©2003 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Longman Publishers.

The Art of Being Human,

7/e

Chapter 4 –

Literature

PowerPoint by Julie Rodakowski

©2003 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Longman Publishers.

LITERATURE AS HISTORYPeople in the past, just as people today, needed to define themselves and their times, and they did so through their writings.

• Gilgamesh

• Homer’s Iliad

©2003 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Longman Publishers.

POETRYPeople in the past, just as people today, needed to share thoughts and ideas in a more elevated style than prose offered, and they did so through POETRY.

TWO OF SEVERAL TYPES OF POETRY:

•sonnet

•haiku

©2003 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Longman Publishers.

SOME FAMOUS POETS:

• Sappho—the first poet?

• Petrarch—sonnets

• Shakespeare—sonnets

• Lorca—sonnets (Spanish poet)

• John Donne—sonnets

• Basho—haiku

• Issa—haiku

• William Blake—simple forms / profound meanings

• Emily Dickinson—a modern poet

• Georgia Douglas Johnson—Afro-American

• Archibald MacLeish—Ars Poetica (defining a poem)

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THE NOVEL

• A PICARESQUE NOVEL—

Cervantes’s Don Quixote

• AN AMERICAN CLASSIC—

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

People in the past, just as people today, needed a more complex literary form that was not based in the “real” events of the past or of the present; thus, the fictional NOVEL was developed.

©2003 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Longman Publishers.

THE SHORT STORY

People in the past, just as people today, needed a literary form that could be read in one sitting, and the SHORT STORY was developed.

• Edgar Allan Poe defined and wrote classic short stories.

• Shirley Jackson also wrote a classic short story called “The Lottery.”