Choose one of the following questions to answer: 1)What are the benefits of Laura's relationship with Braggioni? 2) How is Laura different from the other people around her? 3) What kind of a person is Braggioni? Is he capable of salvation? 4) In the story, Braggioni says to Laura: "We are more alike than you realize in some things. Wait and see" (539). Can you find any hidden similarities between them? 5) What do the flowers of the Judas tree symbolize? 6) What is the purpose of the dream at the end of the story?
"The art of Frida Kahlo,"André Breton wrote in 1938, "is a ribbon around a bomb." Scarecely known outside surrealist circles for many years, Kahlo is today the most renowned of all the women who have been involved in the movement. Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico, of a Hungarian-Jewish faher and a Spanish-Mexican mother, she was stricken with polio as a child; a later streetcar accident, and its attendant operations, left her an invalid for life. She took up painting in the mid-1920s, met Diego Rivera in 1928, and married him a year later. Her own course as an artist, however, was very different from that of her muralist husband.
In recent years, with the rise of a lucrative Frida Kahlo industry, it has become the fashion to belittle her association with surrealism. The facts remain: Not only did Breton arrange her first exhibition in Paris (1938) and write the first important (and often reprinted) text about her work, but Kahlo herself took part in the 1940 International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, frequented in surrealist exiles' milieu in Mexico during the war, and for a time used the term surrealist as a self-description. The fact that she made some abrasive comments about Breton in letters counts for little, for it is well known that Kahlo made abrasive comments regarding practically everyone she knew.
However, well before her final capitulation to Stalinism in 1948, Kahlo had distanced herself from surrealism. Her last works include portraits of Stalin and other works "to serve the Party." After her death in 1954, her home in Coyoacán became the Museo Frida Kahlo.
Excerpted from Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998) edited with introductions by Penelope Rosemont.
In D. H. Lawrence's short story "Odour of Chrysanthemums," he attempts to portray the antagonism between the natural world and the mechanical world. Industrialization, originally a project aiming at emancipating humankind, turns out to become a merciless monster which devours human beings and alienates them from their essential qualities. Technology's promise of happiness and peace is bankrupt. Machines, rather than an emacipator of humankind, become war machines or devices used by human beings to kill or to exploit their fellow human beings. This is the epochal milieu of the production of modernist literature and arts; writers unanimously felt pessimistic about Western culture which subscribed to the myth of progress and grotesquely turned into irrationality and barbarism.
Enclosed is the picture (source: http://www.onlineinvestingai.com/blog/2009/04/27/wage-slave-freedom-hard-work-never-works/) of three Welsh coal miners who are just up from the pits after a day's work in coal mine in Wales. Look at the picture and try to feel the pain and disenchantment of Elizabeth the wife. Can you imagine the reasons why her miner husband Walter turns into an abusive and angry drunkard? What kind of sentimental reasons does Elizabeth have when she seems to care so much about the presence of pink chrysanthemums throughout the story?
I found this interesting clip from YouTube, which is based on Faulker's acclaimed short story and looks like a student's school project. Although the production is crude, the story is narrated beautifully. I post this for your reference; feel free to leave comments (which are optional).
In Today's class, we talked about Faulkner's famous short story "A Rose for Emily" (1931) , his presentation of the conflict between the North and the South, Miss Emily as a symbol of a bygone era, and the tragic decline of southern sensibility. The title "A Rose for Emily" indicates a chilvaric gesture toward a "lady," who is given a rose as a homage to her "ladyship." However, making her a "lady" (by her authoritative father and the traditional antebellum southern society) also cripples her for life. Her status as a "lady" brings about the tragic ending of the story.
Faulkner's story is so famous as to become an inspiration for a British music band "The Zombies." They adapted the story for their song, in which Miss Emily's fate is being lamented:
The summer is here at last The sky is overcast And no one brings a rose for Emily
She watches her flowers grow While lovers come and go To give each other roses from her tree But not a rose for Emily...
Emily, can't you see There's nothing you can do? There's loving everywhere But none for you...
Her roses are fading now She keeps her pride somehow That's all she has protecting her from pain
And as the years go by She will grow old and die The roses in her garden fade away Not one left for her grave Not a rose for Emily...
Emily, can't you see There's nothing you can do? There's loving everywhere But none for you...
Her roses are fading now She keeps her pride somehow That's all she has protecting her from pain
And as the years go by She will grow old and die The roses in her garden fade away Not one left for her grave Not a rose for Emily...
Listen to the music. Do you think the music (and its lyrics) convey the similar feelings you have when you read the story itself? Desribe your feelings.
