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Classical Chinese poetry (漢詩) is the essence of Chinese literature. In the ancient period the intellectuals in East Asia were all poets. The people learned how to express through poetry their public or private experiences as well as their personal feelings throughout their lives. Musicality is the principal factor among aesthetic features of Classical Chinese poetry. Being originated along with music, Classical Chinese poetry was actually a lyric and kept its musical character even after its separation from music in the later period. Hence it has become a tradition to recite a poem like singing a song with a certain tune. Classical Chinese poetry also has a strong picturesque feature. Popular Classical Chinese poetry used to be adopted as a picture by many intellectuals who also utilized picturesque forms in poetic forms. Wang Wei (王維), a famous poet and painter of the Tang dynasty, had a great impact on this practice. Another characteristic feature of Classical Chinese poetry is that techniques of comparison and symbolism has been remarkably developed. Classical Chinese poetry used to have codified devices for various rhetorics. This partly makes it difficult to understand Classical Chinese poetry, but such a factor exhibits excellent connotation. One of the important aesthetic essence of Classical Chinese Poetry is symmetry by parallelism. As Chinese characters have multiple meanings in a word, Classical Chinese poetry could have expressed multiple connotations using this device. In this case, one has to understand both meanings to figure out various intentions of a poet. It is Hoimunsi (廻文詩) that dramatizes this kind of multiple connotations of Classical Chinese poetry. A poem could be appropriately appreciated when one reads it from various perspectives. Despite its significance in the Chinese literature, Classical Chinese poetry has attracted less attention even from scholars majoring in Classical Chinese poetry. It is thus urgent to place special stress on the Classical Chinese poetry in the Chinese Character education.

Paul Verlaine, one of the French poet of the symbolists movement, is popular for his simple and easily understandable writing style. However, people have found that his poems are not just simple but that both the poetic meaning and forms are harmonized perfectly. Verlaine, in fact, appreciated and pursued ‘the beautiful simplicity’ in his poetry, and made effort in writing to remove unnecessary elements and elaborate his style effectively. The seven poems in “Paysages tristes”, part of Verlaine’s first collection, Poèmes saturniens, shows the fundamental characteristics of his poetic style. These characteristics reveals the unity of verlaine’s written works and how these poems connect the emotion of ‘melancholy’ to ‘reminiscence.’ In addition, this connection is developed and revealed through the use of repetition. Repetition is the integral element of poems and a marvelous way to portray simplicity and musicality. The repetition of phoneme, vocabulary, phrase, and strophe influences the formality in Verlaine’s poems, and the repetition of similar vocabulary affects the final Signification of the Look. The paper analyzes the poems in three ways: the repetition of phoneme, the repetition of vocabulary, and the circular structure of repetition. Verlaine uses repetition not mechanically but delicately and fully. Repetition in Verlaine’s poems shows the matchless beauty of sophistication among the French poems.

Under the influence of romanticism, beauty has been regarded as similar to illness. However, it seems that beauty has a confrontation with illness from a conceptual point of view. In Kant’s aesthetics, the beautiful is defined as a ‘sensus communis’ (common sense) by which it means a free unison and harmony. If we accept this definition, beauty must be analogized not to illness but health. Hence new notions of health and illness(disease in Canguilhem’s text) are required in order that the pains of poetic narrators may be taken as aesthetic. Generally speaking, health is a normal state, while disease is an abnormal state. But Canguilhem said disease remains a kind of biological norm and being healthy and being normal are not altogether equivalent. Accordingly, What characterize health is the possibility of transcending the norm, which defines the momentary normal and instituting new norms in new situations. In order to institute new norms, literature has to destroy the pathological normal in the world. The confession of pain is not an expression of pathological state, but that of scepticism about the health. The scepticism is a symptom of literary infection. From such an sceptical and painful state, subject creates new forms of sensitive intuition without conforming to the regular use of concepts. This process is called aesthetic therapy, the movement associated with the concept of beauty between illness and health. Recently many people have taken a deep interest in the literary therapy and the literary counseling. comprehension of dynamism of what beauty is, can offer a theoretical foundation of the study on them. It also makes us search for new possibilities in literary democracy in the world where pains are omnipresent.

This paper discusses the ways in which Wilde's poetry and aestheticism paradoxically celebrated their shared or parallel "marginal" status in the context of Victorian culture. Compared with his plays, fiction and critical essays, Wilde's poetry has been given insufficient critical attention, and it is worth exploring why Wilde the poet so consistently produced pastorals throughout his literary career. As a subgenre of poetry, the pastoral is significantly permeated with a sense of loss and belatedness because such an ideal and care-free world of shepherds and shepherdesses as depicted in the pastoral is a deliberately artificial and conventional--read "generic" here--construct. The pastoral represents, among other things, a delightful defiance of the very pressure of reality, and this generic or internal "logic" can be also witnessed in Wilde's famous aesthetic credo that "Life imitates Art," a reversal of the time-honored mimetic view that art functions as "a mirror held up to nature." According to Wilde's wry perspective, the public's lack of interest in poetry resulted in an ironic protection of it from the relentless materialism of the Victorian age. In a similar vein, aestheticism was past its prime when Wilde self-consciously appointed himself its chief representative. Regardless of his international fame after his lecture tour to the US (1882-1883), he was fully aware of his own culturally “marginal” position as an aesthete and nevertheless waged his aesthetic campaign cheerfully and valiantly.

There have been lots of literary and pictorial representations of Medusa from Homer to Freud, from Caravaggio and Rubens to today's Versace and Six Flags Great Adventure advertisement. The trite but widespread Freudian notion that Medusa ultimately refers to female genitalia, however, has not been under precise scrutiny. Whether Freud interpreted Medusa's head as the one simultaneously bringing about castration and erection, it is true, however, that he contributed in the formation of negative Medusa while discarding the “tempestuous loveliness” and “countenance divine” of beautiful Medusa which Shelley described in his “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” The Medusa which Freud adopted was the one most of painters and sculptors portrayed in a negative way. The popular and scholarly reception of her, however, has been following the negative image of Medusa which Freud unwittingly emphasized and propagated. Hélène Cixous, therefore, in a way, made a revisionary counterstatement to Freudian imagination while recovering the image of beautiful and life-giving Medusa and thus seemed to succeed in breaking the association link between femininity and death. Even if the ambi-valence of Medusa pervades in the twentieth century poems, novels, and advertisements, the death-dealing aspect of Medusa has been considerably off-set and superceded by that of beautiful and life-giving Medusa which lots of European writers has praised for. Medusa is beautiful, not ugly.

The repetition in Beckett and O’Neill represents how the modalities in rhetorical techniques have changed to meet the demands of the modern theater. The repetition in Beckett and O’Neill affects the proposed fictional reality that what is represented on stage. Repetition, although limited to being a rhetorical phenomenon is actually the main force that which gives the fictional work the credence necessary for it to be accepted as real. Repetition manifests in different contextual form and manner to better impress upon the audience/reader of what it is symbolizing, but the significations that are associated with what it is repetitive of never actually changes. The repetition functions as a rhetorical tool which links the temporal, spatial and dialogue sequences which might seem disconnected from each other. Beckett and O’Neill employ repetition not only as an element with which to fill in the ‘temporal or circumstantial void’ apparent in the play but also as a ‘suggestive tool’ through which the dramatic situation suggested becomes, transforms into a representation of an actual reality for the audience/reader.

There is a common belief that the nature of language lies in communication and that efficient communication needs observance of conversational maxims based on cooperation among participants. However, language doesn't necessarily pursue efficiency or economy and maxims are frequently violated either intentionally or unconsciously in our daily conversations. While violations of conversational maxims may cause inefficient communication accompanying extra efforts by listeners for processing information, they can also result in unexpected psychological effects, that is humor. This paper presents the cooperative principle and four conversational maxims and analyzes humor resulting from violating maxims. Although violations of each maxim would betray the expectations of listeners, the unexpected utterances may make listeners laugh. This article analyzes violations of four conversational maxims exemplifying and explaining a few dialogues and utterances. Finally, the paper shows that humor from violations of maxims is closely related with social and psychological elements and suggests further research should be conducted on the dynamics between verbal expressions and underlying socio-psychological factors.