Ｊｕｌｉｕｓ Ｃａｅｓａｒ

　　　　　Last week, we read a story, Julius Caesar written by William Shakespeare.  We read and compared speeches of Brutus and Antony.  The clearest difference between these two speeches is style; Brutus’ speech is normal sentences, while Antony’s speech is like a poem.  I learned in my Intensive Reading class that what high classes people say are written like a poem in play.  I don’t know this story well, but I felt Antony is on higher position than Brutus, or Antony tries to be looked higher class.

              I searched the story of Julius Caesar and know that Brutus is a traitor and Antony overthrows Brutus.  In the story, Antony is a hero, so to show Antony’s greatness, Shakespeare used poem style on Antony’s speech.  I think interesting that even if readers don’t know relationships of story’s character, they can imagine character’s position.

              Another one I thought interesting is about the rule of 3; this story was written in about 1599 and the rule of 3 has used since this age.  The rule isn’t changed still today.  Antony uses the rule of 3 and 4 effectively, and emphasizing that Caesar is ambitious in the line of the rule of 4, makes his speech more impressive.

Ｍｏｎｓｔｅｒｓ

　　　　　　Last week, we read a story in which zombies appears.  It was very interesting story, and I wanted to read whole story.  So, this time, I’m going to write about monsters.

              When I hear the word “monsters”, I firstly think of vampires. 

              The stories of vampire have been told for a very long time.  Vampires are thought to be ghosts of dead people, slip out graveyards, and suck people’s blood.  The victims also become vampires.  They hate cross and garlic, and change into dust when they get sunshine.

              I have some images about vampires.  They are handsome, gentleman and polite.  They are monsters, but are not negative images.

              The legends of vampire became famous when Bram Stoker, an Irish writer, published the novel, Dracula (1897).  Since then, a lot of vampire stories have been made into novels, animations, and movies.  As to recentness, a movie, Dark Shadow which director is Tim Burton and main actor is Johnny Depp is now showing.  I haven’t watched the movie yet, but I’m very interested in it.

Neal Stephenson

              The other day, we read Anathem written by Neal Stephenson.

              Neal Stephenson is an American SF writer.  He made his debut as a writer with The Big U in 1984.  Then he published some famous SF stories: Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond age (1995) and Cryptonomicon (1999).  Snow Crash is set in The American near feature.  The scene of The Diamond age is middle of the 21th century.  The Diamond age won Locus Award and Hugo Award.  Cryptonomicon won Locus Award, too.  Locus Award is SF story’s award in the English-speaking world and Hugo Award is SF story’s award in the U.S.  What I thought interesting that In The Diamond age, people are classified by the ways of thinking, and one of the main kinds is called “Nippon”.

              In Neal Stephenson’s works, there are a lot of metaphors and similes.  Similes are easy to understand for using “like” or “as”.  But metaphors are less understandable because the readers have to imagine the meaning.  In addition, his works are SF stories and far apart from the real world, which makes the readers more difficult to imagine the scene.  As to Anthem, it is necessary to know the religious background, so I could hardly understand the story only by myself.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

         Last week, I learned about Wuthering Heights written by Emily Bronte.  At the first time, I could hardly understand what’s going in the story, and what I only could find was there is something dark image through the whole story I read.  Many difficult and complex words used in the story make it hard to understand the meaning.  I think some reasons about this including what I learned in the class.  Firstly, story is going between two unfriendly men and it is difficult for them to communicate smoothly with each other.  To describe how difficult it is to relate with the two men, the author used such incomprehensive words.  Secondly, the author used difficult words to show an object of readers.  As in Japanese literature, easy words are used in picture books for children, and complicated words are used in stories for adult.  Writing words that children cannot understand, the author showed who should read this book.  That’s my opinion about this question.

              Since CAPTER 1 is dark and not changing dramatically, I’m wondering how this story is going next and how this story ends.  But the story seems so hard that it will take me very long time to read and understand whole the story.

The Rule of Three

       The last class, we learned about “the rule of three”.  This rule is sometimes used in stories written in English and is effective on making sentence powerful.  In Japanese, this rule is often used in proverbs.  I searched examples of this rule in Japanese.

1.     Pine, bamboo and plum

These words mean ranks of things.  Pine is the lowest, bamboo is the middle and plum is the highest rank.  These are seen in Japanese style hotels’ or first class Japanese restaurant’s names of rooms.

2.    Earthquake, Thunder, Fire and Father

This word is an exception of the rule of three.  This is a Japanese proverb and lists some of things which are thought the most terrible.  There are some opinions about the last word, “father”.  For example, this word had changed gradually from a word meaning typhoon.

3.    Food, clothing and shelter

This word’s meaning is the most important things to live.  It is said that if even one of them is not satisfied our lives, our life cannot be regard as a happy life.  So, we should try to pay attention to those three things in our life.

Besides those, there are many other examples of the rule of three.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

　　　　　Last day, I learned about “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wild.  I had known Oscar Wild before, but I read his story for the first time.  He wrote many stories like “The Happy Prince” and “Salome”.  Though I don’t know about these stories, I know only the titles.  What I thought reading chapter one of the story, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is dark image whole the story.

              In the chapter one, his writing is very skillful.  As I learned in Integrated Skills class, there are some sentences which have similar structure: for example, “there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which were worse”.  I felt it was even very difficult for people whose mother tongue is English to write such a skillful sentence.

              In this story, he wrote interesting comments about beauty.  For example, “beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.  Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”  In his other works, he left so many interesting words that there are some Web pages about his quotes.  The most impressive quote is “fashion is what one wears oneself.  What unfashionable is what other people wear” (An Ideal Husband).  Besides this, I found many interesting words which I can never come upon.

A Princess of Mars

              I studied about A Prince of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs the last day.  I didn’t know the title, but I could remember on hearing the name, John Carter.  I often watched this TV commercial because this story was made into movie recently.  I hadn’t been interested in the movie completely before I learned about this story, but now I want to watch this movie because I’m very interested in this story through this class.

              We learned about Carter’s look and some mysteries mainly.  Firstly, reading the paragraph referring his description, I imagined a typical hero and also the man who I watched on the TV commercial. Most of heroes I know are big, strong, kind, and handsome man.  Secondly, in the FOREWORD of this story, there are some mysteries.  15 or 16 years after the Civil War, Carter didn’t age and looked sad, and he died little before “I” arrived at his house.  The situation of his death is also strange.  I couldn’t understand the last paragraph of FOREWORD describing the tomb well, but I felt this part is also mystery.

              I learned all the book covers of SF story in those days of A Princess of Mars was drawn a naked woman regardless of the contents of story.  I thought this kind of book cover was easy for men to take, but women might hesitate to take.

             

If I have time, I want to read all through this story.