多读些书，让我们用实力来碾压所有考试和比赛

USAP(美国中学五项全能)中国赛区刚刚结束，深圳的孩子们战果颇丰（全部都进入决赛，自豪脸）。

但是，文学项目还是相对比较奖牌比较珍稀。

虽然大家比赛前觉得备考资料比较少（内容只有艺术的三分之一），咋一看感觉需要吃透的材料似乎不多，觉得简单，但现实是获奖的同学寥寥。

为什么呢？Domino觉得文学其实是美国／英国初高中课堂上说的English， 类似于我们的语文课，是必修的课。

虽然备考资料没有很多，但知识储备要求很多。

不好好下功夫，薄薄的几页材料，也很难啃下。

SAT 阅读也是一样。

文学和历史这两类需要积淀的文章是考生最大的盲区。

其中考到：作者的tone, 文本的evidence，文学手法的使用和效果，等等。

这些都不是一篇两篇阅读练习就可以拿下的。

当然还有SAT写作。

五十分钟需要阅读历史文献，并且完成写作任务。

文章长度在650－750字之间，涉及到一个特殊时期的历史现象。

作者用上了文本evidence, 文学手法（具有风格的写作）以及说理来希望读者接受一个建议或者观点。

对阅读能力要求很高的还有AP美国史和AP文学（具体考试分析见＋链接 “关于AP美国历史，你需要知道的所有事情”），都是由阅读材料堆砌而成的。

如果没有阅读量上的积累，首先文本就无法理解，更别提做题和写分析类文章的准确了（没错analytical essay是这两个考试的重头戏）。

所以，这个学期我们一起读小说吧～

Domino 选择了九部英美文学经典作品，每周和大家一起阅读赏析一部作品。

这些作品涉及到的文学流派有现实主义，浪漫主义，唯美主义，和黑色幽默等，历史背景跨度从法国革命, 爵士时代到民权运动，虚构的故事中蕴涵着深刻的历史思考，这些小说包括：

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, 1859

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1885

The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde, 1890

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899

Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, 1915

The Great Gatsby, F.

Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952

Lord of Files, William Golding, 1954

Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1961

我们的赏析分为四个层次：

1.选章阅读点评；

2.小说人物塑造；

3.历史背景和影响；

4.文学手法和效果。

接下来以 A Tale of Two Cities 作为范例。

全书分为三册。

主要情节是

故事发生时，政治犯Doctor Manette在Bastille牢狱度过了十八年的囚徒生活，年事已高的他终于得以释放，并与女儿在England重聚。

这那里，有两位男士都倾心于女儿 Lucie Manette，一位是Charles Darnay，被流放的法国贵族，另一位是Sydney Carton，声名狼藉但出色的英国律师。

两位男士的命运也因此相互缠绕。

在伦敦静谧的道路上， 他们被迫来到了充满血腥和复仇气息的巴黎。

此时的巴黎正处于专制镇压革命的恐怖统治巅峰，很快两人便被断头台的致命阴影笼罩着。

“After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England.

There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette.

From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.”

https://www.

goodreads.

com/book/show/1953.

A_Tale_of_Two_Cities

小说因为成书于一两百年前，再加上作者故意为之的选词，很多表达的意思和现代英语是不一样的，会造成阅读的困难，但我们不需要细嚼每一个词的含义，我们可以更专注于Dickens是如何塑造主要人物，以及人物的命运是如何与革命和战争相联系。

作者用到了大量的文学手法，如明喻，暗喻和典故等。

我们在课上会分析到这些手法的使用是如何使人物的形象清晰起来，并跃于纸上的。

首先，我们需要在课上先了解一些文学手法和概念。

这样我们才能更好的文学作品它们的出现劼，以及给读者带来了什么文字上的冲击。

正如，“离不开你，我失去了活下去的力量”和“离开了你，我就像搁浅在沙滩的鲨鱼”，哪个会更触动内心的柔软呢？

接着，我们要赏析选篇。

课上会选择前两章来分析，小说的大环境是如何营造出来的，主角是如何走进读者的视野并在文字中丰满起来的。

要理解好文本的含义，词表可不能少。

接下来请大家先阅读第一章的内容吧～

A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us,

we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France.

In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.

Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this.

Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster.

Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs.

Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.

Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.

It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution.

But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting.

Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security;

the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away;

the mall was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:”

after which the mall was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one

highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball;

thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St.

Giles's, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way.

In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday;

now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.

Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand.

Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them.