Pratica di Shadowing: 1. Introduction - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
Creazione lezione...
1
All right, now I thought I'd begin today.
2
This is, by the way, a regular practice.
3
This is as close as I get to bulleted PowerPoint.
4
It's all there.
5
I ought to have got through those topics by the end of the lecture.
6
If I don't, not to worry, I'll pick up wherever the dotted line emerges in the subsequent lecture.
7
But in any case, I thought I'd begin today by by making a few remarks about the title of our course,
8
because it has some big words in it, theory and literature, but also introduction.
9
I think it's worth saying a word or two about the word introduction as well.
10
Now theory has a very complicated etymological history that I won't trouble you with.
11
The trouble with the etymology of theory and the way in
12
which the word has been used traditionally is that sometimes it actually means practice,
13
and then at other historical periods it means something very different from practice, something typically from which practice is derived.
14
Well, that's the sense of theory that I like to work with, and I would pause over it by saying that after all there is a difference,
15
and we shouldn't too quickly at least confuse the terms.
16
There's a difference between theory and methodology.
17
Yes, it's probably fair enough to say that methodology is applied theory,
18
but there's a great danger in supposing that every aspect of theory has an immediate application.
19
Theory is very often a purely speculative undertaking.
20
It's a hypothesis about something the exact nature of which one needn't necessarily have in view.
21
It's a supposition that whatever the object of theory might be, it must, owing to whatever intellectual constraints one can imagine,
22
be of such a form.
23
At this level of abstraction, plainly, there isn't all that much incentive to apply thinking of that kind.
24
But on the other hand, undoubtedly, theory does exist for the most part to be applied.
25
Very frequently courses of this kind have a text, Lycidas, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,
26
a short story, and then once in a while the disquisition of the lecturer will pause, the text will be produced,
27
and whatever theory has recently been talked about will be applied to the text
28
so that you'll get a post -colonial reading of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, something, by the way, which is absolutely fascinating and important to do,
29
and so on through the course.
30
Now I suppose it's my reluctance to get into the intricacies of questions having to do with applied theory
31
that makes me prefer to keep it simple.
32
Our text is a story for toddlers called Tony the Tow Truck.
33
I've decided not to pass it out today because, because after all I want to get it into the right hands.
34
You can't read it unless you take the course.
35
So I'm going to wait a little bit.
36
We don't come back to it, at least for the moment.
37
But you see that it's mercifully short, and as time passes we will do some rather interesting tricks with it.
38
We will revert, as others revert to Lycidas, to Tawny the Tow Truck for the purpose of introducing questions of applied theory.
39
Now this may suggest a certain condescension both toward theory and toward literary texts, which is not at all intended.
40
It's much more a question of reminding you that if you can do it with this, you can do it with anything,
41
but also of reminding you that after all reading,
42
reading just anything, is a complex and potentially almost unlimited activity.
43
That's one of the good things that theory teaches us and
44
that I hope to be able to get across in the course of our varied approaches to Tony the Tow Truck.
45
Now theory resembles philosophy, perhaps in this,
46
that it asks fundamental questions and also at times builds systems.
47
That is to say, theory has certain ambitions to a totalization of what can be thought that resembles or rivals philosophy.
48
But theory differs from philosophy, and this is something
49
that I'm going to be coming back to persistingly in the second half of this lecture and many times hereafter.
50
Theory differs from most philosophy.
51
V.
52
in that it involves a certain, and this is by no means self -evident, why should this be is one of the questions we're going to be asking.
53
It involves a certain skepticism.
54
There seems to be a doubt, a variety of doubts, about the foundations of what we can think,
55
about the basis of our opinions that pervades theory, seems somehow or another to characterize its history.
56
Now not all theory that we read in this course is skeptical.
57
Some of the most powerful and profound thought that's been devoted to the subject of theory of literature is positive in
58
its intentions and in its views.
59
But by and large you will, happily or unhappily, come to terms with the fact
60
that much of what you're going to be reading this semester is undergirded or perhaps I should could say,
61
undermined by this persisting skepticism.
62
It's crucial, as I say, and I'm going to be coming back to it, but it's just a point I want to make in passing about the nature of theory now.
63
Turning to the word literature, this is not theory of relativity, theory of music, theory of government.
64
This is a course in theory of literature, and theory of literature shares in common with other kinds of literature,
65
other kinds of theory, the need for definition.
66
That is to say, maybe the most central and for me possibly the most fascinating question theory asks is, well, what is literature?
67
How do we know it when we see it?
68
How can we define it?
69
Now much of what we'll be reading takes up the question, what is literature, and provides us with fascinating and always for the moment,
70
I think, enticing definitions.
71
There are definitions based on form, circularity, symmetry, economy of form, lack of economy of form, repetition.
72
There are definitions based on psychological complexity,
73
psychological balance, psychological harmony, sometimes psychological imbalance and disharmony.
74
There are also definitions which insist that somehow there is an epistemological difference between literature and other utterance,
75
whereas most utterances purport to be saying something true about the actual state of things in the world.
76
Literary utterance is under no such obligation.
77
The argument goes and ought properly to be understood as fiction, making it up as opposed to referring.
78
All right, now all of these definitions have had currency.
79
We'll be going over them again and finding them, I hope, more fascinating as we learn more about them.
80
But at the same time, even as I rattle off this list of possibilities, probably you felt yourself an upsurge of skepticism.
81
You said, my goodness, I can easily find exceptions to all those rules.
82
It's ridiculous to think that literature could be defined in any one of those ways
83
or even in a combination of all of them.
84
Literature is many things, a many -splendored thing,
85
You say to yourself, and it simply cannot be confined or trapped within a definition of that kind.
86
Well and good, properly ecumenical of you, but at the same time it gives rise to a sense that possibly,
87
after all, literature just isn't anything at all.
88
In other words, that literature may not be susceptible of any one definition,
89
but it is rather, and this is the so -called neo -pragmatist argument, but it is rather whatever you think it is,
90
or more precisely, whatever your interpretive community says that it is.
91
This isn't really a big problem.
92
It's kind of unsettling because we like to know what things are, but at the same time it's not really a big problem
93
because as long as we know about the fact that a certain notion of literature exists in certain communities,
94
we can begin to do very interesting work precisely with that idea,
95
and we can say there's a great deal to learn about what people think literature is,
96
and we can develop very interesting kinds of thinking about the variety of ways in which these ideas are expressed.
97
So it's not perhaps crippling if this is the conclusion we reach, but at the same time it's not the only possible conclusion.
98
The possibility of definition persists.
99
Definition is important to us, and we're certainly not going to give it short shrift in this course.
100
We're going to make every effort to define literature as carefully as we can.
101
Now in addition to defining literature, Literary theory also asks questions obviously not unrelated but which open up the field somewhat.
102
What causes literature and what are the effects of literature?
103
In a way, there's a subset of questions that arises from those to the effect, and this is of course what we'll be taking up next time,
104
the question, what is an author?
105
That is to say, if something causes literature, there must be some sort of authority behind it,
106
and therefore we find ourselves asking what is an author.
107
By the same token, if literature has effects, it must have effects on someone, and this gives rise to the equally interesting and vexing question,
108
what is a reader?
109
Literary theory is very much involved with questions of that kind,
110
and organizing those questions is basically what that rationalizes the structure of our syllabus.
111
You'll notice that we move in the syllabus after a couple of introductory talks that I'll mention in a minute.
112
We move in the syllabus from the idea
113
that literature is in some sense caused by language to the idea
114
that literature is in some sense caused by the human psyche to the idea
115
that that literature is in some sense caused by social, economic, and historical forces.
116
There are corollaries for those ideas in terms of the kinds of effects
117
that literature has and what we might imagine ourselves to conclude from them.
118
Finally, literary theory asks one other important question.
119
It asks many, but this is the way at least I'm organizing it for today.
120
It asks one other important question the one with which we will actually begin.
121
Not so much what is a reader, but how does reading get done?
122
That is to say, how do we form the conclusion that we are interpreting something adequately,
123
that we have a basis for the kind of reading that we're doing?
124
What is the reading experience like?
125
How do we meet the text face to face?
126
How do we put ourselves in touch with the text, which may after all in a variety of ways be remote from us?
127
Now these are the questions that are asked by what's called hermeneutics, a difficult word that we will be taking up next week.
128
It has to do with the god Hermes who conveyed language to man, in a certain sense, among many other functions,
129
the god of communication, and it is after all obviously about communication.
130
So hermeneutics will be our first topic and it attempts to answer the last question that I'll mention,
131
which is raised by theory of literature.
132
All right, now let me pause quickly over the word introduction.
133
I first started teaching this course in the late 70s and 80s when literary theory was a thing absolutely of the moment.
134
As I told the teaching fellows, I had a colleague in those days who looked at me enviously
135
and said he wished he had the black leather concession at the door.
136
Theory was both hot and cool, and it was something about which,
137
following from that, one had not just opinions but very, very strong opinions.
138
In other words, the teaching fellows I had in those days, Who knows, they may rise up against me in the same way this semester,
139
but the teaching fellows I had in those days said you can't teach an introduction, you can't teach a survey,
140
you can't say if it's Tuesday it must be Foucault, if it's Thursday it must be Lacan.
141
You can't approach theory that way.
142
Theory is important, and it's important to know what you believe, in other words, what the basis of all other possible theory is.
143
I'm a feminist, I'm a Lacanian, I'm a student of Paul Dumont.
144
I believe that these are the foundational moments of theorizing and that if you're going to teach anything like a survey,
145
you've got to derive the rest of it from whatever the moment I happen to subscribe to might be.
146
That's the way it felt to teach theory in those days.
147
It was awkward teaching an introduction, and probably for that reason while I was teaching Lit 300, which was called Lit Y, Paul Neumann was teaching Lit Z.
148
He was teaching a lecture course nearby not at the same time,
149
which was interpretation as practiced by the school of the month.
150
That was lit -z, and it did indeed imply every other form of theory, and it was extremely rigorous and interesting,
151
but it wasn't a survey.
152
It took for granted, in other words, that everything else would derive from the fundamental idea,
153
but it didn't for a minute think that a whole series of fundamental ideas could share space,
154
could be a kind of smorgasbord that you could mix and match in a kind of happy -go -lucky eclectic way,
155
which perhaps we will be seeming to do from time to time in our introductory course.
156
Well now, does one feel any nostalgia for the coolness and heat of this moment?
157
Yes and no. It was fascinating to be, as Wordsworth says, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
158
It was fascinating to be around in those days, But at the same time,
159
I think it's rather advantageous for us to be still in theory.
160
That is to say, we still have views.
161
We still have to recognize that what we think derives from this
162
or that understanding of theory and these or those theoretical principles.
163
We have to understand the way in which what we do and say, what we write in our papers and articles, is grounded in theoretical premises which,
164
which, if we don't come to terms with them,
165
we will simply naively reproduce without being fully aware of how we're using them and how indeed they're using us.
166
So it is as crucial as ever to understand theory.
167
At the same time, we have the vantage point of, I suppose, what we can now call history.
168
Some of what we'll be studying is no longer practiced as that that which is the absolutely necessary central path to methodology.
169
Some of what we're studying has had its moment of flourishing, has remained influential as a paradigm that shapes other paradigms,
170
but is not itself perhaps today the paradigm, which gives us the opportunity of historical perspective so
171
that from time to time during the course of the course
172
I'll be We're trying to say something about why certain theoretical issues and ideas pushed themselves into prominence at certain historical moments,
173
and that too then can become part of our enterprise.
174
So an introduction is not only valuable for those of us who simply wish to acquire knowledge.
175
It's also valuable, I think, in lending an additional perspective to the topic of theory and to an understanding about how theory is,
176
on the one hand, perhaps in a certain sense now, an historical topic and is,
177
on the other hand, something that we're very much engaged in and still committed to.
178
So all that then by way of rationale for teaching and introduction to theory.
179
All right, now the question is, how does literary theory relate to the history of criticism?
180
Now this is a course that I like to teach, too.
181
I usually teach Plato to T .S.
182
Eliot or Plato to I .A.
183
Richards or some sort of important figure in the early twentieth century, and it's a course which is absolutely fascinating in all sorts of ways.
184
It has one very important thing in common with literary theory.
185
That is to say literary criticism is, too, perpetually concerned with the definition of literature.
186
Many of the issues
187
that I raised in talking about defining literature are as relevant for literary criticism as they are for literary theory,
188
and yet we all instinctively know that these are two very different enterprises.
189
Literary theory loses something that literary criticism just takes for granted.
190
Literary theory is not concerned with issues of evaluation and it's not really concerned with concomitant issues of appreciation.
191
Literary theory just takes those for granted as part of the sense experience,
192
as one might say, of any reader and prefers rather to dwell on questions of analysis and speculation,
193
as I've said.
194
Now that's what's lost in theory, but what's new in theory?
195
Here I come to the topic which will occupy most of my attention for the remainder of the lecture.
196
What's new in theory is the element of skepticism.
197
that literary criticism, by and large which is usually affirming a canon of some sort, doesn't reflect.
198
Literary theory, as I say, is skeptical about the foundations of its subject matter
199
and also in many cases about the foundations of what it itself is doing.
200
So the question is how on earth did this come about?
201
It's an historical question, as I say, and I want to devote the rest of the lecture to it.
202
Why should doubt about the veridical or truth -affirming possibilities of interpretation be so widespread in the twentieth century?
203
Now here's a big glop of intellectual history.
204
I think it arises from what one might call and what often is called modernity, not to be confused with modernism and early twentieth -century phenomenon,
205
but the history of modern thought as it usually derives from the generation of Descartes, Shakespeare, Cervantes.
206
Notice something about all of those figures.
207
Shakespeare is preoccupied with figures who may or may not be crazy.
208
Cervantes is preoccupied with a figure who is crazy.
209
We're pretty sure of that, but he certainly is he takes it for granted
210
that he is the most rational and systematic of all thinkers and raises questions about,
211
since we all take ourselves to be rational too, just how we know ourselves not to be paranoid delusives like Don Quixote.
212
So that too can be unsettling
213
when we think of this as happening at a certain contemporaneous moment in the history of thought.
214
Now Descartes, you remember in his meditations, begins by asking a series of questions about how he can know anything,
215
and one of the skeptical questions he asks is, well, might I not be crazy?
216
In other words, Descartes is still thinking along these same lines.
217
He says, well, maybe I've been seized by an evil genius of some kind, or maybe I'm just crazy.
218
Now why, and here's the question,
219
why do we get this nervousness about the relationship between what I know and how I know it arising at this moment?
220
Well, I think it's characterized, at least in part, by what Descartes goes on to say in his meditations.
221
Descartes settles the matter, perhaps somewhat sweeping the question whether he's crazy under the rug because I'm still not sure he answers that question,
222
but he settles the matter famously by saying, saying, I think, therefore, I am.
223
Furthermore, as a concomitant, I think, therefore, all the things that I'm thinking about can be understood to exist as well.
224
Now the Cartesian Revolution establishes something that is absolutely crucial for what we call the enlightenment of the next hundred,
225
hundred and fifty years.
226
In other words, the idea that there is a distance between the mind and the things that it thinks about, but that this distance is a good thing.
227
In other words, if you look too closely at a picture or if you stand too far away from it, you don't see it clearly.
228
It's out of focus.
229
But if you achieve just the right distance from it, it comes into focus.
230
The idea of scientific objectivity, the idea that motivates the creation of the great encyclopedia by the figures of the French Enlightenment,
231
this idea all arises out of the idea that there is a certain appropriate,
232
objective distance between the perceiver and the perceived.
233
Gradually, however, the idea that this distance is not too great begins to erode, so that in 1796 Kant,
234
who isn't exactly enlisted on the side of the skeptics by most of his serious students,
235
nevertheless does say something equally famous as that which Descartes said, and a good deal more disturbing.
236
We cannot know the thing in itself.
237
Now as I said, Kant erected such an incredibly magnificent scaffolding around the thing in itself,
238
that is to say the variety of ways in
239
which although we can't know it we can sort of triangulate it and come to terms with it obliquely, that it seems churlish to enlist him on the side of the skeptics
240
but at the same time there's a sense of a danger in the distance between subject
241
and object that begins to emerge in thinking of this kind.
242
Now by 1807, Hegel and the Phenomenology of Mind is saying that in recent history
243
and in recent developments of consciousness something unfortunate has set in.
244
We have unhappy consciousness, unhappy consciousness which is the result of estrangement and tremdung,
245
which drives us too far away from the thing that we're looking at.
246
We are no longer certain at all of what we're looking at, consciousness therefore feels alienated.
247
All right, so you can already begin to see a development in intellectual history
248
that perhaps opens the way to a certain skepticism, but the crucial thing hasn't yet happened because,
249
after all, in all these accounts, even that of Hegel, there's no doubt about the authority of consciousness to think what it thinks.
250
It may not clearly think about things,
251
about objects, but it has a kind of legitimate basis that generates the sort of thinking that it does.
252
Here's where I want you to look at the passages that I've handed out.
253
Here's where three great figures, there are others but these are considered the seminal figures,
254
begin to raise questions which complicate the whole issue of consciousness.
255
Their argument is it's not just that consciousness doesn't clearly understand what it's looking at and is therefore alienated from it,
256
it's also that consciousness is alienated from its own underpinnings,
257
that it doesn't have any clear sense of where it's coming from any more than what it's looking at.
258
In other words, that consciousness is not only estranged from the world but that it is in and of itself inauthentic.
259
So just quickly look at these passages.
260
Marx, in the famous argument about commodity fetishism and capital,
261
is comparing the way in which we take the product of human labor
262
and turn it into a commodity by saying that it has objective value, by saying that we know what its value is in and of itself.
263
He compares that with religion.
264
The argument is, well, God is a product of human labor.
265
In other words, it's not a completely supercilious
266
God is brought into being the same way objects that we make use of are brought into being.
267
God is a product of human labor.
268
But then we turn around and we say God exists and has value objectively.
269
Marx's argument is that the two forms of belief,
270
belief in the objective value of the commodity and belief in God, are the same.
271
Now whether or not any of this is true, believe me, is neither here nor there.
272
The point that Marx is making is that consciousness, that is to say the way in which we believe things,
273
is determined by factors outside its control.
274
That is to say, in the case of Marx's arguments,
275
social, historical, and economic factors that determine what we think and which in general we call ideology.
276
That is to say ideology is driven by factors beyond the ken of the person who thinks ideologically.
277
So you see the problem for consciousness now is not just a single problem, it's twofold.
278
It's inauthentic relationship with the things it looks at and and also its inauthentic relationship with its own underpinnings.
279
The argument is exactly the same for Nietzsche, only he shifts the ground of attack.
280
For Nietzsche, the underpinnings of consciousness, which make the operations of consciousness inauthentic,
281
are the nature of language itself.
282
That is to say that when we think we're telling the truth, we're actually using worn -out figures of speech.
283
What then is truth? a mobile army of metaphors,
284
metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified,
285
etc., etc., etc., and are now no longer of account as coins but are debased.
286
Now that word now is very important.
287
It suggests that Nietzsche does somehow believe
288
that there's a privileged moment in the history of language
289
when perhaps Perhaps language is a truth serum when it is capable of telling the truth,
290
but language has now simply become a question of worn -out figures.
291
all of which dictates what we believe to be true.
292
I speak in a figurative way about the relationship between the earth and the sky, and I believe that there's a sky god.
293
I speak because I simply don't believe that I'm using figures of speech.
294
All of this is implied in Nietzsche's argument.
295
In other words, language, the nature of language, The way language is received by us in turn determines what we can do with it,
296
which is to say determines what we think, so that for Nietzsche the distortion of truth,
297
that is to say the distortion of the power to observe in consciousness, has as its underlying cause language,
298
the state of language, the status of language.
299
Freud finally argues for exactly the same relationship between consciousness,
300
that is to say what I think I am thinking from minute to minute,
301
and the unconscious, which perpetually in one way or another unsettles what I'm thinking and saying from minute to minute.
302
You know that in the psychopathology of everyday life,
303
Freud reminded us that the Freudian slip isn't something that happens just sometimes and nobody knows knows this better than a lecturer.
304
It's something that happens all the time, and the Freudian slip is something
305
that one lives with simply as a phenomenon of the slippage of consciousness under the influence of the unconscious.
306
Now in the passage I gave you, Freud says a very interesting thing, which is that after all,
307
we have absolutely no objective evidence that the unconscious exists.
308
I mean the unconscious, if I could see the unconscious, it would be conscious, right?
309
The unconscious, what Freud is saying, is something that we have to infer from the way consciousness operates.
310
We've got to infer something.
311
We've got to figure out somehow how it is that consciousness is never completely inhibited, never completely does and says what it wants to say.
312
So the spin on consciousness for Freud is the unconscious.
313
Now someone who didn't fully believe Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud,
314
a very important modern philosopher in the hermeneutic tradition named Paul
315
Ricoeur famously said in the fourth passage on your sheet that these great precursors of modern thought,
316
and particularly, I would immediately add,
317
of modern literary theory, together dominate a school of There is,
318
in other words, in Ricard's view a hermeneutics of suspicion,
319
and skepticism or suspicion is a word that can also be appropriated perhaps more rigorously for philosophy as negativity,
320
that is to say whatever seems manifest or obvious
321
or patent in what we're looking at is undermined for this kind of mind by a negation,
322
which is counterintuitive.
323
That is to say, which would seem not just to qualify what we understand ourselves to be looking at but to undermine it altogether.
324
These tendencies in the way in which Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud have been received.
325
When we read Foucault's What is an Author? next time, we'll return to this question of how Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have been received and what we should make of
326
that in view of Foucault's idea that there's no such thing as an author, but that it's rather dangerous to believe that there are authors.
327
Well, if it's dangerous to believe that there are authors, what about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud?
328
Foucault confronts this question in what is an author and gives us some interesting results of his thinking.
329
For us, the aftermath, even precisely of the passages I've just quoted,
330
but certainly of the oeuvre, of the three authors I've quoted from,
331
can to a large degree be understood as accounting for the topic,
332
the phenomenon of literary theory as we study it.
333
In other words, literary theory, because of the influence of these figures, is to a considerable degree a hermeneutics of suspicion,
334
recognized as such both by its proponents and famously,
335
I think this is perhaps what is historical for you, by its enemies.
336
During the same period when I was first teaching this course, a veritable six -foot shelf.
337
of diatribes against literary theory was being written in the public sphere.
338
There was the most under - I mean you can take or leave literary theory, fine,
339
but the idea that there would be such an incredible outcry against it was one of the most fascinating results of it.
340
That is to say, for many, many, many people literary theory had something to do with the end of civilization as we know it.
341
That's one of the things that seems rather strange to us today from an historical perspective.
342
But the undermining of foundational knowledge, which seemed to be part and parcel of so much that went on in literary theory,
343
was seen as the central,
344
crucial threat to rationality emanating from the academy and and was attacked in those terms in,
345
as I say, at least six feet of lively polemics.
346
All of that is the legacy of literary theory,
347
and as I say, it arises in part from this element of skepticism that I've thought it best to emphasize today.
348
Now I think that one thing Ricœur leaves out, and something that we can anticipate as becoming more
349
and more important for literary theory and other kinds of theory in the twentieth century is Darwin.
350
That is to say, it strikes me that Darwin could very easily be considered a fourth hermeneut of suspicion.
351
Of course Darwin was not interested in suspicion,
352
but he was certainly the founder of ways of thinking about consciousness that are determined,
353
sociobiologically determined, determined in the realm of cognitive science, determined as artificial intelligence, and so on.
354
All of this is Darwinian thinking and I think increasingly will be central in importance in the 21st century.
355
What will alter the shape of literary theory as it was known studied in the twentieth century is,
356
I think, an increasing emphasis on cognitive science
357
and sociobiological approaches both to literature and to interpretive processes
358
that will derive from Darwin in the same way
359
that strands of thinking of the twentieth century derive from the three figures that I've mentioned.
360
But what all this gives rise to, and this brings me finally to the passages
361
which you have on both sides of your sheet and which I don't want to take up today but just to preview.
362
The passages from James Ambassadors, 1903, and from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, 1904.
363
In other words, I'm at pains to remind you that this is a specific historical moment in which, in a variety of ways,
364
the speaker argues that consciousness, that is to say the feeling of being alive and being someone acting in the world,
365
no longer involves agency.
366
The feeling that somehow to be conscious has become to be a puppet,
367
that there is a limitation on what we can do imposed by the idea
368
that consciousness is determined in in ways that we cannot control and cannot get the better of,
369
so that Strasser in The Ambassadors and Yepichidov in The Cherry Orchard speak for a point of view,
370
which is a kind of partially well -informed gloom and doom
371
that could be understood to pervade texts that are much better informed that we will be considering,
372
but nevertheless are especially important as an aspect of their historical moment.
373
I want to begin the next lecture by taking up those passages.
374
Please do bring them, and I will also be passing around Tony the Tow Truck,
375
and I'll give you a brief description of what the little children's book actually looks like, and then we will plunge into the question, what is an author?
376
So I'll see you on Thursday.
📺 Stesso Canale
C12
2. Foundations: This Is Your Brain
University StudentsWorking Adults
C11
The Renovations of Notre-Dame | The Age of Cathedrals with R. Howard Bloch
University StudentsWorking Adults
C11
1. Introduction: What is Political Philosophy?
University StudentsWorking Adults
C16
2. Socratic Citizenship: Plato's Apology
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C15
Contract Law 1 Intro Hamer v Sidway (just say no)
Cambridge Exam PrepBusiness EnglishUniversity Students
✨ Video consigliato
C18
549 frasi
Philosophy of Science Lecture #1: Introduction
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C12
106 frasi
What is History? E.H. Carr
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C11
65 frasi
Gee: What is Discourse
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C13
149 frasi
SEM141 - Speech Acts - An Overview
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C14
88 frasi
Contemporary Topics 2 Unit 5 Lecture with Powerpoint
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C1552 frasi
The Professor Who Taught People How To Think (1962)
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C12
311 frasi
Eco 155: Principles of Macroeconomics Class 1
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C12
124 frasi
bassham ch3pt1
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C1464 frasi
Lec 1 | MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra, Spring 2005
TOEFL PrepCambridge Exam PrepUniversity Students
C115
158 frasi
Introduction to Cognitive Bias: Crash Course Scientific Thinking #1
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C14
135 frasi
String Theory
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione
Questa lezione di conversazione si basa sul video “1. Introduction”. Le parole che ritornano più spesso: theory, literature, literary, consciousness, word. Questo video contiene 376 frasi e 5500 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 39:26. Chi parla mantiene un ritmo costante di circa 139 parole al minuto, comodo per lo shadowing. Il 83% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese; conviene studiare le altre prima di iniziare.
Vocaboli chiave di questo video
15 parole del video che vale la pena imparare, con pronuncia e significato:
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| literary aggettivo | /ˈlɪt.(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/ | letterario |
| consciousness sostantivo | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | conoscenza, coscienza |
| passage sostantivo | /ˈpæsɪd͡ʒ/ | passo |
| lecture sostantivo | /ˈlɛk.t͡ʃə/ | conferenza, lezione |
| unconscious aggettivo | /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/ | svenuto |
| derive verbo | /dɪˈɹaɪv/ | derivare |
| topic sostantivo | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | tema, categoria |
| twentieth aggettivo | /ˈtwɛn.ti.əθ/ | ventesimo, ventesima |
| crucial aggettivo | /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/ | cruciale |
| suspicion sostantivo | /səˈspɪʃ.ən/ | sospetto |
| remind verbo | /ɹəˈmaɪnd/ | ricordare |
| objective sostantivo | /ɒbˈd͡ʒɛk.tɪv/ | obiettivo |
| define verbo | /dɪˈfaɪn/ | definire, determinare |
| psychological aggettivo | /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/ | psicologico |
| arise verbo | /əˈɹaɪz/ | sorgere, apparire |
I phrasal verb che sentirai
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| take up verbo | sollevare, prendere | |
| wear out verbo | fare fuori, consumare | |
| figure out verbo | scoprire, rendersi conto | |
| get across verbo | attraversare | |
| get through verbo | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | superare, farcela |
| hand out verbo | distribuire | |
| open up verbo | aprire | |
| pick up verbo | tirare su, sollevare |
Frasi da ripetere
Frasi brevi e complete del video che puoi riutilizzare nella conversazione di tutti i giorni:
- All right, now I thought I'd begin today.
- You can't read it unless you take the course.
- How do we know it when we see it?
- How can we define it?
- How do we meet the text face to face?
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Frasi condizionali if + frase, will/would + verbo — una condizione e il suo risultato | If I don't, not to worry, I'll pick |
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | has been · I've decided · has remained |
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | is derived · is applied · be applied |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | way, which is · texts, which is · that which is |
Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione
Chi parla usa 83 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come we're, I'm, I've. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.
- I suoni “th”: twentieth /ˈtwɛn.ti.əθ/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, methodology /ˌmɛθ.əˈdɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, nevertheless /ˌnɛvɚðəˈlɛs/, leather /ˈlɛðɚ/
- I suoni “sh” e “zh”: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, crucial /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/, suspicion /səˈspɪʃ.ən/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/
- Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: literary /ˈlɪt.(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, fundamental /ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/, intellectual /ˌɪntəˈlɛkt͡ʃʊəl/, phenomenon /fəˈnɒm.ɪ.nən/
I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:
- /h/ — va soffiata, non è muta: unhappy /ʌnˈhæpi/, whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, wherever /(h)wɛɹˈɛvɚ/, happily /ˈhæp.ə.li/, harmony /ˈhɑ̟ɹ.mə.ni/
- Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, passage /ˈpæsɪd͡ʒ/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, derive /dɪˈɹaɪv/, topic /ˈtɑpɪk/
- /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: passage /ˈpæsɪd͡ʒ/, aspect /ˈæspɛkt/, rational /ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/, unhappy /ʌnˈhæpi/, paradigm /ˈpæɹ.ə.daɪm/
Come esercitarsi con questo video
- Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
- Fai shadowing frase per frase a velocità normale, ripetendo ognuna finché il tuo ritmo coincide con quello di chi parla.
- Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come literary, consciousness, passage.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.