MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, JANE AUSTEN AND PROTOFEMINISM

Protofeminism is a concept that anticipates modern feminism in eras when the feminist concept as such was still unknown. So we can correctly say that Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen were protofeminist writers.

KNIGHTHOOD & CHIVALRY: THE INSPIRATION OF DON QUIXOTE

Don Quijote y Sancho Panza by Pablo Picasso 

 As a Spanish gentleman living a quiet life of retirement and enjoying his favorite pastime of reading medieval romances about knights and their ladies, Don Quixote one day feels inspired to emulate the knights of old and restore the ideals of chivalry, honor, truth, courtesy, and service that his own age has relegated to the past.

Because the modern man of the sixteenth century has revolutionized the nature of warfare by the invention of gunpowder, the institution of knighthood has declined and disappeared. Jousts, armor, and lances are obsolete in the new world called “The Iron Age.”

As the military practice of knighthood has become outdated, the virtues of the knight have also become relics of the past.

LITERATURE, FAITH AND PANDEMICS

Agnes Mueller, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, wrote an interesting article introducing the literary works she taught in  her course “Pandemics in Literature” and reflecting on the role of faith and religion in a time of uncertainty such as a pandemic.

Read her article HERE,  then take the reading comprehension test HERE

WHY DO WE STUDY LITERATURE? MR KEATING'S ANSWER

Why should we study literature in Mr Keating's opinion?

Take notes of the main points in his speech and then try to explain what he says in your own words.

MODULE 3. DRUMS OF WAR

MODULE 3.  DRUMS OF WAR 

MODULE 2. PARENTS & CHILDREN

Module 2. Parents & Children

FRANKENSTEIN VS JEKYLL

"Jekyll and Hyde" (1886) and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus" (1818) share numerous features, as a matter of fact.

1. THE FIGURE OF THE OVERREACHER - The two protagonists are scientists who, led by their great ambition, fulfill their achievement but, thus doing, they overcome the limits and borders imposed to them by ethics, nature or God. Their punishment is death by exhaustion in one case, by self-destruction in the other. Both are OVERREACHERS, rebels who go beyond the limits imposed to Mankind by God or Nature, who have their prototype in Prometheus, the mythical Titan who defied Zeus stealing the fire from the Olympus.