The Industrial Revolution

http://www.ltisdschools.org/cms/lib/TX21000349/Centricity/Domain/287/Chapter_25.pdf

Cheltenham, UK - a virtual tour

At the end of August thirty students with four teachers will leave for Cheltenham, England UK, to attend a four- week course of English (European Structural Funds 2007-2013, C1).
                                                           

      

Cheltenham is 150 km west-northwest of London. Here you can take a virtual tour here and learn about the town and its sorroundings in the slideshow here.

What's the weather like today in Cheltenham? There you are:

Curious about food- fashion- history- famous people born in Cheltenham, etc. etc.? We will post more here on these subject in the next days. Stay tuned!

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters from Naples

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, never returned to England after his second visit to Italy in  1818, which he travelled extensively and where he wrote several of his important poetical works (Ode to the West Wind). Here you can read a more detailed biography.

By Amelia Curran (1775-1847)

As every traveller in that time, P. B. Shelley has left a number of letters to friends, telling his experiences and thoughts in the places which he visited - Bologna, Ravenna, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Naples, and others. In a letter from Naples to a friend, he explained that "I keep no journal, and the only records of my voyage will be the letters I send you".

The poet wrote an  Ode to Naples, while these verses from the Ode to the West Wind

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,	30
Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay...

hint to the Gulf of Pozzuoli and its islands.

Bacchus and Agathodaemon with Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, House of the Centenary.

Now at Napoli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale

To have an idea of Shelley's impressions on the places, the people, the cultures he met in our region,  read both the letters from Naples - here and here -, where he tells of his visits to Pompeii, Paestum and the Vesuvius.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass

« Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought  Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’ ».

So runs one of the most famous incipits in the Victorian  literature about the most famous little girl in her age. 

The hint to the need of "pictures" and "conversation" in books might lead us to think to a children book - and this is what Alice in Wonderland, 1865, is often supposed to be. But, though  full of pictures and conversation, Alice's kid jokes  get to the adult mind.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898) was a mathematician and a university professor. He  wrote books like The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically or Symbolic Logic, he invented mathematical and language games. Alice is not simply a scherzo on the fantastic adventures of a ten-years-old girl. Jokes were a serious matter to the author. To know more on this aspect of his activity, give a look at the Lewis Carroll Society of North America:  you will find as much mathematics and logic as fiction.

Consider Alice and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, 1872, weird cases and character list: a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat, obsessed by time, the girl Alice becoming disproportionately tall or short after having a cake or a drink (objects appear different to us as we change our viewpoint), Alice discussing with a parrot in a "queer-looking party" of birds and animals. The parrot states he is right because « ‘I am older than you, and must know better’... ».  Yet, Alice is a reflexive little girl, so she  « "would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said" »  (how to solve a problem if one or several data are missing?). Not to say of the puns. The Mouse about to tell Alice a tale says  « ‘Mine is a long and a sad tale!’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. ‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice... ». 
I will stop here for the moment (the list is very long) and make a few considerations. Strange animals, illogical assertions. Alice is always the voice of logic, she faces the strange adventures feeling the strength of logical thinking. Whenever she renounces to rebut to absurdities, that is simply because she chooses to do that, she's too polite and she knows it would be no use.

*   *   *  

The chapter Advice from a Caterpillar is especially exemplar of the tone of the whole book: a queer character, a weird picture, a poem resembling an ancient ballad in the form, but quite absurd in the content, Alice challenged in her convictions.

                                                    Illustration by John Tenniel, 1820-1914

« ‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I— I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’»

Then  « ‘What size do you want to be?’ »  it asked. In order to go back to her familiar height, the Catrpillar suggests Alice to eat a piece of mushroom: « ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter’ ». But the mushroom "was perfectly round" so Alice "found this a very difficult question". 

... to be continued

G. Orwell, "Newspeak"

by Valentino G., V C 2009-2010. English versione by Loriano A., ... R., Gianluca R., V F 2011-2012

In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published 1948 by George Orwell, he describes the world Oceania (pink on the map below), where “the” Party controls every citizen’s word and action, night and day, trough the “telescreen”, a tv  that can both receive and transmit images and sounds.

But for the control to be complete, it is necessary to reduce the essence thought itself. One of the most worrisome element in the novel is the “Newspeak”, a highly artificial language, that in the aims of the Party in a not so far future will become the only allowed linguistic instrument.

Netiquette

James Joyce, Dubliners

Here is a link to the audio file of Eveline, which you have recently read.

Two gallants is the next story to read.
Look for a definition of gallant in an online dictionary (for example, the Merriam-Webster), go to the end and say if, in your opinion, the title matches the content.
What object represent epiphany in this story?

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

di Giovanni A., Marco C., Marco, D'A., Daniele L., Franco L., Simone L., Chiara M., Andrea M., Daniele M., Lorenzo N., Pierpaolo N., Erica P., Alessio S., IV E PNI 2011-2012

"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country...".
So starts one of the most famous ever novels, Robinson Crusoe, first published in London in 1719 by Daniel Defoe, ca. 1659–1661 - 1731.

Today we simply refer to the book mentioning its eponymous hero, but on the title page of the first edition you read The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un‐inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pirates.

In that time, book titles used to be a kind of summary, a form of advertising:  the title had to attract the readers and introduce them into the core of the story.

Robinson's Crusoe's voyage, from

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/journeys/voyage_html/images/globes2.jpg

Robinson's journey started from Bristol, England, when he was nineteen. He was a merchant’s son, who did not want to prosecute his father’s job. He was captured by pirates, but succeeded in escaping from them. He reached Brazil and started to work in plantations. He left a second time for a slave trade, but the ship was caught in a storm:

And now our case was very dismal indeed; for we all saw plainly that the sea went so high that the boat could not live, and that we should be inevitably drowned. As to making sail, we had none, nor if we had could we have done anything with it; so we worked at the oar towards the land, though with heavy hearts, like men going to execution; for we all knew that when the boat came near the shore she would be dashed in a thousand pieces by the breach of the sea. However, we committed our souls to God in the most earnest manner; and the wind driving us towards the shore, we hastened our destruction with our own hands, pulling as well as we could towards land. (Chapter 3, http://www.online-literature.com/defoe/crusoe/3/).

Crusoe was shipwrecked off a desert island and the only survivor. There he lived for the following twenty-eight years.
Actually, the island was used as a ritual place by a tribe of native cannibals. One day Robinson surprised them while they were going to kill three prisoners and succeeded in rescuing one of them: he is Friday, who owes his name to the day of the week when he appeared on the island.  Crusoe was happy: he had found a servant and companion, whom he taught  English and the principles of the Christian religion.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered a science-fiction novel. Actually, the author wanted to represent a totalitarian political system which was not at all fictional, based as it was on the Fascist and Stalinist  régimes of his times. In fact, the book was published in 1948 - the last two figures being the reverse of those in the title. Here you can read how language was manipulated to control the people's minds. By the way, the passage is in Italian. Who will translate it into English?

For general information on the novel click here.
A beautiful online edition of the whole book is the following, from the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Dinosaurs

For all those who wanted to see dinosaurs at Città della Scienza, check the great musical science project Symphony of Science. The songs remix music and speeches from famous scientists. Unfortunately, the lyrics for this song is missing.