《英语散文:鉴赏与写作》的另一目标是通过培养学生的2C(Critical & Creative)能力,激发其亲手尝试英语散文创作的兴趣。每课之后的“写作指南”结合本篇课文的写作特点、篇章结构、行文风格、创作技巧等,为学生梳理、总结英语散文创作的要点,然后再通过每课最后设计的开放或半开放式的写作任务,让学生有机会尝试英语散文的创作,并在这样的尝试中感受散文之美、追求散文之美、创造散文之美。 《英语散文:鉴赏与写作》编者长期担纲大学本科学生的文学课教学,对文学鉴赏教学有着自己独到的见解和体会。 《英语散文:鉴赏与写作》在编者所在学校面向选修文学类通识课程的非英语专业学生试用,受到学生的广泛好评。有同学反映,英语散文鉴赏课让他们领略到了英语原汁原味的音韵美、修辞美和意境美,英语不再作为获取信息的工具而学得那么功利、无趣,而是作为审美的对象而学得那么感性、生动;也有学生反映,通过大学英语四级或六级考试之后,自己的英语学习似乎进入了一个进步迟缓、成效不彰的漫长时期,即人们常说的“高原现象”,英语散文鉴赏课课时虽少,但内容丰富,涉及词汇、句法、修辞、语篇,以及阅读、写作等方方面面的知识和技能,学习强度很大,所传授的学习方法也非常独特,能帮助学习者有效地克服英语学习的“高原现象”,对进一步提高自己的英语能力和人文素养大有裨益。
Unit One "On Doors"
Unit Two "On Going a Journey"
Unit Three "A Piece of Chalk"
Unit Four "A Relic"
Unit Five "On Lying Awake at Night"
Unit Six "Rude Am I in My Speech"
Unit Seven "About Face"
Unit Eight "La Paz"
Unit Nine "Grieving"
Unit Ten "Trivia"
Unit Eleven "Thomas Hobbes"
Unit Twelve "Disaster Always Waits on Early Wit"
Appendix
《英语散文:鉴赏与写作》:
There is a strange and profound and unknowable reality to these abandoned houses where jealously guarded, even prized possessions have become mere trash: windowpanes long ago smashed, and the spaces where they had been festooned with cobwebs, and cobwebs brushing against your face, catching in your hair like caresses. The peculiar, dank smell of wood rot and mildew, in one of the houses I most recall that had partly burned down, the smell of smoke and scorch, in early summer pervading even the lyric smell of honeysuckle - these haunting smells, never, at the time of experiencing, given specific sources, names.
Where a house has been abandoned - unworthy of being sold to new tenants, very likely seized by the county for default on taxes and the property held in escrow - you can be sure there has been a sad story. There have been devastated lives. Lives to be spoken of pityingly. How they went wrong. Why did she marry him, why did she stay with him? Just desperate people. Ignorant. Poor white trash. Runs in the family. A wrong turn.
Shall I say for the record that ours was a happy, close-knit, and unextraordinary family for our time, place, and economic status? Yet what was vividly real in the solid-built old farmhouse that contained my home (my family consisted of my father, mother, younger brother, grandfather, and grandmother, who owned the property - a slow-failing farm whose principal crop had become Bartlett pears by the time I was a girl) was of far less significance to me than what was real elsewhere. A gone-to-seed landscape had an authority that seemed to me incontestable: the powerful authority of silence in houses from which the human voice had vanished. For the abandoned house contained the future of any house - the lilac tree pushing through the rotted veranda, hornets' nests beneath eaves, windows smashed by vandals, human excrement left to dry on a parlor floor once scrubbed on hands and knees.
……