Lecture 3.3.0 – Love and Marriage: A Common Theme
Lecture Overview
In this lesson, we are going to read and analyze three short stories. A couple of them are written by two very famous writers – Anton Chekhov and James Joyce.
One has the reputation of being the finest playwrights to come along since William Shakespeare. His influence on writers around the world is huge! His name is Anton Chekhov. Chekhov was a Russian writer of short stories, novels as well as plays. He is a personal favourite and you are encouraged to read one of his plays either The Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters. His writing tends to focus on peasants – working class people – especially farmers and those who were close to the land. He is one of the best writers, who could create believable child characters. You’ll read one of those in the last lesson in this series. Chekhov’s stories are understated and open-ended and are frequently very short. He wrote in the Russian language although he could read and speak English as well as French. French was considered essential for educated Russians in the 19th Century. Chekhov was a big fan of the British writer Charles Dickens whom some of you may know and have read – or SHOULD IN THE FUTURE.
The second famous writer you will read in this lesson is Irish - James Joyce. Joyce was primarily a novelist but his short stories are used by many high school teachers here in Canada. If you take our Grade 12 ENG4U you’ll meet James Joyce again!
These two writers were selected because one of their interests as writers – their perspective – is the love between men and women and especially the struggles within a marriage. But marriage as many of us already know isn’t always a lasting affair. Marriages are never guaranteed to last.
So, in this lesson you will enter the world of a young couple about to be married and an older couple whose marriage is both strange and appears to be over. Or is it?
In Lesson 3.4 - The Hero’s Journey in Literature, you will do Unit 3 Test, which is worth 10% of your final course grade. One of the stories in today’s lesson will be included in the test – so it’s important to read each story carefully and respond to the assigned questions that guide your interpretation and understanding of the stories.
A reminder about Annotation from Lesson 3.1 - What is Fiction? What is Short Fiction? The short quiz that follows is based on the why and how of annotation.