Week 14

1.Paul's Case

"Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's Magazine in 1905. It also appeared in a collection of Cather's stories, The Troll Garden (1905). For many years, "Paul's Case" was the only one of her stories that Cather allowed to be anthologized.

Around the turn of the century Pittsburgh was an industrial center with a successful class of business leaders. According to Cather's story these leaders could manage their companies while traveling in Europe. New York City, on the other hand, was a place one escaped to; a center of fine living and society, and “the symbol of ultimate glamour and cosmopolitan sophistication at that time.”

The symbolism of this lifestyle in "Paul's Case" is the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The cities offer contrasting models of the humdrum life of routine and lived in high style.

Paul, a Pittsburgh high school student, is frustrated with his middle-class life. He dreams of another life in which he would attend concerts and theater, although his appreciation of the arts is more social and superficial than aesthetic. For example, he enjoys a symphony concert not so much for the music but for the atmosphere: "the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendor." Later on, he steals money to support a short escapade in New York City, but once he exhausts his funds, he commits suicide rather than allow his father to take him back to Pittsburgh.

Paul's teachers and father refer to Paul's "case," representing him at a distance and as an example of someone to be studied, handled, and managed. The term enables Cather to adopt "the voice of medical authority."

At the start of the story, Paul is suspended from a Pittsburgh high school for a week. He meets with the principal and his teachers, and they complain about his "defiant manner" in class and the "physical aversion" he exhibits toward his teachers. One of Paul's teachers also mentions that Paul's mother died back when he was a child in Colorado. He then goes to work at the Pittsburgh music hall, Carnegie Hall. Here he enjoys donning his uniform and performing his job as an usher with enthusiasm as if he were the host of a grand social event. He stays for the concert and enjoys not so much the music as the social scene. After the concert, he follows the soloist and imagines life inside her hotel. Paul and his father do not have a good relationship with one other. Upon returning home very late, Paul enters through the basement to avoid a confrontation with his father, with the fear his father will mistake him for a burglar and shoot him. Paul sleeps in the basement that night on order to avoid contact with his father.

Paul despises the "burghers" on his respectable but drab street. He is unimpressed by a plodding young man who works for an iron company and is married with four children although his father considers him a role model for his Paul. While Paul longs to be wealthy, cultivated, and powerful, he lacks the stamina and ambition to attempt to change his condition. Instead, Paul escapes his humdrum life by visiting Charley Edwards, a young actor. Sometime later, after Paul makes it clear to one of his teachers that he thinks his job ushering is more important than his schoolwork, his father prevents him from continuing to work as an usher.

Paul takes a train to New York City after stealing one thousand dollars from his new job at Denny & Carson's to finance a new life. He buys an expensive wardrobe, rents a room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, walks around the city, and meets a young San Franciscan who takes him on an all-night tour of the city's social scene. His few days of impersonating a rich, privileged young man bring him more contentment than he has ever known. Living a prosperous life is Paul's only hope and dream.[5] On the eighth day, however, after he has spent most of his money, Paul learns from a Pittsburgh newspaper that his theft has been made public; his father has returned the money and is en route to New York City to bring Paul home to Pittsburgh. We are told that Paul had bought a gun on his first day in New York City, and he briefly considers shooting himself to avoid returning to his old life in Pittsburgh. Eventually, he decides against it and instead commits suicide by jumping in front of a train. Paul made the ultimate decision of taking his own life because the thought of returning to his old one was too much for him to handle.

2.Grimms' Fairy Tales

Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) is a collection of fairy tales first published in 1812 by the Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. The collection is commonly known in English as Grimms' Fairy Tales.

The influence of these books was widespread. W. H. Auden praised the collection during World War II as one of the founding works of Western culture.[3] The tales themselves have been put to many uses. Hitler praised them as folkish tales showing children with sound racial instincts seeking racially pure marriage partners, and so strongly that the Allied forces warned against them; for instance, Cinderella with the heroine as racially pure, the stepmother as an alien, and the prince with an unspoiled instinct being able to distinguish. Writers who have written about the Holocaust have combined the tales with their memoirs, as Jane Yolen in her Briar Rose.

The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence. Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, the English Joseph Jacobs, and Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales. There was not always a pleased reaction to their collection. Joseph Jacobs was in part inspired by his complaint that English children did not read English fairy tales; in his own words, "What Perrault began, the Grimms completed".

Three individual works of Wilhelm Grimm include Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen ('Old Danish Heroic Songs, Ballads, and Folktales') in 1811, Über deutsche Runen ('On German Runes') in 1821, and Die deutsche Heldensage ('The German Heroic Saga') in 1829.

The Grimm anthology has been a source of inspiration for artists and composers. Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane and Rie Cramer are among the artists who have created illustrations based on the stories.

3.Old King Cole

"Old King Cole" is a British nursery rhyme first attested in 1708. Though there is much speculation about the identity of King Cole, it is unlikely that he can be identified reliably as any historical figure. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 1164. The poem describes a merry king who called for his pipe, bowl, and musicians, with the details varying among versions.

The most common modern version of the rhyme is:

Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.
Every fiddler he had a fiddle,
And a very fine fiddle had he;
Oh there's none so rare, as can compare,
With King Cole and his fiddlers three.

The song is first attested in William King in his Useful Transactions in Philosophy in 1708–9.[1]

King's version has the following lyrics:

Good King Cole,
And he call'd for his Bowle,
And he call'd for Fidler's three;
And there was Fiddle, Fiddle,
And twice Fiddle, Fiddle,
For 'twas my Lady's Birth-day,
Therefore we keep Holy-day
And come to be merry.

4.Danaë

In Greek mythology, Danaë (/ˈdæn.i.iː/[1] or /ˈdæn.ə.iː/ DAN-ə-ee, as personal name also /dəˈnaɪ/ də-NY, Greek: Δανάη Ancient: [daˈna.ɛː] Modern: [ðaˈna.i]) was the daughter, and only child of King Acrisius of Argos and his wife Queen Eurydice. She was the mother of the hero Perseus by Zeus. She was credited with founding the city of Ardea in Latium during the Bronze Age.

Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, King Acrisius asked the oracle of Delphi if this would change. The oracle announced to him that he would never have a son, but his daughter would, and that he would be killed by his daughter's son. At the time, Danae was childless and, meaning to keep her so, King Acrisius shut her up in a bronze chamber to be constructed under the court of his palace (other versions say she was imprisoned in a tall brass tower with a single richly adorned chamber, but with no doors or windows, just a sky-light as the source of light and air). She was buried in this tomb, never to see the light again. However, Zeus, the king of the gods, desired her, and came to her in the form of golden rain which streamed in through the roof of the subterranean chamber and down into her womb. Soon after, their child Perseus was born.

Unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods or the Furies by killing his offspring and grandchild, King Acrisius cast Danaë and Perseus into the sea in a wooden chest. The sea was calmed by Poseidon and, at the request of Zeus, the pair survived. They were washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where they were taken in by Dictys – the brother of King Polydectes – who raised Perseus to manhood. The King was charmed by Danaë, but she had no interest in him. Consequently, he agreed not to marry her only if her son would bring him the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Using Athena's shield, Hermes's winged sandals and Hades' helmet of invisibility, Perseus was able to evade Medusa's gaze and decapitate her.

Later, after Perseus brought back Medusa's head and rescued Andromeda, the oracle's prophecy came true. He started for Argos, but learning of the prophecy, instead went to Larissa, where athletic games were being held. By chance, an aging Acrisius was there and Perseus accidentally struck him on the head with his javelin (or discus), fulfilling the prophecy.