Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Ugliness also lies in the eye of the
beholder.
The Libido for the Ugly
Henry L. Mencken
Quotes from Mencken
• "There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."
• "It is hard enough to put into them what one thinks; it is a
sheer impossibility to put into them what one feels."
– Such skepticism, however, never kept him from trying.
• I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a
curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly
overestimated services on the ethical side have been
more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear
and honest thinking.
• I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I
believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I
believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
Outline
• 1. Pre-reading tasks
– Lead in
– Contexts
• 2. While-reading tasks
– Comprehension (global and local)
– Appreciation (linguistic and rhetorical)
• 3. Post-reading tasks
– Points for consideration
– Description
– Assignments
Teaching Procedures
1. Pre-reading tasks
• 1.1 Questions as lead-in
• 1.2 Understand Contexts
– Social background
– Authorial background
– Comments about Mencken
Pittsburg
Mencken hate these architectural forms.
Mencken favors these architectural forms.
• I opened A Book of Prejudices and began to
read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the
clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he
write like that? And how did one write like that? I
pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing
with his pen. I read on and what amazed me
was not what he said, but how on earth anybody
had the courage to say it. . . . I identified myself
with that book. ----
Richard Wright
• Mencken’s is some of the most biting and
humorous writing ever in America. He
rarely had much good to say about
anybody or anything, though of course
much of his writing is satiric. For those
who aren’t familiar with the master himself,
I’m presenting an on topic sample for your
enjoyment. Though his views are not
necessarily mine, I thought this would help
illustrate that the critique of America’s built
environment as ugly...
Aaron
2. While-reading Tasks
• 2.1 Global understanding (skimming)
– Main idea of each paragraph
• Para 1: Stark contrast of great wealth of the region with the
abominable human inhabitations
• Para 2: Ugliness in the rural area
• Para 3: Ugliness in house design
• Para 4: ugliness in brick color
• Para 5: worst ugliness of the Westmoreland valley
• Para 6: a contrast between the United States and Europe
• Para 7: Assumption: libido for the ugly
• Para 8: make explanations for the aforesaid assumption
• Para 9: conclusion
2. While-reading Tasks
• 2.1 Global understanding
– Macrostructure
• Part I (Para 1) introduction (with a striking contrast)
• Part II (Para 2 to Para 5) description of the
ugliness in Westmoreland.
• Para III (Para 6 to Para 9) the libido of the whole
American race for the ugliness.
2.2 Q & A
1.
What is the function of paragraph 1?
2.
What kind of houses covers the hillsides? What does the author
say about them? What might be the appropriate houses does the
author suggest for this region? (Paragraph 2)
3.
What How does the author describe the houses in that region
4.
What is the effect produced by the elliptical sentence “But what
brick! ”(Paragraph 4)?
5.
Why does Mencken refer to other towns and villages in America
(Para 5)?
6.
What is the purpose of Mencken’s saying “The peasants, however
poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and
charming habitations, even in Spain”? (Para 6)
7.
What does the first sentence in Para 7 imply?
8.
How do you understand the word “mellow” in Line 111 (Para 8)?
9.
What is the thesis of the whole essay?
10.
What is the tone of the essay? Why do you pass this judgment?
2.3 Paraphrase
It (the dreadful scene) reduced the whole
aspiration of man to macabre and depressing joke.
(Para 1)
This dreadful scene makes all human efforts to
improve their destiny appear a ghastly and
saddening joke.
• Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with
some dignity. (Para 4)
• Red brick, even in a steel town, appears
respectable with the passage of time.
• I award this championship only after
laborious research and incessant prayer.
(Para 5)
• I give the highest award for ugliness to
Westmoreland after a lot of research
efforts and continuous praying.
It is impossible to put down the wallpaper
that defaces the average American home of
the lower middle class to mere inadvertence,
or to the obscene humor of the
manufacturers. (Para 7)
It is impossible to attribute the wallpaper that
ruins the beauty of average American home
of the lower middle class to mere
carelessness or oversight, or to the indecent
humor of the manufacturers.
• 2.4 Appreciation
– 2.4.1 Syntactical scheme
• Long and complex sentences
– Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center
of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast
and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on
earth--and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so
intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole
aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.
• How this sentence is structured?
• 2.4 Appreciation
– 2.4.1 Syntactical scheme
• Patterns (SVO, with + n+ pp phrase)
– It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies
running up into the hills.
– And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead
and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the
streaks.( Para 3)
– The function of the above syntactical
schemes
• Right-branching sentence
• Increased formality
• 2.4 Appreciation
– 2.4.2 Figures of speech
•
•
•
•
Hyperbole
Sarcasm and irony
Metaphor
Simile
Hyperbole
• Here was wealth beyond computation(Para.1)
• …of every house in sight (Para.2)
• From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance
of twenty-five miles, there was not one in
sight from the train that did not insult and
lacerate the eye. (Para. 2)
•
• But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic
yellow, and so they have the most loathsome
towns and villages ever seen by mortal
eye.(Para.4)
• But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad,
have I seen anything to compare to the
villages that huddle along the line of the
Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to
Greensburg. (Para.5)
• I have seen, I believe, all of the most
unlovely towns of the world; they are all to
be found in the United States. (Para 5)
• But nowhere on this earth, at home or
abroad, have I seen anything to compare
to the villages that huddle along the line of
the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh
yards to Greensburg. (Para.5)
Sarcasm and/or irony
• I award this championship only after laborious
research and incessant prayer.
• They are incomparable in color, and they are
incomparable in design. (Sarcasm in Para.5)
• It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius,
uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted
all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them.
(Irony Para.5)
• It is incredible... achieved such masterpieces of
horror. (Para.6)
• But in the American village and small town the
pull is always toward ugliness, and in that
Westmoreland valley it has been yielded to with
an eagerness bordering upon passion.
(Sarcasm Para.6)
• It is incredible that mere ignorance should have
achieved such masterpieces of horror. (Sarcasm
and irony Para.6)
• But they chose that clapboarded horror with their
eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it
mellow into its present shocking depravity. (Irony
Para.6)
• Obviously, if there were architects of any
professional sense or dignity in the region,
they would have perfected a chalet to hug
the hillsides.
• In precisely the same way the authors of
the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned
made a deliberate choice. (Para.8)
• The effect is that of a fat woman with a
black eye. (Para 8)
• It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. (Para.8)
Simile
• Some were so bad, and they were among
the most pretentious--churches, stores,
warehouses, and the like--that they were
downright startling; one blinked before
them as one blinks before a man with his
face shot away. (Para. 2)
• a crazy little church just west of Jeannette,
set like a dormer-window on the side of a
bare, leprous hill (Para. 2)
• By the hundreds and thousands these
abominable houses cover the bare
hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic
and decaying cemetery…(Para.3)
3. Post-reading Tasks
• 3.1 Points for consideration
– Do you agree with Mencken’s idea that there
was a natural or biological pull toward
ugliness among Americans? Or do the
Americans voluntarily accept the ugly?
– In Para 2, we find such phrases or statements
as “Unbroken ugliness” and “hideousness
without a break” or “They have taken as their
model a brick set on end”. Explore the reason
why the author chooses these words.
Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were
established, in times very different from the present, by men
whose power of action upon things was insignificant in
comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our
techniques, the adaptability and precision they have
attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a
certainty that profound changes are impending in the
ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a
physical component which can no longer be considered or
treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by
our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years
neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was
from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to
transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting
artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an
amazing change in our very notion of art.”
Benjamin went on to say
• In principle a work of art
(including architectural art)
has always been
reproducible.
• Man-made artifacts could
always be imitated by men.
• Replicas were made by
pupils in practice of their
craft, by masters for
diffusing their works.
Pupils are working, with their
master standing by.
• The Greeks knew only two procedures
of technically reproducing works of art:
founding and stamping.
Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the
only art works which they could produce in
quantity.
• Woodcut graphic art
The age of Engraving and etching
(Renaissance)
Engraving is the practice of incising
a design onto a hard, usually flat
surface, by cutting grooves into it.
The silver, gold, steel, or glass may
be engraved. These images are also
called engravings.
Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acids to
cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a
design in relief in the metal.
The age of lithography(1796)
a method of printing originally based
on the immiscibility of oil and water.
Photography
Photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions
which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.
3D printing(1984)
Digital press (1993)
(Herbert Marcuse,1898-1979)
• A comfortable, smooth, reasonable,
democratic unfreedom prevails in
advanced industrial civilization.
• Marcuse pointed out advanced industrial
society made people one-dimensional
men who lost their creativity and freedom
and dared not pursue an alternative life
different the real life.
• Its (advanced industrial world) productivity
is destructive of the free development of
human needs and faculties… its growth
dependent on the repression of the real
possibilities...
• 3.2 Description
Description
• Outline
– Why do we need to describe?
• Not all texts are of expository or argumentative nature
• All fictions involves description
– What is description?
•
•
•
•
•
Etymology
A working definition
Two elements
Types
Appreciation
– How to create a descriptive piece?
1. What is description?
1.1 Etymology
1.2 A working definition
The art of translating perceptions into words.
1.3 Two elements
1. Object: what is seen or heard
2. Observer: he who sees or hears it
1.4 Types
• A. Objective description
• B. Subjective or impressionistic description
A. Objective description
• Objective description attempts to report
accurately the appearance of an object;
• It is primarily factual, omitting any attention
to the writer, especially with regards to the
writer's feelings.
• The observer seems to be an impersonal
scanning machine.
B. Subjective or impressionistic
description
• Subjective description includes attention to
both the object described and the writer's
emotional responses (internal, personal) to
the object described.
• Subjective description does not seek to
inform but to arouse emotion or appeal to
senses.
1.5 Appreciation
A
• Chestnut street sings a music of its
own. There is the light sliding
swish of trolley poles along the
wire, accompanied by the deep
rocking rumble of the car, and the
crash as it pounds over the crosstracks at Sixth Street. There is the
clear mellow clang of the trolley
gongs, the musical trill of fast
wagon wheels running along the
trolley rails, and the rattle of hoofs
on the cobbled strip between
metals.
What rhetorical
devices have been
employed here?
Parallel elements
the clear mellow..,
Alliteration:
the musical the
trill…,
repetition
of two or
and the rattle…
more initial
Assonance: the
consonant sounds
repetition of two
in words within a
vowel sounds
line.
within a line.
Sliding swish
Trolley
gongs the
Consonance:
repetition of two or
more consonant
sounds within a
line.
Clear mellow clang
• B
• It was a narrow room, with a
rather high ceiling, and
crowded from floor to ceiling
with goodies. There were
rows and rows of hams and
sausages of all shapes and
colors—white, yellow, red,
and black; fat and lean and
round and long rows of
canned preserves, cocoa
and tea.
Polysyndeton is the
use of conjunctions
or connecting words
frequently in a
sentence, placed
very close to one
another.
The Roman historian Suetonius provides us with some
insight into the character and personality of Julius Caesar:
• "He was tall, of a fair complexion, round
limbed, rather full faced, with eyes black
and piercing; he enjoyed excellent health
except toward the close of his life when
he was subject to sudden fainting fits and
disturbances in his sleep. He was likewise
twice seized with the 'falling sickness,'
while engaged in active service.
William Russell, a reporter for the London Times, kept a
diary of his impressions about Abraham Lincoln:
• … there entered, with a shambling, loose, irregular,
almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man,
considerably over six feet in height, with stooping
shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in
hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however,
were far exceeded in proportion by his feet. He
President-elect Lincoln
was dressed in an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit of black,
in February 1861
which put one in mind of an undertaker's uniform at
a funeral; round his neck a rope of black silk was
knotted in a large bulb, with flying ends projecting
beyond the collar of his coat; his turned-down shirtcollar disclosed a sinewy muscular yellow neck,
and above that, nestling in a great black mass of
hair, bristling and compact like a ruff of mourning
pins, rose the strange quaint face and head,
covered with its thatch of wild, republican hair, of
President Lincoln.
March 27, 1861
How a writer may manipulate our
reading experience?
• The kitchen table is rectangular, seventy-two
inches long and thirty inches wide. Made of a
two-inch-thick piece of oak, its top is covered
with a waxy oilcloth patterned in dark red and
blue squares against a white background. In the
right corner, close to the wall, a square blue
ceramic tile serves as the protective base for a
brown earthenware teapot. A single white
placemat has been set to the left of the tile, with
a knife and fork on either side of a white dinner
plate, around nine inches in diameter. On the
plate are two thick pieces of steak.
• Our lives at home converged around the
pleasantly-shaped kitchen table. It was the
magnet that drew our family together quite
warmly. Cut from the sturdiest oak, the
table was tough, smooth, and long
enough for my mother, my two sisters, and
me to work or play on at the same time.
Our favorite light blue ceramic tile,
stationed in the right corner, was the
table's sole defense against the ravages
of everything from a steaming teapot to
the latest red-hot gadget.
Explore differences
In the objective description,
the observer use his or her eyes to scan the table, but
there is no emotional response provoked by the
scene.
In the subjective description,
The narrator scans the table, and put his or her
personal emotions or feeling into the descriptive piece.
Therefore, the table takes on a sense of "utility" and
"meaning“ (the narrator explain the importance of the
table to the household harmony and warmth.
3. How to create a descriptive piece?
Description is organized usually by space order.
Here are some strategies:
--- from a fixed position to moving position
--- from close up to distance
--- from general to specific
--- from subjective to objective
Exercises-Guided writing
• Scene 1: 他坐在桌子边，敞开着衣领，低着
头，手拿着笔，准备写一封长信。
• Collar off, head down and pen in hand, he sat
at the table, preparing to write a long letter.
• Scene 2: 她脸上带着温和的微笑走出来迎接
我，两只大大的眼睛闪闪发光。
• She came out to greet me, with a warm smile
on her face and her large eyes flashing.
• Scene 3:小流氓朝他步步紧逼，手里摇晃着
一条鞭子。
• The young ruffian [hooligan] was advancing
upon him, with a whip swinging in his hand.
• Scene 4: 在我们面前展现一大片金色的稻谷，
稻穗随风飘，稻香遍村庄。
• A vast expanse of golden rice spreads before
us, with the ears waving in the breeze and the
fragrance drifting over the village.
• Scene 5:老头坐了下来，由于痛苦脸色发白，
两颊上还带有泪痕。
The old man sat down, with his face pale with
pain and traces of tears on his cheeks.
• Scene 6: 工程师把两手放在裤子口袋里，踱
来踱去，显得焦虑不安。
• Vexed, the engineer is pacing to and fro, with
his hands (placed) in his trousers’ pockets.
Exercises- free writing
• 3.3 Assignments
– Writing project (no less than 300 words)
• Option 1: A critical essay about the libido for the
ugly?
• Option 2: Libido for the stupid
• Option 3: A descriptive piece about the people
waiting at the bus stop for No.5 Bus in Nanchong
– Preview
Thank you!