Unit 1 Great scientists Reading课时作业

第一节 阅读理解

　　Unlike other men of his time, Irish writer Oscar Wilde was showy, outspoken and unconventional. At the height of his fame, he was betrayed by his lover Lord Alfred Douglas and had to serve two years hard labor for being himself. He died three years after he came out of prison.

　　The work Wilde is remembered for was written over a period of less than 10 years. The Happy Prince and Other Tales was published in 1888. That volume marks the beginning of Wilde's true creativity. However, academic criticism of Wilde's work has too often dismissed his fairy stories as lesser works, a minor bit of sentimentalism(多愁善感).

　　Today, since JK Rowling's Harry Potter and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, children's literature has been repositioned as central, not secondary, shifting what children read, what we write about what children read, and what we read as adults. At last we seem to understand that imagination is ageless. Wilde's children's stories are splendid. In addition, it seems to me that they should be revisited as a defining part of his creative process.

　　"The Happy Prince" starts a new note in Wilde's writing: loss. Fairytales always involve reversals of fortune. This works in both directions: beggars become kings, palaces collapse into shelters, the spoilt son swallows bitterness. Wilde's own reversal of fortune from fame and money to poverty and imprisonment shares the same rapid drama. Fairytales are also and always about transformation of various kinds - frogs into princes, coal into gold - and if they are not overly moralistic, there is usually a happy ending. Wilde's fairytale transformations turn on loss.

　　"The Happy Prince" is the story of a gilded ( 鎏金的) and jeweled statue on a column high above the town. One day, a Swallow rests at the feet of the Happy Prince, who tells him of all the suffering he can see. He asks the Swallow to take the ruby ( 红宝石) from his sword and give it to a poor family. The Swallow does so. The Prince begs him to stay and to strip him bit by bit of all his gold and jewels to distribute to others. The weather is getting colder and the Swallow knows he should fly to the sun. But as he takes the Prince's jeweled eyes, he realizes that he must stay, for now the Prince is blind.

　　Winter comes. The Swallow dies at the feet of the Happy Prince, no longer sparkling with jewels and gold. The Mayor has the statue pulled down. As the workmen melt down the Prince they find they cannot melt his heart. They throw it on the rubbish pile next to the body of a swallow.

　　I don't think anything could be closer in description than this to the criticism of Wilde and his talent by a society fascinated with appearances and indifferent to imagination. Wilde believed in the soul. The soul is often described as a bird - and if Wilde is the Happy Prince, then the Swallow is his soul, that returns to him and will not leave him.

_______ gift and sacrifice is another theme of Wilde's fairy stories. In "The Nightingale and the Rose", a Nightingale colors a white rose red with her own heart's blood so that a poor student will have the most beautiful flower in the world to give to his beloved. His beloved rejects him and his rose, and the rose is thrown in the gutter( 排水沟 ), where it is broken by a cart-wheel. As Wilde says in his letter