本帖最后由 米饭袜子 于 2009-5-22 22:50 编辑
Culture offers us a rich, nebulous and contested set of resources to engage with the most important question we ever have to ask: how should we live? It allows us to engage with the lives of others in a way which informs our own. From art, literature, film, music, history, psychology, philosophy and science, we discover how people of other ages, genders, classes, religions, countries and centuries managed the tricky task of living.
(开门见山谈culture的作用,下段例证)
From the letters of Abelard1 and Heloise2 we learn how devotion can sustain us through separation, from Goya's black paintings3 how anxiety can consume us, from Virginia Woolf4 how powerful our desire for privacy can be(老米也很喜欢用排比的说,其实排比挺好的,感觉流畅优美,学习学习). We may find individual examples motivating, challenging or comforting, irrelevant, irritating or infuriating(强大的形容词啊). However we respond, engaging with culture sharpens our own sense of what we value and how we want to live. No wonder we are so hungry for it.
(这段不仅例证了上段而且很巧妙地回答了当今人们“文化热”的原因,很自然,让人信服)
For too long great parts of our culture were archived, stewarded and protected by various elites who told us what was important and what was not. Today, more than ever before, each of us has the opportunity to become our own steward, sifting, questioning and reorganising the wealth of ideas available to us. This freedom leads us to think deeply about what we value and why, gleaning ideas and opinions from others not merely to regurgitate them but to form and reform our own. We annotate margins, collect postcards, take photographs, bookmark, blog and comment, creating and recreating personal anthologies or collections or playlists that sustain us in a deeply personal way(这里把culture的含义扩大化大众化了,能很好的迎合作者的观点). As a writer, Jeanette Winterson5, elegantly put it, "The consolation of art is everything you have seen, read, heard and kept inside you as a talisman against the popular lie that nothing matters any more."(的确elegant,记下了)
(上面说culture对大众的重要性,下面则展开面临的barreiers)
There remain significant barriers to accessing and reshaping the cultural inheritance that belongs to all of us. Fear and snobbery are among the most powerful. Thankfully we are beginning to get over the ideologically dated distinction between elite and popular culture. Penguin recently edited extracts from Augustine and Freud, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, Plutarch and Arendt, among others, for their Great Ideas series, offering beautifully designed original texts as a form of cultural self-help. Not all the authors are people whose advice for living we would necessarily want to follow, but reading them broadens our thinking about love, family, politics, work and play, better equipping us to answer the very personal question of how each of us wants to live.
When Oprah Winfrey6 chose Anna Karenina for her book club a couple of years ago, rightly telling readers it is an "extremely sexy(有吸引力的) and engrossing read" and offering "discussion questions, quizzes, character journeys and plot points to uncover the meaning of family and love in 19c Russia", she was inviting us to interpret the passion, anxiety and concern of Tolstoy's characters in relation to our own lives. Far from dumbing down, this kind of enlightened thinking puts culture back where it belongs: in the service of wiser everyday living.
(最后一句不仅非常自然的亮出了作者的观点,而且从头到尾,作者一步步把我们带入她的的观点中,服。另外作者所理解的wising up更贴近生活,更具普遍性,感觉so好)
1 Peter Abelard (Lt: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; Fr: Pierre Abélard) (1079 – April 21, 1142) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century"
2
Living within the precincts of Notre-Dame, under the care of her uncle, the canon Fulbert, was Héloïse. She was remarkable for her knowledge of classical letters, which extended beyond Latin to Greek and Hebrew. Abélard sought a place in Fulbert's house, then seduced Héloïse. The affair interfered with his career, and Abélard himself boasted of his conquest. Once Fulbert found out, they were separated, but met in secret. Héloïse became pregnant and was sent by Abélard to Brittany, where she gave birth to a son she named Astrolabe after the scientific instrument. To appease Fulbert, Abélard proposed a secret marriage in order not to mar his career prospects. Héloïse initially opposed it, but the couple married. When Fulbert publicly disclosed the marriage, and Héloïse denied it, she went to the convent of Argenteuil at Abélard's urging. Fulbert, believing that Abélard wanted to be rid of Héloïse, castrated him, effectively ending Abélard's career. Héloïse was forced to become a nun. Héloïse sent letters to Abélard, questioning why she must submit to a religious life for which she had no calling. According to historian Constant Mews in his The Lost Love Letters of Héloïse and Abélard, a set of 113 anonymous love letters found in a fifteenth century manuscript represent the correspondence exchanged by Héloïse and Abelard during the earlier phase of their affair.
3
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish painter and printmaker. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.
In later life Goya bought a house, called Quinta del Sordo ("Deaf Man's House"), and painted many unusual paintings on canvas and on the walls, including references to witchcraft and war. One of these is the famous work Saturn Devouring His Sons (known informally in some circles as Devoration or Saturn Eats His Child), which displays a Greco-Roman mythological scene of the god Saturn consuming a child, possibly a reference to Spain's ongoing civil conflicts. Moreover, the painting has been seen as "the most essential to our understanding of the human condition in modern times, just as Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling is essential to understanding the tenor of the 16th century".[11]
This painting is one of 14 in a series known as the Black Paintings. After his death the wall paintings were transferred to canvas and remain some of the best examples of the later period of Goya's life when, deafened and driven half-mad by what was probably an encephalitis of some kind, he decided to free himself from painterly strictures of the time and paint whatever nightmarish visions came to him. Many of these works are in the Prado museum in Madrid.
4
Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
5
Jeanette Winterson OBE (born 27 August 1959) is a British novelist. Winterson was born in Manchester, England and raised in Accrington, Lancashire by adopted parents Constance and John William Winterson. On track to becoming a Pentecostal Christian missionary, she began evangelising and writing sermons at age six, but by sixteen Winterson declared she was lesbian and left home.[1] She soon after attended Accrington and Rossendale College and supported herself at a variety of odd jobs while earning her bachelors degree in English literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
After moving to London, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published when she was twenty-four years old. It won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990, which in turn won the BAFTA Award for Best Drama. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion, a novel set in Napoleonic Europe. Winterson's subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual identities, and have won several literary awards. Her stage adaptation of The PowerBook in 2002 opened at the Royal National Theatre, London. She also bought a derelict terraced house in Spitalfields, East London, which she refurbished into a flat as a pied-a-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food.[2] Winterson was made an officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) at the 2006 New Year Honours. 6
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American media personality, Academy Award nominated actress, producer, literary critic and magazine publisher, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.[2] She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century,[3] the most philanthropic African American of all time,[4] and was once the world's only black billionaire.[5][6][7][8][9] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world
Born in rural Mississippi to a poor teenage single mother and later raised in an inner city Milwaukee neighborhood, Winfrey was raped at age 9 and at 14-years-old gave birth to a son, who died in infancy.[13] Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19.[14] Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place,[6] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated. Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,[15] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[15][16][17][18] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,[15] which a Yale study claimed broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.[19] By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture[18] and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.[20] In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race,[21] an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering her a seat in the U.S. senate |