1. 了解集社会批评家、新闻记者和语言学家于一身的亨利·路易斯·门肯（Henry Louis Mencken）其人其作；

2. 掌握作者描述ugliness的重要词语以及hyperbole、sarcasm等修辞方法；

3. 理解课文内容，熟悉文章主题思想和语篇结构；

4. 掌握主观性描写文体(subjective description)写作特点，并能使用文体分析方法对其进行赏析。

1. 课前收集有关亨利·路易斯·门肯（Henry Louis Mencken）其人其作、东西方建筑审美方面的资料，通过查阅工具书和参考书，理解课文中的语词并熟悉课文主旨内容；通过教师课上讲解和操练，理解课文中的长难句，掌握文章写作技巧和修辞方法，熟悉课文语篇结构；完成教师指定的课后练习和知识拓展练习。

2. 单元重点

hyperbole、litotes、sarcasm等修辞方法；主观性描写文体的写作手段。

3. 单元难点

写景状物：以描写为主要表达方式，辅之以记叙、抒情、议论、说明等手段，以表现人文环境、自然景观和特定物件为主要内容。

1. Background Information

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1856), an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English, one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century. His essays were received with delight or horror, depending on the reader’s point of view, he was also highly respected for his literary criticism and he exerted a powerful influence on American literature.

2. Text Analysis

“The Libido for the Ugly” is a piece of subjective, impressionistic or emotional description. By revealing the ugliness of Westmoreland, the author attacks the whole American race — a race that loves ugliness for its own sake, that lusts to make the world intolerable; a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.

3. Structure of the Text

The text is divided into three parts:

Part 1 (Para.1)

It shows how the author is surprised by the ugliness of Westmoreland and also points out that the abominable human habitations seen everywhere are not due to poverty as it is actually a very wealthy region.

Part 2 (Paras. 2-5)

The author uses a trenchant pen and a harsh tone to depict how the buildings seen everywhere are continuously ugly, both in terms of design and color. The author also demonstrates that it is through serious and earnest scientific research that he reaches that conclusion that the ugliest buildings are located in the United States.

Part 3 (Paras. 6-9)

It addresses the reason and cause why the people in Westmoreland have such an ardent and strange love for ugly buildings. The author then turns to attack the whole American race and society which hates beauty as it hates truth.

4. Key words and expressions

lucrative, hideous, macabre, abominable, allude, pretentious, chalet, preposterous, swinish, precarious, loathsome, incessant, decompose, aberrant, insensate, unfathomable, abomination, inadvertence, depravity, inimical, border upon, put down…to

5. Analysis of Rhetorical Devices

hyperbole、litotes、sarcasm

6. Writing Techniques

1) the definition of description

2) two kinds of description: subjective description and objective description

3) the objects of description

Paraphrase:

1. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation. (Para. 1)

2. From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye. (Para. 2)

3. And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks. (Para. 3)

4. But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye. (Para. 4)

5. It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. (Para. 5)

Key:

1. But somehow in the past I never really perceived how shocking and wretched this whole region was.

2. Every house a passenger saw when traveling by train from East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, was so ugly that it offended and hurt his eyes. The generalized statement is an exaggeration again.

3. All the houses here are smeared with sooty dirt, and some paint which is not covered up by the soot looks like dried-up scales formed on the skin by eczema.

4. But it seems that people in Westmoreland county prefer that yellow color produced by the disease uremia (the color of urine plus blood) and so they have the most disgusting towns and villages ever seen by human eyes.

5. It is as if some genius of great power, who didn’t like to do the right things and who was an inflexible enemy of man, employed all the cleverness and skill of Hell to build these ugly houses.

Written work:

Write a satirical attack on ugliness, describing any city or village.

Key:

A Sickening Village

This is a village you will never want to revisit once you had been there. The road is grit-paved and dotted with sand and small stones here and there. If you happen to have a pair of thin-sole shoes, your feet are certain to suffer. On a sunny day, if a truck or a tractor passes by, you are covered with dust left behind. On a rainy day, your trouser legs soon get dirty with muddy water. Here and there, you may find a pile of building materials such as bricks, cement boards, sand casually lying in a disorderly way. There are trees on one side of the road. Some are a little tall, some quite short, and on each tree you cannot fail to find broken branches. As for the houses, they are in different size, different height, and different colour. They stand there one after another with no harmony. If you want your students to search for the antonym of "unity", just bring them here. You can see a pond at the end of the road. Actually you needn't see it. Use your nose and the smell will make you sicken. Floating on the brownish filthy water are used wrapping paper, plastic bags, foams, and one or two dead dogs or mice.

Text Appreciation:

Here Is New York（excerpt）

E. B. White

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail.  The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York.  It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.  No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter,  the actor,  the trader,  and the merchant.  It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown.  No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings.  I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher's office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose,  four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle,  thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White,  five blocks from where I used to usher at the Metropolitan Opera and only 112 blocks from the spot where Clarence Day the elder was washed of his sins in the Church of the Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely);  and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in,  some of them on hot,  breathless afternoons,  lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.

Key:

Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E.B. White’s stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. The New York Timeshas named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city”. In Here is New York, White developed a pure and plain-spoken literary style; his writing was characterized by wit, sophistication, optimism, and moral steadfastness.

1. Why does Mencken use the uncommon word libido in his title?

2. Besides attacking the ugliness of Westmoreland, what else does Mencken attack in this essay?

Key:

1. Mencken deliberately uses the word “libido”, a special term in psychoanalysis, in his title to create the impression that his description and analysis has some scientific foundation.

2. The author also attacks the whole American race—a race that loves ugliness for its own sake, that lusts to make the world intolerable; a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.