26. September 2013

Introduction to Fables

                Selected Quotes from the "Preface"

        THE TALE, the Parable, and the Fable are all common and
popular modes of conveying instruction.  Each is distinguished
by its own special characteristics.  The Tale consists simply
in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created
solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated with
the teaching of any moral lesson.  The Parable is the designed
use of language purposely intended to convey a hidden and secret
meaning other than that contained in the words themselves; and
which may or may not bear a special reference to the hearer,
or reader.

        The Fable partly agrees with, and partly differs from 
both of these.  It will contain, like the Tale, a short but 
real narrative; it will seek, like the Parable, to convey a 
hidden meaning, and that not so much by the use of language, 
as by the skilful introduction of fictitious characters; and 
yet unlike to either Tale or Parable, it will ever keep in 
view, as its high prerogative, and inseparable attribute, 
the great purpose of instruction, and will necessarily seek 
to inculcate some moral maxim, social duty, or political truth.

        The true Fable, if it rise to its high requirements, ever
aims at one great end and purpose representation of human 
motive, and the improvement of human conduct, and yet it so 
conceals its design under the disguise of  fictitious 
characters, by clothing with speech the animals of the field,
the birds of the air, the trees of the wood, or the beasts 
of the forest, that the reader shall receive advice without
perceiving the presence of the adviser.

        Thus the superiority of the counsellor, which often renders 
counsel unpalatable, is kept out of view, and the lesson comes
with the greater acceptance when the reader is led, unconsciously
to himself, to have his sympathies enlisted in behalf of what 
is pure, honorable, and praiseworthy, and to have his indignation
excited against what is low, ignoble, and unworthy.  The true 
fabulist, therefore, discharges a most important function. 
He is neither a narrator, nor an allegorist.  He is a great
teacher, a corrector of morals, a censor of vice, and a 
commender of virtue.

        In this consists the superiority of the Fable over the Tale
or the Parable.  The fabulist is to create a laugh, but yet, 
under a merry guise, to convey instruction." "The continual 
observance of this twofold aim creates the charm, and accounts 
for the universal favor, of the fables of Aesop.

        The construction of a fable involves a minute attention 
to (1) the narration itself; (2) the deduction of the moral; 
and (3) a careful maintenance of the individual characteristics
of the fictitious personages introduced into it.  The narration
should relate to one simple action, consistent with itself, 
and neither be overladen with a multiplicity of details, nor
 distracted by a variety of circumstances. The moral or 
lesson should be so plain, and so intimately interwoven with,
and so necessarily dependent on, the narration, that every 
reader should be compelled to give to it the same undeniable
interpretation.

        The introduction of the animals or fictitious characters 
should be marked with an unexceptionable care and attention 
to their natural attributes, and to the qualities attributed 
to them by universal popular consent. The Fox should be 
always cunning, the Hare timid, the Lion bold, the Wolf 
cruel, the Bull strong, the Horse proud, and the Ass patient.
Many of these fables are characterized by the strictest 
observance of these rules.  They are occupied with one 
short narrative, from which the moral naturally flows, 
and with which it is intimately associated.

Here are some proverbs which we can read if we have time.

The Ant and the Dove

Androcles

The Bat the Birds and the Beasts

The Birds the Beasts and the Bat

The Bundle of Sticks

The Cat Maiden

Tags: Fable-Intro

Write a comment

Comments: 0

Fri

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?

shutterstock_222422665_151112

DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:

Languages Are Products of Their Environments

The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Thu

Jun

2014

Fun with Newspaper Headlines

Newspaper Headlinigs

0 Comments

Tue

Jun

2014

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

Chapters

0 Comments

Mon

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

________________________________

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.

A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

Zhou Yongkang, a member of China’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee from 2007 to 2012, is the subject of one of the highest-level corruption investigations in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Several members of his family, over the years Mr. Zhou was in power, made investments in companies with ties to the China National Petroleum Corp., the state oil company formerly run by Mr. Zhou, although there is no evidence to show that Mr. Zhou was personally involved in the dealings.

1 Comments

Fri

Nov

2015