My Platonic Sweetheart

Mark Twain

Mark Twain• Samuel Langhorne Clemens

(November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."

• Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which became very popular and brought nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well received. Twain had found his calling.

Mark Twain(1835-1910)

Mark Twain’s Masterpieces

Mark Twain’s Writing Features

local colour

represented social life through portraits of local places which he knew best drew from his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places

tall tales (highly exaggerated) a texture of most l

ocal color literature ， a kink of humor

a master oflanguage

shortconcrete direct in effect

simp1e, even ungrammatical sentence & structures

words

he used colloquial language, vernacular language, dialects

American dialect

an American language

Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs, who descended from him."

Mark Twain’s Writing Features

humour

is of witty remarks mocking at small things and making people laugh

is a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice

Writing Characteristics of Mark Twain

• Literature is an art of language. Mark Twain’s language is artistic and like a sharp weapon without doubt. Mark Twain is famous for his humor and satire.

• Mark Twain’s humor is based on the humor of the Western in America.

• He used a lot of colloquial idioms and colloquial syntax. • He often described persons who was innocent, simple, n

aive, and ignorant as his heroes or heroines.• He used the artistic style of hyperbole on the basis of the

western traditional humor and made his writing full of allegories that lay behind the humor.

Background information of this story

• "My Platonic Sweetheart" is a short dream narrative. It was originally entitled The Lost Sweetheart and written between Jul-Aug 1898, but only published in 1912.

Note Mark Twain was always interested in those

psychic phenomena which we call dreams. His own sleep fancies were likely to be vivid, and it was his habit to recall them and to find interest, and sometimes amusement, in their detail.

In the story he set down, and not without some fidelity to circumstance—dream circumstance—a phase of what we call recurrent dreams. As the tale progressed he felt an inclination to treat the subject more fully— more philosophically—and eventually he laid the manuscript away. The time did not come when he was moved to rewrite it; and for the pure enjoyment of it as a delicate fancy it may be our good fortune that he left it unchanged.

Questions and discussions

• Why his sweetheart is platonic?

• Why the narrator and his sweetheart have different names in different dreams?

• What, according to you, did Mark Twain most beautifully present to us readers in this story?