W2: Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"

Reading and responding to fiction:

• the narrator addresses a listener or reader
• read a story attentively
• literacy prose works with the sounds as well as meaning of words
• college level dictionary 
• The Elephant in the Village of the Blind
• expectation
• character's different perceptions and interpretations
• personal experience 
• clues of the title 

Linda Brewer’s 20/20

Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or our intellects （思維能力）will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before.

The sinister（邪惡的） character of Nelson in "Vitamins" worked his way into the story after Carver’s writing was interrupted by a wrong number on the phone.

"I was in my room one night when I heard something in the corridor（走廊）. I looked up and saw an envelope slide under the door.”

• Allegory: character, actions, and setting have two connected levels of meaning 
• Fable (Aesop's fable): moral, animal character, 
• Jesus's parable: Prodigal's son

Bewitched (2005)神仙家庭

• American TV situation comedy fantasy
• created by Sol Saks under executive director Harry Ackerman, and starred actress Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York (1964–1969), Dick Sargent (1969–1972), Agnes Moorehead, and David White. 
• The show is about a witch who marries an ordinary mortal man and tries to lead the life of a typical suburban housewife. Bewitched enjoyed great popularity, finishing as the number two show in America during its debut season, and becoming the longest-running supernatural-themed sitcom of the 1960s–1970s. The show continues to be seen throughout the world in syndication（企業聯合組織化） and on recorded media.

No, heroics

No Heroics is a British superhero-comedy television series, which began on 18 September 2008. The show is ITV2's first original sitcom. It was nominated for Best New British TV Comedy of 2008 at the British Comedy Awards.

Critical approaches

• Emphasis on the text 
  • New criticism
  • Structuralism
  • Post structuralism
  • Deconstruction
  • Narrative theory
• Emphasis on the source
  • Biographical criticism
  • Psychoanalytic criticism 
• Emphasis on the receiver
  • Reader-response criticism
• Historical and ideological criticism
  • Marxist criticism
  • Feminist criticism
  • Gender studies and queer theory 
  • African American and ethnic literary studies 
  • New historicism
  • Cultural studies 
  • Post colonial and studies of world literature

The all critical approach in introductory literature is to help you understand the text better.

Antihero A1

• Tom Sawyer 

Lock: a lock of hair

Term: 

• epic: a long poem that celebrates, in a continuous narrative, the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, usually in founding a nation or developing a culture, and uses elevated language and a grand, high style. Other epic conventions include a beginning in medias res, an invocation of the muse, a journey to the underworld, battle scenes, and a scene in which the hero arms himself for battle. Examples include Beowulf and Homer’s Iliad. A mock epic is a form of satire in which epic language and conventions are used to depict characters, actions, and settings utterly unlike those in conventional epics, usually (though not always) with the purpose of ridiculing the social milieu or types of people portrayed in the poem. A famous example is Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.
• sonnet: a fixed verse form consisting of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter（抑揚格五音步）. An Italian sonnet consists of eight rhymelinked lines (an octave) plus six rhymelinked lines (a sestet), often with either an abbaabba cdecde or abbacddc defdef rhyme scheme. This type of sonnet is also called the Petrarchan sonnet in honor of the Italian poet Petrarch (1304– 74). An English or Shakespearean sonnet instead consists of three quatrains (four- line units) and a couplet and often rhymes abab cdcd efef gg.
• antihero: a protagonist who is in one way or another the very opposite of a traditional hero. Instead of being courageous and determined, for instance, an antihero might be timid, hypersensitive, and indecisive to the point of paralysis. Antiheroes are especially common in modern literary works; examples might include the speaker of T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
• in medians res: "in the midst of things" (Latin); refers to opening a plot in the middle of the action, and then filling in past details by means of exposition or flashback.
• flashback: a plot-structuring device whereby a scene from the fictional past is inserted into the fictional present or is dramatized out of order.
• foreshadowing: a hint or clue about what will happen at a later moment in the plot.

Chapel（小禮拜堂）, church（禮拜堂）, Cathedral（教區總教堂）

snobbish（勢利的）

Flat character: A flat character is a minor character in a work of fiction who does not undergo substantial change or growth in the course of a story. Also referred to as "two-dimensional characters" or "static characters," flat characters play a supporting role to the main character, who as a rule should be round.

Raymond Carver - "Cathedral" 

Raymond Carver was born in 1938 in the small town of Clatskanie, Oregon, to an alcoholic father who worked at a sawmill and a mother who worked as a waitress. He grew up in Washington state and married Maryann Burke, his high school girlfriend, when he was just eighteen. He and Maryann had two children by the time Carver was twenty-one. After high school, Carver and his family moved to California, where he worked a variety of odd jobs. He didn’t resume his schooling until 1958, when he began taking classes at Chico State College. While there, he took writing classes with the writer John Gardner, who introduced him to the world of writing.

Carver began writing poetry and short stories while continuing to work odd jobs to support his family. In 1968 he published his first poetry collection, Near Klamath, followed not long after by Winter Insomnia (1970) and several other works in the early 1970s. He began teaching at various colleges, and in 1976 he published his first short-story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, which has become one of his best-known works.

Although Carver earned critical acclaim for his writing, he simultaneously struggled with alcoholism. His alcoholism was so severe that he was hospitalized several times. He finally stopped drinking in 1977, after many failed attempts to quit. After a hiatus（間斷） from writing, during which time he focused on staying sober, Carver published several more short-story collections: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Elephant (published posthumously in 1988). Two compilations（彙編） of Carver’s stories have also been published: Where I’m Calling From (1988) and Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993). A film version of Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman, came out in 1993.

Carver has a distinct writing style, a strong, minimalist approach that critics often compare to the writing of Ernest Hemingway and Anton Chekhov. Carver liked to focus on down-and-out, blue-collar, middle-class people facing bleak truths, disappointments, and small revelations in their ordinary lives, all subject matter that places him firmly in the “dirty realism” school of writing. Other dirty realism writers include Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Richard Ford. Besides the style and subject matter, Carver’s short stories are known for their dialogue, which mimics realistic speech patterns, and their abrupt endings—also called zero endings—that fail to tie up the story neatly, if at all.

“Cathedral” features all of the well-known Carver characteristics and is often regarded as his best short story. Carver himself considered it one of his favorites and recognized it as an important step forward in his writing. “Cathedral” ends on a slightly more optimistic note than many of his earlier stories, and Carver believed that this story, as well as the other stories in the collection Cathedral, were “more hopeful” and more fully developed than his previous work.

As Carver wrote his later short-story collections, he divorced his wife, Maryann, and married a writer named Tess Gallagher. They were married for only a few months before Carver died from lung cancer in 1988. He was fifty.

"And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved."