Bøger af Sabrina Middeldorf

Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,0, National University of Ireland, Maynooth (English Department), course: Renaissance and Restoration, language: English, abstract: IntroductionJohn Donne was born in 1572 to catholic parents, converted to Anglicanism, married Anne More secretly and became Dean of St. Pauls at the age of 39. He is known as an erotically charged religious poet, whose sacred and profane poems seem equally passionate but he is also famous for his metaphysical poems. Metaphysical poetry typically had a special conceit, a metaphor like Donne¿s metaphor of the compass and unites two usually opposing motives like sex and religion.This brief introduction into the life of John Donne shows that he has a certain obsession towards both, religion and sex: as a man of the church he converted to Anglicanism and became Dean of St. Pauls, but as a lover of a woman he secretly married his beloved wife. Keeping these facts in mind I will exemplarily analyse two of Donne¿s poems, namely The Flea and Elegy XX - To his Mistress going to bed to find out, whether sex and religion really are modifications of the same energy in Donne¿s metaphysical poems.The FleaThe poem consists of 3 stanzas with 9 lines each and the meter alternates between iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a rhyming couplet following the pattern AABBCCDDD, the final line rhymes with the final couplet.The first hint on a common origin of sex and religion is the form of the poem. It has three stanzas but the rhyme scheme is a rhyming couplet (apart from the last line): three as an uneven number is a divine number representing the Trinity whereas two as an even number is a worldly number mirroring all profane, like Adam and Eve representing mankind. Nevertheless these modifications of the form derive from the same origin, the poem as a whole.The three stanzas of the poem tell of a man and a woman that are both bitten by a flea. In the first stanza the flea bites the speaker first and is about to bite the woman. By doing this the flea unites their bloods in its body. In Renaissance times exchanging fluids was thought to happen when two people

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, RWTH Aachen University (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Recent Canadian Drama, language: English, abstract: I. Introduction ¿ A Canadian play for a German audience While talking about the play ¿Billy Bishop goes to war¿ by John Gray and Eric Peterson that was written in 1976, different points of view play a decisive role. The play deals with a Canadian boy who joins the military because of a lack of possibilities. The action begins in Canada in 1914. That means it is the time of World War I and Canadian forces fight as a part of the Empire against the enemy, namely Germany. The play describes Billy Bishop¿s rise from a Canadian boy to a national hero as a fighter ace. Consequently there are different attitudes towards the play, for instance if you are an opponent of war or an advocate of it. Furthermore there is the question of age: if you have fought in a war and have seen how friends die or if you are a young man who is full of bravery, strength and patriotism, you have a different attitude towards such a play. But above all there is the question of nationality. As the play is of Canadian origin and originally played for Canadians, the question is meaningless. But on the one hand the fact that the play received great honor and was performed on Broadway and on the other hand the existence of a German film version opens a completely new kind of adapting the play for Germany.In the film version there are German actors that play Billy and the piano player and the text is German, too. What these facts mean and how film and play are adapted for Germany is analyzed in the following term paper. Concerning that there is not any kind of secondary literature about this topic that can be accessed by a German Library, the analysis is based upon my own results of analyzing play and film as well as studying the preface of the drama. The version of the play is the one in the Jerry Wasserman anthology ¿Modern Canadian Plays¿ published by Talonbooks, Vancouver and the film version is the one directed by Peter Meincke and Norman McCandlish of the year 1984/1985. II.1 SummaryThe Canadian play ¿Billy Bishop goes to war¿ by John Gray and Eric Peterson deals with a young Canadian from Owen Sound, Ontario who becomes a flying-ace and a hero. The play takes place in the year 1914, which means the time of World War I, where recruits from the British colonies were drafted to support the British Empire against the Germans, or as they call it, the Huns. At the age of twenty Billy enters the Royal Military College (R.M.C.) because of a lack of opportunities and the qualification of