109 年 國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班文學組《文學作品分析》

Read the following three sonnets written by different English/American poets of different historical periods. Answer the following questions respectively in essay style : (50%)

"Sonnet 130" by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

"Scorn not the Sonnet" by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains-alas, too few!

"Sonnet" by Billy Collins (1941- )
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this next one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

A. Explain the introduction of the sonnet form as a literary genre into English literature. (10%)
B. In what way(s) does Shakespeare endow his sonnet quoted below with innovative and/or reformist spirit? (10%)
C. In what way(s) does Shakespeare's couplet differ from its preceding stanzas/quatrains, octave or sestet in the entire sonnet poem? (10%)
D. What is Wordsworth's attitude toward and/or evaluation of sonnet as a literary form? (10%)
E. What is Billy Collins' attitude toward and/or evaluation of sonnet as a literary form? (10%)

The Call for Papers of EALA (English and American Literature, Taiwan) 2020 International Conference teases out a good number of English/American literary works that have largely drawn on the concept of dream in a variety of manners:

The history of English and American literature is punctuated by descriptions of dreams in all their guises and disguises. William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream explores the comedy that arises when human beings encounter mischievous fairies. Horace Walpole maintains that one particular dream inspires him to write The Castle of Otranto, arguably the first Gothic novel in English literature. As a co-author of Lyrical Ballads and founding figure of British Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sometimes considers himself a loyal scrivener of his transient oriental dreams. When Jane Eyre tells Rochester that she has strange dreams and when Lockwood's sleep is disturbed by wuthering nightmares, we see how important such altered states of consciousness are for the two Brontë sisters. This interest in the peculiar working of mind flourishes in the twentieth century, when Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot experiment with the Protean ways through which words capture the intricate and interwoven streaming of human consciousness. American literature celebrates and dramatizes the power of dreams with no less fervor than its English counterpart. From Washington Irving's short story "Rip Van Winkle" to Walt Whitman's poems, from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays to William Faulkner's novels, writers after writers investigate what happen when our banal quotidian experiences are unsettled by defiant fantasies or unquieted by a spiritual yearning for a world better or braver. Such yearning also finds itself in the notion known as "The American Dream." When novelists, poets and playwrights explore what this grandiose ideal signifies for them, they not only popularize this sanguine idealism, but they also encourage their readers to probe into the latent utopian and dystopian characters involved in such a celebrated term.

Based on your personal reading experience, choose your own TWO English/American literary works/texts that are pertinent to the notion of dream, consciousness, unconsciousness, or subconsciousness, as demonstrated in the above thematic statement. Compare and contrast their similarities and differences from the following perspectives in essay style: (50%)

A) the authors' historical backgrounds (10%)
B) the authors' modes of characterization (10%)
C) the authors' thematic concerns (10%)
D) the authors' special technical dimensions (10%)
E) your personal preference between the two works and your reason(s) (10%)