While he may have been exposed to manuscripts of these works the trips were not usually long enough to learn

sufficient Italian; hence, it is speculated that Chaucher had learned Italian due to his upbringing among the merchants and immigrants in the docklands of London

In 1374, Chaucer became Comptroller of the Customs for the port of London for Richard II While working as comptroller Chaucer moved to Kent and became a Member

of Parliament in 1386, later assuming the title of clerk of the king's works, a sort of foreman organizing most of the king's building projects In this capacity he oversaw repairs upon Westminster Palace and St George's Chapel

Soon after the overthrow of his patron Richard II, Chaucer vanished from the historical record He is believed to have died on October 25, 1400, of unknown causes, but there is no firm evidence for this date It derives from the engraving on his tomb, built over one hundred years after his death There is some speculation—most recently in Terry Jones' book Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery— that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II or even on the orders of Richard's successor, Henry IV

The works of Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess, was an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster, but reflects some of the signature techniques that Chaucer would deploy more deftly in his later works It would not be long, however, before Chaucer would produce one of his most acclaimed masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde Like many other works of his early period (sometimes called his French and Italian period) Troilus and Criseyde borrows its poetic structure from contemporary French and Italian poets and its subject matter from classical sources

Troilus and Criseyde

Troilus and Criseyde is the love story of Troilus, a Trojan prince, and Criseyde Many Chaucer scholars regard the poem as his best for its vivid realism and (in comparison with later works) overall completeness as a story

Troilus is commanding an army battling the Greeks at the height of the Trojan War when he falls in love with Criseyde, a Greek woman captured and enslaved by his countrymen Criseyde pledges her love to him, but when she is returned to the Greeks in a hostage exchange, she goes to live with the Greek hero, Diomedes Troilus is infuriated, but can do nothing about it due to the siege of Troy

Meanwhile, an oracle prophesies that Troy will not be defeated as long as Troilus reaches the age of twenty alive Shortly thereafter the Greek hero Achilles sees Troilus lead his horses to a fountain and falls in love with him Achilles ambushes Troilus and his

sister, Polyxena, who escapes Troilus, however, rejects Achilles' advances, and takes refuge inside the temple of Apollo Timbraeus

Achilles, enraged at this rejection, slays Troilus on the altar The Trojan heroes ride to the rescue too late, as Achilles whirls Troilus' head by the hair and hurls it at them This affront to the god—killing his son and desecrating the temple—has been conjectured

as the cause of Apollo's enmity towards Achilles, and, in Chaucer's poem, is used to tragically contrast Troilus' innocence and good-faith with Achilles' arrogance and capriciousness

Chaucer's main source for the poem was Boccaccio, who wrote the story in his Il Filostrato, itself a re-working of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, which was in turn an expansion of a passage from Homer

The Canterbury Tales

Troilus and Criseyde notwithstanding, Chaucer is almost certainly best known for his long poem, The Canterbury Tales The poem consists of a collection of fourteen stories, two in prose and the rest in verse The tales, some of which are original, are contained inside a frame tale told by a group of pilgrims on their way from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket's at Canterbury Cathedral

The poem is in stark contrast to other literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative and the variety of the pilgrims and the stories they tell, setting it apart from almost anything else written during this period The poem is concerned not with kings and gods, but with the lives and thoughts of everyday persons Many of the stories narrated by the pilgrims seem to fit their individual characters and social standing, although some of the stories seem ill-fitting to their narrators, probably representing the incomplete state of the work

Chaucer's experience in medieval society as page, soldier, messenger, valet, bureaucrat, foreman, and administrator undoubtedly exposed him to many of the types of people he depicted in the Tales He was able to mimic their speech, satirize their manners, and use their idioms as a means for making art

The themes of the tales vary, and include topics such as courtly love, treachery, and avarice The genres also vary, and include romance, Breton lai, sermon, and fabliau The characters, introduced in the General Prologue of the book, tell tales of great cultural relevance, and are among the most vivid accounts of medieval life available today Chaucer provides a "slice-of-life," creating a picture of the times in which he lived by

letting us hear the voices and see the viewpoints of people from all different backgrounds and social classes

Some of the tales are serious and others humorous; however, all are very precise in describing the traits and faults of human nature Chaucer, like virtually all other authors

of his period, was very interested in presenting a moral to his story Religious malpractice

is a major theme, appropriate for a work written on the eve of The Reformation Most of the tales are linked by similar themes and some are told in reprisal for other tales in the form of an argument The work is incomplete, as it was originally intended that each character would tell four tales, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey This would have meant a possible one hundred and twenty tales which would have dwarfed the twenty-six tales actually completed

It is sometimes argued that the greatest contribution that The Canterbury Tales made to English literature was in popularizing the literary use of the vernacular language, English, as opposed to the French or Latin then spoken by the noble classes However, several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet

—also wrote major literary works in English, and Chaucer's appellation as the "Father of English Literature," though partially true, is an overstatement

Much more important than standardization of dialect was the introduction, through The Canterbury Tales, of numerous poetic techniques that would become standards for English poesy The poem's use of accentual-syllabic meter, which had been invented a century earlier by the French and Italians, was revolutionary for English poesy After Chaucer, the alliterative meter of Old English poetry would become completely extinct The poem also deploys, masterfully, iambic pentameter, which would become the de facto measure for the English poetic line (Five hundred years later, Robert Frost would famously write that there were two meters in the English language, "strict iambic and loose iambic.") Chaucer was the first author to write in English in pentameter, and The Canterbury Tales is his masterpiece of the technique The poem is also one of the first in the language to use rhymed couplets in conjunction with a five-stress line, a form of rhyme that would become extremely popular in all varieties of English verse thereafter