英美散文讲义

First Lecture

1) What is this course all about?

This course is meant to make up for the absence of both extensive and intensive reading courses for the seniors with a view to helping them learn realistic, purposeful and practicable English. Although China is indisputably an English-learning superpower, we often lament over the widespread ludicrous translations of Chinese into English (eg. The other day I received a phone interview about the ―good good study and day day up‖ kind of English) and I over the inexcusable mistakes the English majors make when they speak or write – not only diction-wise or pragmatically but also grammar-wise and syntactically (eg. ―make me be happy‖ and ―call police when you are stolen‖, not to say numerous errors in terms of agreement and so forth). So this course purports primarily to give you powerful assistance in increasing your competence and performance in the English language by exposing you to samples of good prose writing (Poetry can wait, I think) and encouraging you to imitate it. I believe you all more or less need ―nutrients badly‖(恶补) before leaving campus for work. So on top of the selected samples in this yellow book, every or every other week I’ll let you share with me some of the new English books I’ve recently read or used. The accepted practice last year is I’d leave the book with the president of the class. Those who are interested can sign up for a photocopied version of my book or download it to your Kindle to read at leisure. Hopefully, by doing so your final-year input will be enormous. Today I have with me a hefty 1994 anthology called The Art of the Personal Essay, the introduction of which we’ll deal with next. If photocopying the entire book is too expensive or involves technical difficulties, I suggest you have the following sections pp.113-302 and pp.476-770 photocopied as they cover the British and American scenes respectively.

I’ll, as optional assignments, also ask you to make in-class presentations and/or write outside class with a suggested topic. Comments on your output also account for an important part of teaching and learning.

Allow me to tell you something about this course historically. In my days it used to be a literature course overarching the historical evolvement of the essay helping toward the overall literary cultivation of a student of the arts. It was taught by none other than my own late mentor Professor Mr Xu Yanmou. But gone are the days when the students were expected to be armchair aesthetes or cognoscenti or connoisseurs. Today, few if any students learn English for the unalloyed beauty of the language or for a feeling of euphoria derived therefrom. More emphasized is the instrumentality of the language in a utilitarian world with a much accelerated tempo of life or the usefulness of the language in being turned to bread and butter. That’s why I’ve encapsulated the time window of selection to the twentieth century and the present day, leaving a host of many earlier but canonical essays, pearls of the genre so to speak, uncovered. Still, I aim at an illusory combination of what is aesthetic with what

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