The  “a raisin in the sun” is essentially about dreams. The stage directions in “a Raisin in the Sun” were particular and vital. Some of the stage directions were very descriptive in not only the action but the mood that was to be portrayed by the characters. The author vividly describes each character’s attitude and action; for example, in A RAISIN IN THE SUN 41, MAMA I ain’t meddling. (Pause) Put a lot of nice butter on it? (RUTH shoots her an angry look and does not reply) He likes lots of butter. Hansberry also brings the characters to the audience by narrating everyone’s dream and struggle to deal with the oppressive circumstances that rule their lives. The story describes a significant conflict in the novel the Youngers, a working-class black family, struggle against economic hardship and racial prejudice. Mama’s greatest dream for her family is to have a house where the whole family can live comfortably. Walter wants to be rich, and devises plans to acquire wealth with his friends. Beneatha’s dream is to become a doctor and to save her race from ignorance. All the characters’ efforts described by the author have a common goal: improving their social status and having a quality life in the U.S，even they live in a narrow and gloomy environment.

After I finished reading “Benito Cerino” by author Herman Melville, I can conclude that the main character of “Benito Cereno” is not Captain Delano;  his character does not change in the course of the story, other than his awakening to the true relationship of Cereno and the slaves. Rather, the protagonist is Cereno himself, who falls under “the shadow of the Negro” in the course of the tale, eventually leading to his death. Cereno plays a significant role in saving his fellows Spanish, who survived the disease and the repression of the slaves. Melville is not condemning slavery in his novel but depicts the subtle relationship between the various characters. The negative or positive of the story is depending on the reader’s perspectives; There are three main characters in this novel,  the white captive Cereno, the white commander Delano and the black slave Gbagbo. From Babo’s perspective, the novella positively depicts enslavement because it is from the perspective of Spaniard or white; the opinion is opposite Babo. in the end, Cereno and all the sailors were threatened with instant death if they give anything away. Cereno struggled between wanting to tell Delano the truth and the constant threat of Babo. Finally, he leaped overboard into Delano’s boat. Slavery is part of our human history; even in today’s world, slavery still exists but in a different form. Slavery is not based only on race but also on social status, religion. The characters in the story reflect all the things React differently. The reader could empathize with Babo and other slaves, but the Darkside of human history can never change. I think Melville is exploring intriguing of the relationship between blacks and whites through his novel.

I would like to talk about the movie called Green book,  the movie describes how a white man changes his mind about a black musician in a narrative way. Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult, he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’, and a chauffeur. Shirley about to embark on a concert tour in the Deep South in 1962. In need of a driver and protection, Shirley recruits Tony Lip, a tough-talking bouncer from an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. Despite their differences, the two men soon develop an unexpected bond while confronting racism and danger in an era of segregation. for example, After a bar incident leads to a group of white men threatening Don’s life, Tony rescues him by threatening to pull a gun on them. He instructs Don not to go out without him for the rest of the tour.     

 Culler mentions narrative give pleasure, to amuse listeners by giving a new twist to familiar situations. the pleasure of the narrative is linked to the desire. plots tell of desire and what befalls it, but the movement of narrative itself is driven by a desire. stories also have the function that teaching us about the word, showing us how it works, enabling us through the devices of focalization to see things from other vantage points and to understand others. novels in the western tradition show how aspirations are tamed and desires adjusted to social reality. narratives also provide a mode of social criticism, they expose the hollowness of worldly success, the world’s corruption, they expose the predicaments of the oppressed.

According to Culler, poetry is related to rhetoric in which poetry is the language that makes abundant use of figures of speech and language that aim to be powerfully persuasive.  In Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History”, he uses unique rhetorical figures at the beginning of the poem “in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History”  to show the charm of the poem. As Culler mentioned in the  chapter, Metaphor has been treated as basic language and the imagination because it is cognitively respectable, not inherently frivolous or ornamental,  it is the part which I am interested in. Literature depends on rhetorical figures but also on larger structures, particularly literary genres, genres are sets of conventions and expectations. poetry as word and act, the relative importance of different ways of viewing poems is that a poem is both a structure made of words and an event which is an act of the poet, an experience of the reader, an event in literary history. The extravagance of the lyric is another factor of rhetoric, lyric shows us the meaning of the story emerging from verbal patterning. You repeat words that echo in a rhythmical structure and see if a story or sense won’t emerge. Rhythmic words are the scandal of poetry that ‘contingent’ features of sound and rhythm systematically infect and affect thought. Interpreting the poem is the last rhetoric which Culler mentioned in chapter five, don’t treat the poem as we might a bit of conversation, a fragment that needs a larger context to explain it, but assume that it has a structure of its own.

According to the chapter, there are three dimensions or levels of meaning: the first being the meaning of a word, of an utterance, and of a text. The first dimension is the word which is the literal meaning of the word. The second dimension addresses the possible meanings of words that contribute to the meaning of an utterance, which is an act by the speaker. The third dimension is text, something the author has constructed, and its meaning is not a proposition but what it does, its potential to affect readers. It is important to look at the whole picture while reading a text, not just the literal language that the author used, the same literal language in the different pictures may present a totally different meaning. I was interested in how language can be a system of differences, his theory of language states that “what makes each element of a language what it is, and what gives it its identity, are the contrasts between it and other elements within the system of the language” (58). Since language is a system of signs and the key facts, Saussure calls this “arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign”, which means the sign is a combination of a form and a meaning, and the relation between form and meaning is based on convention, not natural resemblance. Each language is a system of concepts as well as forms: a system of conventional signs that organize the world. Meaning is the experience of a subject and a property of a text; what we understand and what we try to understand.

In the part of the lecture“The nature of literature.” Culler defines “literature” from several angles. Culler indicates the nature of literature is important, because of their unique structure and function many types of poetry are instantly recognizable and this makes them literature. Culler divided nature into five specific factors: literature as the ‘foregrounding ‘of language, as an integration of language, as a fiction, as an aesthetic object, and as an intertextual. literature creates a “fictional world” in which the reader can touch the complex narrative woven using different techniques. According to “one reason why readers attend to literature differently is that its utterances have a special to the world”, this further illustrates the importance of the relationship between literature and readers. There is a famous saying that “ There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes. Therefor, the angle of literature which interests me is that literature creates a “fictional world”, for example, when I read a book called “ordinary world” by Lu Yao, many golden memories are created from the depth of my mind, those happy memories can’t describe by a single word. In the end, the fictionality of literature is very important to readers, it leaves the work’s relation to the world open to interpretation. 

1. After reading Chapter two of Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory, the most important aspect of this section of the chapter is the definition of literature and how to define it. the author defines literature is not only the written word, but it is a speech act or textual event that makes it unique and worthy of attention. according to Culler, “literature is an institutional label that gives us reason to expect that the results of our reading efforts will be ‘worth it’”. the author defines literature is not only the written word, but it is a speech act or textual event that makes it unique and worthy of attention. the important for thinking about definitions of literature is literature has the ability to build on itself. literature encourages civility and education, as well as solitary study, it also encourages new avenues of thought which can lead to action. As a college student, I would say this student who studies literature and read for pleasure has a higher vocabulary, better reading comprehension, and better communication skills, such as writing ability which is the golden key to open the door of the new world.
2.  This question has been bothering me after reading this chapter: “why literature is so difficult to define?”