跟讀練習: The Art World Couldn't Understand William Blake - 通過影片學習英語口語
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128 句
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This is a coin sorter and it's a useful tool to help me explain why certain works of art become classics,
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get taught in schools, live on in the culture, while so many others just disappear into oblivion.
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In order to achieve that level of prestige, it's not always enough for creative work to be beautiful or thought -provoking.
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It also has to fit into one of a handful of accepted categories.
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Categories like painting, poetry, the novel, or the film.
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When a work of art drops into one of these channels it enters a whole ecosystem of commercial, critical, and scholarly attention.
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Institutions that can promote it, consecrate it, and preserve it.
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You can think of this whole coin sorter as that ecosystem.
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All the institutions that comprise it have for a very long time been organized to classify work in this way.
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And when something comes along that can't be classified, well, the ecosystem has a hard time assimilating or even seeing it.
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And left on the outside, its chances of long -term survival are slim.
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This is a predicament that unclassifiable artists have faced for centuries.
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And for centuries, so many of them have found solace and inspiration in the radical visionary work of William Blake,
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the patron saint of unclassifiable artists.
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Here, take a look at this.
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How would you categorize this from Blake's book
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Songs of Innocence?
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Is it poetry?
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Is it illustration?
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Well, there's a poem here, a short one, you can see, but it's embedded in this gorgeous design,
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in the curving spiky stem of this evocative red flower.
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Despite what you might expect, this imagery is not a depiction of the subject of the poem.
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Not really.
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The poem makes no mention of a flower.
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Each of the two art forms have their own aesthetic and symbolic integrity, neither one subordinate to the other.
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And yet, when you put them together like this, their interaction, their dialogue, creates something new.
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What you're seeing here, these are not paintings.
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They're prints of engravings from Blake's illuminated books, which he designed, wrote, etched,
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colored, and printed himself using a technique that he invented.
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These extraordinary books are works of art that mix and synthesize categories.
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And as a result, the art world of the late 17 and early 1800s didn't really know what to make of them.
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And Blake never sold more than a handful.
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At that time, the ecosystem that we've been talking about was in the process of forming and hardening.
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The key event in England was the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 when Blake was 11 years old.
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The Royal Academy was one of several similar institutions springing up across Europe in this period, institutions that elevated the status of the fine arts
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while also wielding their power to help define the standards by which art was judged.
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The Academy in England trained students to be obedient to its values and rewarded
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that obedience at their annual exhibitions where a good placement on the wall could make an artist's reputation
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and create a demand from private clients.
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In turn, these exhibitions, which were popular events, shaped the taste of collectors, patrons, and the public, dramatically expanding the commercial market for artworks.
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After apprenticing as an engraver, a 21 -year -old
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Blake entered the Royal Academy as a student in 1779, but quickly found himself at odds with its teaching,
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especially the aesthetic philosophy of its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds.
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Blake despised Reynolds' emphasis on generalizing and idealizing nature
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and hated his reverence for Venetian and Flemish -style oil painting with its soft tonal variations and blurred contours.
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Blake believed that art should come from within,
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from imaginative vision, and he preferred the strong lines and distinct forms of artists like Raphael and Durr.
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Blake just didn't fit at the Academy.
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By refusing to work in oils, his paintings were classed as watercolors, considered a minor medium.
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He was primarily regarded as an engraver anyway, which the Academy treated as an even lesser art, but he didn't fit there either.
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As Eileen Ward points out, engravers were valued to the extent that they approximated the effects of the works they copied.
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Blake could do that, he earned a living doing that, but his creative focus was on his own original designs, and that was very uncommon.
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What's more, many of those designs incorporated the entirely different art form of poetry.
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There was simply no category that could contain him.
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His choice, Morris Eaves writes, to work as a maker of words, maker of images, and crossbreeder of both,
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amounted to a decision to live in incommensurable neighborhoods of meaning.
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He swam against the current of modern human understanding, whose bedrock is the principle of specialization.
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Why was Blake like this?
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Why did he resist, at the cost of money and recognition, that trend towards specialization?
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Well, I think the answer could be found in possibly his greatest work ever, his engravings of the Book of Job.
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Here, check this out.
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So this series includes 22 engraved illustrations like this, based on earlier watercolors that
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Blake made for a patron.
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In the engravings, however, you can see
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that he added these ornate borders full of symbolic imagery and handwritten quotes from the Bible.
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His blending of text and image, his mixing of media, it's more than a stylistic choice.
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It's a thematic one.
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You see, Blake believed that the fall of man, the source of human suffering, was a fall into division.
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A division of body from spirit, man from woman, person from nature, humanity from God.
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All around him, he saw one faculty of the human mind, reason, claiming dominance over all others,
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measuring, explaining, dividing everything in its path, even the arts and religion.
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It's this situation that led to the rigid classifications and hierarchies that he saw at the Royal Academy,
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and to a dry, legalistic interpretation of the Bible.
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For Blake, the Book of Job isn't the story of a righteous man being tested by an inscrutable God.
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It's the story of a man who believes mistakenly that salvation requires a slavish obedience to words written in a book.
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That's what Job's doing in this first page.
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Surrounded by his wife and children, Bible on his lap, he's performing what he believes is piety.
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But the moment is cheerless, empty.
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Above him, musical instruments hang like fruit on the tree, unused.
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There's no music, no vitality in the scene where the sun retreats behind the horizon and the sheep doze.
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As the caption says, thus did Job continually.
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This is what
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Job does out of habit, unthinkingly, day after day after day.
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The text recontextualizes the image and vice versa.
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The very existence of the surrounding border suggests that there's a wider perspective that
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Job can't see.
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He can't see that submission to the letter killeth, that only spirit giveth life.
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For Blake, God doesn't exist in some separate heaven above man.
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Job looks up where he believes the deity resides, but there's no God there, only more words.
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All throughout the series, as Job goes through his trials, as his worldview begins to change, there is this interplay between border and image,
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image and text, inviting our creative participation to interpret Blake's meaning.
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Gradually, Job learns the folly of a religion based on law, tradition, received wisdom.
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By page 14, his experience of divinity is no longer mediated by a book.
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He and his wife and his friends apprehend creation directly, and the glory of creation, with God not at the top but at the center,
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expands past the border of the image and fills the whole sheet.
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On page 17, the book has been moved from the image proper into the lower margin.
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As the caption says, I have heard thee with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye seeth thee.
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And who does he see?
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It's Christ, the divine inhuman, entreating Job to see the divine in himself.
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Books are not discarded entirely here.
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They're just restored to their proper place in the balance.
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For Blake, words aren't evil in themselves, just as reason isn't evil.
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The danger comes when we try to understand reality through words alone, or reason alone, or any one fragment of the human soul.
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The danger is when we divide and sort ourselves.
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Blake's antidote to classification and division is imaginative art, an art that seeks to reunify what's been split apart.
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His plea for that unity is expressed in his work, but as with the engravings of Job, it's also enacted by it.
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Words and images coalesce in an art object made without a division of labor.
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The writing, designing, engraving, coloring, printing, they're all the product of a single set of hands, a single visionary mind.
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In 1827, at age 69, William Blake died in poverty and relative obscurity.
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And when he was rediscovered some decades after his death, his resurrectors did so by isolating the component parts of his work,
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ripping his poetry from the surrounding designs and printing it in nice, respectable font, formatted and categorized for scholarly attention.
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Next year, 2027, will mark two centuries since Blake's death,
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and in that time we've become much better at recognizing and celebrating art that crosses boundaries, that can't be contained by any one category.
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But the ecosystem will always need categories, and there will always be unclassifiable artists whose work.. is overlooked.
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If you, you, happen to be one of those artists, you already know what there is to lose by being so radical.
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Let the visionary work of William Blake remind you of all there is to gain.
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推薦影片
本課的詞彙與口語要點
這節口語課以影片“The Art World Couldn't Understand William Blake”為素材。 影片中反覆出現的詞有:Blake, image, Academy。 這段影片共有 128 個句子、1786 個單詞可供跟讀。 講話部分時長為 11:19。 說話人語速自然,每分鐘約 158 個詞,接近日常對話。 只有 77% 的單詞屬於英語最常用的 3,000 詞,詞彙難度較高。
影片中的重點詞彙
影片中 15 個值得學習的單詞,附發音和釋義:
| 單詞 | 發音 | 釋義 |
|---|---|---|
| ecosystem 名詞 | /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/ | 生態系 /生態系, 生態系統 /生態系統 |
| poetry 名詞 | /ˈpoʊ.ə.tɹi/ | 詩歌 /詩歌, 詩 /詩 |
| poem 名詞 | /ˈpoʊ.əm/ | 詩 /詩, 詩篇 /詩篇 |
| surround 動詞 | /səˈɹaʊnd/ | 包圍 /包圍, 圍繞 /圍繞 |
| flower 名詞 | /ˈfloʊɚ/ | хуа, хуар |
| exhibition 名詞 | /ɛksɪˈbɪʃən/ | 展覽會 /展覽會, 展示會 /展示會 |
| expand 動詞 | /ɪkˈspænd/ | 擴充套件 /擴充套件, 擴張 /擴張 |
| radical 名詞 | /ˈɹædɪkəl/ | 根 |
| divine 形容詞 | /dɪˈvaɪn/ | 神的 |
| maker 名詞 | /ˈmeɪk.ɚ/ | 製造者 /製造者 |
| coin 名詞 | /ˈkoɪ̯n/ | 硬幣 /硬幣, 銅錢 /銅錢 |
| classification 名詞 | /ˌklæsɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/ | 分類 /分類 |
| divide 動詞 | /dɪˈvaɪd/ | 分, 分裂 |
| handful 名詞 | /ˈhæn(d)fʊl/ | 少數 /少數 |
| aesthetic 形容詞 | /ɛsˈθɛ.tɪk/ | 審美的 /審美的 |
影片中出現的短語動詞
| 單詞 | 發音 | 釋義 |
|---|---|---|
| come along 動詞 | 陪伴, 陪同 | |
| go through 動詞 | 通過 /通過 | |
| look up 動詞 | /ˌlʊk ˈʌp/ | 仰, 上看 |
| point out 動詞 | 指, 指出 | |
| show up 動詞 | 露面 |
影片中的語法
說話人最常用的結構,並附上影片中的原話:
| 結構 | 影片中的用法 |
|---|---|
| 被動語態 be + 過去分詞 — 強調發生了什麼,而不是誰做的 | been organized · can't be classified · was judged |
| 現在完成時 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去發生但與現在仍有關聯的事 | have faced · have found · has been moved |
| 定語從句 who / which + 從句 — 補充說明人或事物 | exhibitions, which were · man who believes |
需要注意的發音
說話人用了 20 次縮略和弱讀形式,例如 can't, didn't, they're。請按聽到的簡短形式來說。
- “sh” 和 “zh” 音: exhibition /ɛksɪˈbɪʃən/, classification /ˌklæsɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/, illustration /ˌɪləsˈtɹeɪ̯ʃən/, caption /ˈkæp.ʃən/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/
- 長單詞——注意重音位置: ecosystem /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/, exhibition /ɛksɪˈbɪʃən/, classification /ˌklæsɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/, illustration /ˌɪləsˈtɹeɪ̯ʃən/, primarily /ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/
中文母語者容易讀錯的音:
- /v/ — 不要讀成 /w/,上齒輕觸下唇: divine /dɪˈvaɪn/, divide /dɪˈvaɪd/, relative /ˈɹɛl.ə.tɪv/, poverty /ˈpɑːvɚti/, survival /sɚˈvaɪ.vəl/
- 詞尾子音 — 要讀清楚,後面不要加母音: surround /səˈɹaʊnd/, expand /ɪkˈspænd/, divide /dɪˈvaɪd/, aesthetic /ɛsˈθɛ.tɪk/, relative /ˈɹɛl.ə.tɪv/
- /r/ 和 /l/ 的區別: radical /ˈɹædɪkəl/, illustration /ˌɪləsˈtɹeɪ̯ʃən/, primarily /ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/, relative /ˈɹɛl.ə.tɪv/, glory /ˈɡlɔːɹi/
如何用這段影片練習
- 先完整聽一遍影片,不要開口,記下不認識的單詞。
- 先用 0.75 倍速逐句跟讀,熟練之後再回到正常速度。
- 錄下自己的聲音並與原聲對比,特別注意 ecosystem, poetry, poem 這類單詞。
什麼是跟讀法?
跟讀法 (Shadowing) 是一種有科學依據的語言學習技巧,最初開發用於專業口譯員的培訓,並由多語言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。這個方法簡單而強大:您在聽英語母語原聲的同時立即大聲重複——就像是一個延遲1-2秒緊跟說話者的影子。與被動聽力或語法練習不同,跟讀法強迫您的大腦和口腔肌肉同時處理並模模擬實的講話模式。研究表明它能顯著提高發音準確性,語調,節奏,連讀,聽力理解和口語流利度——使其成為雅思口語備考和真實英語交流最有效的方法之一。














