课前准备 Warm-up

Love is a topic of eternal interest, and one might wonder how love could be “a fallacy”. Before you read the text, think about the following questions:

1) What is LOVE?

2) What is a FALLACY?

3) Take a wild guess of the relation between love and fallacy.

本章概览 An Overview

This is a humorous essay in which the narrator tells his failure to win the heart of a young woman with the force of logic, which therefore proves to him that “love is a fallacy”—“it is inconsistent with logic.”

The narrator of the story is Dobie Gillis, a freshman in a law school who is proud of his logical reasoning and general intellectual capability. Dobie Gillis grapples with Petey Burch whose girlfriend he hopes that he can persuade to give up and Polly Espy, Burch’s girlfriend he intends to marry after he has improved her. He is quite sure of his final success because he is smarter and it is only logical that the girl will choose him. However, the result is a great surprise to him because the girl turns down his proposal and chooses Petey Burch, all because of what Dobie Gillis regards as a “silly reason”, thus proving that “love is a fallacy”.

学习目标 Objectives

Through textual analysis and learning, the students should

1) Get the theme of the text

2) Comprehend the social significance of the text

3) Acquire relevant rhetorical devices used in the text

知识结构 Knowledge Structure

The text can be roughly divided into four parts, which can be subdivided into several sections.

Part I (paras. 1-3)

Preface: The author’s idea about the purpose of this story.

Part II (paras. 4-59)

It is the bargain between the law student and his roommate over the exchange of the girl.

Part III (paras. 60-125)

It vividly describes the incredibly tough project of making dumb Polly smart, and the seeming success.

Part IV (paras. 126-154)

The girl learns her lesson too well. She uses all the logical fallacies to fight back her teacher.