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今天我选择的主体是一部颇具影响却又被人忽视的发过文学经典的创作的来源（节选）后面的文章有涉及到一个青年的木偶团的介绍 最后的越障是有关于男性与女性角色转换的 重点是在开始的3篇和越障文章 我觉得木偶这个措辞什么的比较一般，但是内容还是可以 所以希望大家会喜欢今天的内容哦
Speed [Time1]
The girl at the Grand The adolescent obsession that inspired an influential yet neglected French classic
SAL PARADISE, hero of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, carries only one book on his three-year travels across America. On a Greyhound bus to St Louis he produces a second-hand copy of “Le Grand Meaulnes”, stolen from a Hollywood stall. Entranced by the Arizona landscape, he decides not to read it after all. Such is the fortune of Alain-Fournier’s story, one of France’s most popular novels, in the English-speaking world. Much loved yet little read, for almost a century this strange, earnest and inconsolable novel has haunted the fringes of fiction. Henry Miller venerated its hero; F. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed its title for “The Great Gatsby” (and some critics think Fournier’s main characters were models for Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, and his lovelorn pal). John Fowles claimed it informed everything he wrote. “I know it has many faults,” he sighed, as if trying to shake the obsession, “yet it has haunted me all my life.” Despite its famous advocates, “Le Grand Meaulnes”—100 years old in 2013—is a masterpiece in peril. The stream of pilgrims who visit Fournier’s childhood home, near Bourges, is starting to thin. These days readers in Britain and America often choose denser, more overtly philosophical French authors. A decade ago, one British fan, Tobias Hill, noted that the book survived through “a barely audible system of Chinese whispers”. Why are many English-speaking readers unfamiliar with a book adored by some of their most respected writers? And what accounts for the curious grip that this simply written and nostalgic tale of adolescent romance holds over its most besotted fans? Some love the poetry of its language, others the interlocking mysteries of its plot. Many are entranced by the elegiac sadness that rises from the prose, as one critic remarked, “like mist over the heath”. But its appeal partly lies in the romantic life and early death of its author, and the story of the woman who inspired him.
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[Time2]
In the last year of his life Fournier had shaken off his daydreams. In death they defined him. In 1913 “Le Grand Meaulnes” had narrowly missed out on the Prix Goncourt—France’s most prestigious literary award—but the war propelled the novel to far greater fame. Many of those who had seen and survived the savagery appreciated Fournier’s elegy to innocence. Most of his English-speaking readers come across the book at school, but he has become less well-known as languages, French in particular, have fallen out of fashion. Degree courses skip over the novel, perhaps because it doesn’t fit into any movement or genre. “It comes from nowhere and leads nowhere,” says Patrick McGuinness of Oxford University. “It is its own monument.” Its ever-changing English titles do not help: “Big Meaulnes”, “The Great Meaulnes” and “The Magnificent Meaulnes” have all come and gone. Editions that omit the hero’s vowel-heavy name, such as “The Wanderer” and “The Lost Estate”, have had more success, though many publishers simply retain the French title. The author’s unusual pen name is another disadvantage. Alain-Fournier—an oddly hyphenated semi-pseudonym adopted to avoid confusion with a racing driver—was misspelled by an editor the first time Fournier used it, and is still often mangled. Some think this creeping obscurity deserved, finding “Le Grand Meaulnes” mawkish and melodramatic, its plot contrived. Publishers play up the sentimentality with covers depicting pastoral scenes and teenage boys. That is a fair summary of the story’s first part, but a poor illustration of the oddness of the rest.
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[Time3]
Fowles, who called the book “the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature”, suggested that its detractors dislike being reminded of “qualities and emotions they have tried to eradicate from their own lives”. Fitzgerald camouflaged Fournier’s themes with a more sophisticated setting: Gatsby is no less juvenile than Meaulnes, but age and wealth make him seem more worldly. Happily, a small group of contemporary novelists still wear Fournier’s influence proudly. The young hero of “The Way I Found Her”, by Rose Tremain, acquires a copy of “Le Grand Meaulnes” from a Paris bouquiniste, who “looked quite miserable to part with it”. A mental patient in David Mitchell’s “Black Swan Green” relives the novel each day. Critics have now puzzled out most of the book’s mysteries. The bleak final photo of Fournier solved his disappearance. The true identity of Yvonne de Quiévrecourt was revealed after her death. All the same, little is really known about the girl at the Grand Palais, who was both worshipped and artistically exploited by Fournier. She remained silent about her role in one of France’s most famous novels; by the end of her life she could not remember it herself. It fell to her husband to tell their children the story, as its fame grew around them. In 1939 she apologised for not visiting Fournier’s sister, then guardian of his estate. “Far better for me to remain within the aura in which your brother enclosed me,” she wrote. Perhaps she was wise to stay as untouchable as the heroine she inspired. Probably no mere mortal could embody all the fascination and yearning that Fournier captures in “Le Grand Meaulnes”.
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[Time4]
As Li Wenxing arrives at the rehearsal room of Guangdong Province Puppet Art Theater, Guangzhou city is still sleeping. It’s 6:30 am and the silence is conspicuous. Li, 23, graduated from a drama performance major at Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai campus last summer. Her parents asked her to come back to her hometown in Henan province, but she decided to apply to the puppet theater instead. “I loved these traditional arts when I was at university. I once saw an online video of a puppet show by the director of the puppet theater. It was really amazing and left a deep impression on me,” says Li. When she began to train, Li had to hold up a puppet, the lightest of which weigh more than 2.5 kilograms, for five to ten minutes at a time. Later, the time was gradually increased. After Lu Jie, 21, completed his puppet-lifting training, he faced an even more difficult task: He had to learn to control the puppet with two bamboo sticks. Lu practiced five to six hours every day and his fingers blistered easily. But he didn’t put on an adhesive bandage when the blisters broke. “It was very painful. But if I had begun using adhesive bandages, I would have relied on them and it would have made my fingers less flexible when controlling the puppet. So the only solution was for me to wait until my fingers grew thick calluses,” says Lu. Lu used to be a dancer before joining the puppet theater. He had never seen a puppet show before and it was a new experience for him. His first performance was during the national holiday last year, when he played the head of a dragon in a show. “I felt a lot of pressure and was very nervous. I could hardly fall asleep the night before. Even though I only performed for seven minutes I was soaked with sweat,” says Lu. Compared with Li Wenxing and Lu Jie, Li Kuan, 22, is a senior in this profession. He comes from a family of puppeteers and is the sixth generation in his family to inherit this tradition. He began puppeteering after finishing junior middle school. “I grew up in a small village in Zhanjiang. After the rice had been gathered in August, the village would invite a puppet group to perform for a week. That was always the most wonderful period in the village and the puppet shows impressed me deeply,” says Li. “Sometimes we would go out performing for a whole month. Besides the puppets and stage props, I also had to bring a mat and quilt. When we finished the show, I would spread out the mat beside the stage to sleep,” says Li.
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[Time5]
Despite the hardship, Li says he enjoyed the experience. “Every time when I heard the applause and laughter from the audience, I felt a sense of achievement,” he says. Li joined the Guangdong Province Puppet Art Theater in 2007. The basic training was not difficult for him, but he needed to spend time creating and shaping his characters. “Before, I learned by imitating the people in my village, but when I joined the puppet theatre I had to learn to create a role by myself. I needed to figure out their personality and I hope now I can make them come alive through my hands,” says Li. There are some 60 men and women in the puppet theater, and more and more from the post-1990s generation are enrolling to learn the traditional art from their seniors. In order to play their roles well, these young people discuss scripts with each other in their spare time and cherish every chance to practice with their puppets. “We stay behind the curtain when we perform with the puppets, but when they laugh, we laugh, and when they cry, we cry, too,” says Lu. “There is a show on the stage, but there is also one behind it. When we come out with the puppets at the end of the show, the applause is for all of us,” says Lu.
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OBSTACLE
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. By Hanna Rosin. Riverhead; 310 pages; $27.95. To be published in Britain in October; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
MEN today are haunted by the “spectre of a coming gender apocalypse”, Hanna Rosin declares in her new book, “The End of Men”. How worried should they be? It is true that women are contributing more than ever to household income. They dominate university attendance around the world. In South Korea more women than men pass the foreign-service exam, which has sparked the foreign ministry to implement a minimum quota for men. In Brazil nearly a third of women earn more than their husbands, a phenomenon that has caused men to form church support-groups calling themselves “Men of Tears”. Ms Rosin, an editor at Atlantic, whose book grew out of an article she wrote for the magazine in 2010, acknowledges that men are not about to become extinct any time soon. But women today are excelling, while men founder. As part of her research, Ms Rosin travelled to many corners of America, among them Auburn-Opelika, Alabama, where women’s median income is 40% higher than men’s, and men are encouraged to watch virtual simulations to teach them how to get jobs. The financial crisis has been especially unkind to men: three-quarters of the 7.5m American jobs lost in the recession belonged to men and were in traditionally masculine industries, such as construction, manufacturing and finance. Manufacturing’s flight from America and the evolution of technology in the workplace have left many men jobless—and often despondent. The book is filled with anecdotes from those who are trying to make sense of what has happened to them. “Probably no one has had their wife move up the ladder as far as I’ve moved down,” says one man. Another, who is annoyed that his girlfriend earns more than he does, complains, “All the things we need to be good at to thrive in the world…are things that my female friends and competitors are better at than me.” The argument Ms Rosin puts forward does not spell out the end of men so much as the deterioration of their condition. The new service-based economy rewards communication and adaptation, qualities that women are more likely to have. Only about 3% of men have taken over raising children full-time while their wives support their families. Instead, many men, especially young ones, have retreated into a world of video games, drinking and prolonged adolescence—a phenomenon identified in “Guyland”, a 2008 book by an American sociologist, Michael Kimmel. But what happens to men has great consequences for women, and vice versa. Many poorer women who are not well educated are forgoing marriage, believing that a man is simply a drag and an additional mouth to feed, Ms Rosin argues. Educated, wealthier women, on the other hand, are experiencing more fulfilling relationships in which they share responsibilities with partners as each takes up slack at different times. She calls these “seesaw marriages”. One result of women’s rise is that men have more retirement income, better health and happier marriages. Hard as Ms Rosin tries to argue that the world has embraced “matriarchy”, however, the data does not support her thesis. Only 3% of Fortune 500 bosses are women, as are only 20 of the world’s 180 heads of state. She dismisses evidence that suggests her book is inappropriately titled: “Men have been in charge for about 40,000 years, and women have started edging them out for about 40. So of course there are still obstacles at the top.” She also eschews a more nuanced approach by letting what is mostly an argument about American gender trends strive to be global. For example, she mentions that women own more than 40% of private businesses in China, and that in many countries parents prefer having a daughter. But nowhere does she acknowledge that aborting female fetuses remains a huge problem in China and India. “The End of Men” is notable, however, for what it says about America’s thinking on women today. In another provocative article in the Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, Anne-Marie Slaughter argued that women are deluded if they think that they can have a high-flying career and a family without something giving way. Ms Slaughter used to be a senior official in the State Department, a job she recently gave up in order to spend more time with her children and return to academia. A high-powered job can be compatible with child-rearing only if a woman is wealthy, has a job with flexible hours or works for herself. Ms Rosin also argues for greater flexibility in the workplace, but ultimately takes a more bullish line than Ms Slaughter about women’s ability to change their workplaces to suit their needs. Both young men and women of the millennial generation want more flexible work hours and see the value of working remotely. And they will seek out employers who try hard to make better work-life balance a reality. This is not the first recession that has triggered a crisis of masculinity in America. After the recession in the early 1990s, Susan Faludi wrote “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man”, which lamented that men were underworked, underachieving and undersupported. This time the story is somewhat different. Had Ms Rosin put off writing her book for a few years, she would probably have seen women’s jobs go the way of men’s. The economic dislocations that have erupted in male-dominated industries, such as construction and finance, are making their way into industries dominated by women, as governments cut back on services, teaching staff and the like. The real story about men and women is about how this economic crisis will harm both genders, and future generations.
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发表于 2013-7-14 00:23:36
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