http://books.altspu.ru/files/original/77/112/_[650].png e2e88ad14b3c0cb18c005c79615f597d http://books.altspu.ru/files/original/77/112/kozlova[mini].pdf e07d5450154362afe1abc10ef5969710 PDF Text Text Содержание �Содержание ОБ ИЗДАНИИ Основной титульный экран Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 1 Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 2 �Содержание МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «Алтайский государственный педагогический университет» (ФГБОУ ВО « АлтГПУ» ) Л.А. КОЗЛОВА, Л.Л. ШЕВЧЕНКО FURTHER STEPS IN TEXT ANALYSIS Учебное пособие Барнаул ФГБОУ ВО « АлтГПУ» 2018 Об издании - 1, 2, 3. ISBN 978-5-88210-915-7 �Содержание УДК 811.111(075) ББК 81.432.1я73 К592 Козлова, Л.А. Further steps in text analysis [Электронный ресурс] : учебное пособие / Л.А. Козлова, Л.Л. Шевченко. – Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2018. – Систем. требования: PC не ниже класса Intel Celeron 2 ГГц ; 512 Мb RAM ; Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 ; Adobe Acrobat Reader ; SVGA монитор с разрешением 1024х768 ; мышь. ISBN 978-5-88210-915-7 Рецензенты: Рогозина Ирина Владимировна, доктор филологических наук, профессор (Алтайский государственный технический университет им. И.И. Ползунова); Кочешкова Ирина Юрьевна, кандидат филологических наук, доцент (Алтайский государственный педагогический университет) Настоящее пособие предназначено для занятий со студентами V курса по лингвостилистическому анализу и интерпретации текстов различных жанров: эссе, биографии, автобиографии, короткого рассказа, публичной речи, научного текста и поэзии. С учетом того, что начальные навыки лингвостилистического анализа закладываются на IV курсе, данное пособие ставит своей целью расширение знаний и закрепление навыков интерпретации текстов различных жанров, выявление жанровых особенностей текста и тех стилистических приемов, которые формируют в своей совокупности идиостиль конкретного автора. Рекомендовано к изданию редакционно-издательским советом АлтГПУ 21.02.2018 г. Текстовое (символьное) электронное издание. Системные требования: PC не ниже класса Intel Celeron 2 ГГц ; 512 Мb RAM ; Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 ; Adobe Acrobat Reader ; SVGA монитор с разрешением 1024х768 ; мышь. Об издании - 1, 2, 3. �Содержание Электронное издание создано при использовании программного обеспечения Sunrav BookOffice. Объём издания - 9 012 КБ. Дата подписания к использованию: 21.05.2018 Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «Алтайский государственный педагогический университет» (ФГБОУ ВО «АлтГПУ») ул. Молодежная, 55, г. Барнаул, 656031 Тел. (385-2) 36-82-71, факс (385-2) 24-18-72 е-mail: rector@altspu.ru, http://www.altspu.ru Об издании - 1, 2, 3. �Содержание СОДЕРЖАНИЕ Introduction PART I. THE LANGUAGE OF NONFICTION: A LITERARY ESSAY The Origin and the Main Types of Essays Virginia Woolf. The Common Reader. How Should One Read a Book Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book” A Few Hints on Essay Writing Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf St. Jean de Crevecoeur. What is an American? Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?” Samples of Student’s Essays What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-Reliance Laurie Lee. Appetite Biography and Autobiography as Nonfiction Genres Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography Evelyn Waugh. General Conversation: Myself Margaret Atwood. Great Unexpectations Essays for Self-Guided Analysis H.G. Wells. Ellis Island Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar Susan Sontag. Beauty PART II. THE LANGUAGE OF PUBLIC SPEAKING The Main Features of Publicistic Style Analysing Speeches Analysing Political Speeches Donald Trump. The Crossroads In Our History Theodore Roosevelt. The Man with the Muck-rake �Содержание Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech Donald Trump. Inaugural Address Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS PART III. THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE The Main Features of Scientific Style Anna Wierzbicka. English: Meaning and Culture. English as a Cultural Universe Steven Arthur Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language Scientific Texts for Self-Guided Analysis Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say PART IV. THE LANGUAGE OF FICTION: A SHORT STORY The Art of Reading and Analysing a Story James Joyce. Eveline Oscar Wilde. The Model Millionaire Katherine Mansfield. A Cup of Tea Somerset Maugham. The Happy Man O. Henry. The Cop and the Anthem Ernest Hemingway. Cat in the Rain Stories for Self-Guided Analysis Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras PART V. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY Analysing Poetry Sir Walter Raleigh. Even Such Is Time John Donne. Holy Sonnets. Sonnet XIII Robert Herrick. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time William Blake. A Poison Tree �Содержание Edgar Allan Poe. Alone Emily Dickinson. There is no Frigate like a Book Christina Rossetti. Up-hill William Butler Yeats. For Anne Gregory Edwin Arlington Robinson. Richard Cory Robert Frost. Gathering Leaves Edward Estlin Commings. Pity this Busy Monster, Manunkind Dylan Thomas. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Dorothy Parker. Frustration Allen Ginsberg. A Supermarket in California Tom Clark. Poem Poems for Self-Guided Analysis Selected Bibliography �Содержание INTRODUCTION As we have stated earlier (see the introduction to the manual for 4th year students) there are various kinds and purposes of reading: we may read for information, for relaxation etc. Analytical reading is a more complex intellectual activity and it requires an attentive and inquisitive reader. The main aim of analytical reading is to understand the message of the author, to get aesthetic pleasure and to be able to discuss the merits and demerits of a book, a story or a poem. In this type of reading the reader starts a dialogue with the author, accepting or rejecting his/her views and aesthetic principles. But to be able to carry on such a dialogue you have to really understand the author, to achieve equality with him (according to Raphael, to understand an author is to become equal to him). Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested and chewed.” Reading a text analytically and being able to carry on a dialogue with the author actually means chewing and digesting the text we analyze. Yet it does not mean that we just share every idea expressed by the author and fully dissolve ourselves in the author. Stating that reading a text we start a dialogue with the author, we must keep in mind that both the participants of this dialogue are equal. The author embodied his/her ideas in the material form of the text and the reader “collects”, or extracts this idea by carrying out a holistic analysis of lingual, pragmatic, cultural and cognitive parameters of the text. A really talented text (“an open text” as Umberto Eco calls it) potentially has a possibility of multiple, or unlimited interpretation. Each reader brings to the interpretation his/her own social, economic, aesthetic, ethical, religious and political background. In other words, our personal history, even our present mood may influence our responses and so makes each reading to some extent our own. Thus the process of interpretation can be no less creative than the text production, because it presupposes the solution of an intellectual problem – the reconstruction of meaning which is sometimes not expressed explicitly, but is hidden and requires reconstruction by means of inference. Of course, there are limits to the degree of our freedom. The eminent Russian scholar Georgy Bogin said that there exist certain boundaries in the multiplicity of interpretation, beyond which appears the danger of distortion of the text meaning or the inadequacy of understanding which usually occurs because of the lack of necessary knowledge and convincing argumentation based on knowledge. It’s never enough just to say: “It’s so just because I think soc” or “It’s my personal opinion”. Our opinion must be very well grounded and based on the knowledge of the topic, only then will it sound convincing. The famous Russian poet Samuil Marshak said that each talented writer requires a talented reader. We are hopeful that you will prove to be sophisticated and talented readers and therefore able to carry on a successful dialogue with the authors and we wish you success in this challenging work. �Содержание PART I. THE LANGUAGE OF NONFICTION: A LITERARY ESSAY The Origin and the Main Types of Essays Virginia Woolf. The Common Reader. How Should One Read a Book Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book” A Few Hints on Essay Writing Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf St. Jean de Crevecoeur. What is an American? Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?” Samples of Student’s Essays What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-Reliance Laurie Lee. Appetite Biography and Autobiography as Nonfiction Genres Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography Evelyn Waugh. General Conversation: Myself Margaret Atwood. Great Unexpectations Essays for Self-Guided Analysis H.G. Wells. Ellis Island Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar Susan Sontag. Beauty �Содержание The Origin and the Main Types of Essays The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, “to try” or “to attempt”. In English essay first meant “a trial” or “an attempt”, and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as “attempts” to put his thoughts adequately into writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones. Francis Bacon’s essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Other English essayists included Robert Burton (1577–1640) and Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682). In Italy, Baldassare Castiglione wrote about courtly manners in his essay Il libro del cortegiano. In the 1600s, the Jesuit Baltasar Gracián wrote about the theme of wisdom. During the Age of Enlightenment, essays were a favoured tool of polemicists who aimed at convincing readers of their position. In the 1700s and 1800s, Edmund Burke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote essays for the general public. In the 20th century, a number of essayists tried to explain the new movements in art and culture by using essays (e.g., T.S. Eliot). Whereas some essayists used essays for strident political themes, Robert Louis Stevenson and Willa Cather wrote lighter essays. Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and Charles du Bos wrote literary criticism essays. An essay has been defined in a variety of ways. I.R. Galperin defines it as literary composition of moderate length on philosophical, social, aesthetic or literary subject. He also points out that the most obvious characteristics of the essay is personality in the treatment of the subject and naturalness of expression. Following Montaigne’s original idea of an essay as an attempt to “to give something a try”, we may define an essay as a careful and considered piece of writing, a record of the mind in the act of thinking, which is characterized by an informal style and in which a writer presents his/her personal opinion on a certain political, social, ethical or literary issue. It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject. He notes that “like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything, usually on a certain topic. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay.” He points out that “a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel.” Huxley argues that “essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference.” The three poles are: �Содержание • Personal and the autobiographical essays: these use “fragments of reflective autobiography” to “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description.” • Objective and factual: in these essays, the authors “do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme.” • Abstract-universal: these essays “make the best...of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist.” According to I.R. Galperin, this literary genre has definite lingual traits which shape it as a variety of publicistic style. Different writers and publicists specialize in different kinds of essay. According to their form and style, essays may be classified into several types: narrative, descriptive, persuasive, and argumentative. These types are used by a range of authors, including university students and professional essayists. A narrative essay recounts true events. It uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative, authors must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish their point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically. A descriptive essay describes people, places, or things. Descriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader’s emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities. Determining the purpose, considering the audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing the description are the rhetorical choices to be considered when using a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can also be chronological or emphatic. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression. A persuasive essay aims to convince the reader of the author’s opinion or, perhaps, to rouse the reader to action. Persuasive writing is characterized by strong arguments aimed at convincing the reader by the use of various means of manuipulating the reader’s consciousness. This type of essays is characteristic of political discourse. An argumentative essay is a type in which the author addresses a certain issue and offers various approaches to it, presenting different viewpoints, considering all the pros and cons and supplying different arguments for and against various viewpoints. An effective essay often combines features of different types. �Содержание Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Her mother, a famous beauty, was born in India and later moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable author, critic and mountaineer. The young Virginia was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household. Sir Leslie Stephen’s eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the widower of Thackeray’s youngest daughter), meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. There was an immense library at the Stephens’ house, from which Virginia and her sister Vanessa were taught the classics and English literature. According to Woolf’s memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories, however, were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse. The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses. Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks until her suicide. After the death of their father and Virginia’s second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Following studies at King’s College, Cambridge, and King’s College London, Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. Despite his low material status the couple shared a close bond. The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the �Содержание Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia’s novels. Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted and sometimes almost dissolved in the characters’ receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. Having been brought up in the atmosphere of literature, painting and music, she always attempted to express in her writing the outcome of this interaction. She wrote in one of her letters: “I always think of my books as music before I write them”. Her prose presents a vivid example of intermediality. Her chief works are: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1929), The Waves (1931). Her works have been translated into over 50 languages. The Common Reader. How Should One Read a Book 1. In the first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions – there we have none. 2. But to enjoy freedom if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squiring half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is “the very spot”? There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by �Содержание men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read? 3. It is simple enough to say that since books have classes – fiction, biography, poetry – we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirtytwo chapters of a novel – if we consider how to read a novel – first are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you – how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. 4. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasized; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. The turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist – Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person – Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy – but that we are living in a different world. Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact is enough. But if the open air and adventure mean everything to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room, and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun around. The moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the mind is now exposed – the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are each is consistent with itself. The marker of each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon us they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another – from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith – is to be wrenched and �Содержание uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great finesse of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist – the great artist – gives you. 5. But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show you that writers are very seldom “great artists”; far more often a book makes no claim to be a work of art at all. These biographies, for example, lives of great men, of men long dead and forgotten, that stand cheek by jowl with the novels and poems, are we to refuse to read them because they are not “art”? Or shall we read them, but read them in a different way, with a different aim? Shall we read them in the first place to satisfy that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of these people – the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting. Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and adventures? 6. Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable such houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die. And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish and we are out at sea; we are hunting, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are taking part in great campaigns. Or if we like to stay here in England, in London, still the scene changes; the street narrows; the house becomes small, cramped, diamond – paned, and malodorous. We see a poet, Donne, driven from such a house because the walls were so thin that when the children cried their voices cut through them. We can follow him, through the paths that lie in the pages of books, to Twickenham; to Lady Bedford’s Park, a famous meeting-ground for nobles and poets; and then our steps to Wilton, the great house under the downs, and hear Sidney read the Arcadia to his sisters; and ramble among the very marshes and see the very herons that figure in that famous romance; and then again travel north with that other Lady Pembroke, Anne Clifford, to her wild moors, or plunge into the city and control our merriment at the sight of Gabriel Harvey in his black velvet suit arguing about poetry with Spenser. Nothing is more fascinating than to grope and stumble in the alternate darkness and splendour of Elizabethan London. But there is no staying there. The Temples and the Swifts, the Harleys and the St. John beckon us on; hour upon hour can be spent disentangling their quarrels and deciphering their characters; and when we tire of them we can stroll on, past a lady in black wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and Garrick; or cross the channel, if we like, and meet Voltaire and Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and Twickenham – how certain places repeat themselves and certain names! – where Lady Bedford had her Park once and Pope lived later, to Walpole’s home at Strawberry Hill. But Walpole introduces us to such a swarm of new acquaintances, there are so many houses to visit and bells to ring that we may well hesitate for a moment, on the Miss Berry’s doorstep, for example, when behold, up comes Thackeray; he is the friend of the woman whom Walpole loved; so that merely by going from friend to friend. From garden to garden, from house to house, we have passed from one end of English literature to another and wake to find ourselves here again in the present, if we can so differentiate this moment from all that have �Содержание gone before. This, then, is one of the ways in which we can read these lives and letters; we can make them light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous dead in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close and can surprise their secrets, and sometimes we may pull out a play or a poem that they have written and see whether it reads differently in the presence of the author. But this again rouses other questions. How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life – how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us – so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so personal. 7. But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement – the colts galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at the well, the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long, acrid moan. The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its records of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder. It may be one letter – but what a vision it gives! It may be a few sentences – but what vistas they suggest! Sometimes a whole story will come together with such beautiful humor and pathos and completeness that it seems as if a great novelist had been at work, yet it is only an old actor, Tate Wilkinson, remembering the strange story of Captain Jones; it is only a young subaltern serving under Arthur Wellesley and falling in love with a pretty girl at Lisbon; it is only Maria Allen letting fall her sewing in the empty drawing room and sighing how she wishes she had taken Dr. Burney’s good advice and had never eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value; it is negligible in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go through the rubbish heaps and find rings and scissors and broken noses buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while the colt gallops round the field, the woman fills her pail at the well, and the donkey brays. 8. But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching for what is needed to complete the half-truth which is all that the Wilkinsons, the Bunburys, and the Maria Allens are able to offer us. They had not the artist’s power of mastering and eliminating; they could not tell the whole truth even about their own lives; they have disfigured the story that might have been so shapely. Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are very inferior form of fiction. Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements and approximations; to cease from searching out the minute shades of human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the purer truth of fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and generalized, unaware of detail, but stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is poetry; and that is the time to read poetry when we are almost able to write it. Western wind, when wilt thou blow? �Содержание The small rain down can rain Christ, if my love were in my arms, And I in my bed again! The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then – how sudden and complete is our immersion! There is nothing here to catch hold of: nothing to stay us in our flight. The illusion of fiction is gradual; its effects are prepared; but who when they read these four lines stops to ask who wrote them, or conjures up the thought of Donne’s house or Sidney’s secretary; or enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past and the succession of generations? The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centered and constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion. Afterwards, it is true, the sensation begins to spread in wider rings through our minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to sound and to comment and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The intensity of poetry covers an immense range of emotion. We have only to compare the force and directness of I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave Only remembering that I grieve, with the wavering modulation of Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands As by an hour glass; the span of time Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it; An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home At last and ends in sorrow; but the life, Weary of riot, numbers every sand, Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down, So to conclude calamity in rest, or place the meditative calm of whether we be young or old Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, Is wish infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be, beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside – or the splendid fantasy of And the woodland haunter Shall not cease to saunter �Содержание When, far down some glade, Of the great world’s burning, One soft flame upturning Seems, to his discerning, Crocus in the shade. to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into character as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power to condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever. 9. “We have only to compare” – with those words the cat is out of the bag, and the true complexity of reading is admitted. The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by author. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pig-sty, or a cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare buildings. But this act of comparison means that our attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, books that fill the air with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind. There they hang in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgments we have passed on them – Robinson Crusoe, Emma, The Return of the Native. Compare the novels with these – even the latest and least of novels has a right to be judged with the best. And so with poetry – when the intoxication of rhythm has died down and the splendour of words has faded a visionary shape will return to us and this must be compared with Lear, with whatever is the best or seems to us to be the best in its own kind. And we may be sure that the newness of new poetry and fiction is its superficial quality and that we have only to alter slightly, not to recast, the standards by which we have judged the old. 10. It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first – to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow- shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating – that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to say, “Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is good”. To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred �Содержание authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our own identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathize wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, “I hate, I love,” and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts – poetry, fiction, history, biography – and has stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective. It will begin to bring us not merely judgments on particular books, but it will tell us that there is a quality common to certain books. Listen, it will say, what shall we call this? And it will read us perhaps Lear and then perhaps Agamemnon in order to bring out that common quality. This, with our taste to guide us, we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our perceptions. We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from that discrimination. But as a rule only lives when it is perpetually broken by contact with the books themselves – nothing is easier and more stultifying than to make rules which exist out of touch with facts, in a vacuum – now at least, in order to steady ourselves in this difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature, as an art. Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the poets and novelists themselves in their unconsidered sayings, are often surprisingly relevant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading. They can do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the shade of a hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our own and vanquishes it. 11. If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight and judgment, you may perhaps, conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful sow grazing in a �Содержание further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching. 12. Yet who reads to bring about an end however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crown, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading”. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Essay 1. Speak about the author of the essay: her life, her personality, her literary credo and her contribution to English and world literature. 2. As you know there are different types of essays: descriptive, narrative, expository, persuasive. To which of these types would you refer this essay? Or does it combine features of different types? Give evidence to your opinion. 3. Comment on the title of the essay. Why does the author choose to present in the form of a question? Can we trace the connection between the form of the title and the form of the whole essay? Does the writer merely state her opinion or does she try to involve the readers into discussion? What language means does she employ to involve the reader into discussion? Comment on the tonality of the essay. Is it matter-of-fact or emotional? Pay special attention to the abundance of interrogative and exclamatory sentences and the choice of words and their contribution to the tonality. 4. What is the central thesis of the essay? In what form does the writer present her thesis? Is there only one thesis or are there several, related to the main one? Analyze the structure of the paragraphs paying special attention to the opening sentences. 5. What, in the writer’s opinion, is the most important quality we should posses to be able to enjoy a book and form our own judgement? Point out the words and phrases related to the concept of freedom (in this case freedom of opinion) in the first two paragraphs of the essay. Pay special attention to the metaphors employed by the author in the representation of this concept. 6. What is the author’s attitude to books and libraries? Do we get an impression that Virginia Woolf treats books as human beings? Point out the words and phrases that create this effect. What facts from her biography help us to trace the roots of this attitude? 7. As the essay develops the writer can’t help giving advice to the reader as to how to better understand a book. Quote the sentences which express this advice and comment on the ideas the writer suggests. In paragraph 3 Virginia Woolf often resorts to the form of the Imperative Mood. Yet do you feel that she imposes her opinion on you? What makes her advice sound �Содержание tentative, not imposing? Point out cases of alliteration in paragraph 3 and comment on its phonoaesthetic effect. Pay close attention to the syntax of paragraphs 3 and 4, find cases of parallel constructions and antithesis and comment on their contribution to the style. 8. One of the key metaphors employed by Virginia Woolf in her description of the reading and writing processes is the metaphor of a house (building). She extends this key metaphor by adding other images to the central image. Follow the process of extension and point out the means of metaphorical extension and other metaphors related to the central image. What is the expressive effect of parallel participial constructions in paragraphs 5 and 7? 9. In paragraphs 5–8 Virginia Woolf describes three main genres of literature: biography, poetry, and fiction, pointing out the peculiarities of each. Follow the description and point out the means employed by the author to present the specificity of each genre and its effect upon the readers. Does the tonality of the essay remain the same or does it change as the author passes over from the description of one genre to another? What effect does the change of tonality create? What is the effect of the numerous quotations from poetry? 10. Paragraphs 9–11 are devoted to the description of the post-reading appreciation of a book: comparison and judgement. Do the writer’s ideas coincide with your own? What does she warn us against when we act as judges? What is her attitude to critics? Comment on the effect of the extended simile she resorts to in her description of critics and criticism. 11. Comment on the final paragraph of the essay. How do you interpret the words of her dream? As the last paragraph of an essay usually contains a conclusion, what kind of conclusion does she suggest? 12. What is the author’s aesthetic credo as it is presented in the essay? 13. Summarize your answers, add your own observations and get ready for the final analysis of the essay. Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book” A Few Hints on Essay Writing Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf �Содержание Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book” 1. How and why I read books. 2. “I looked for peace everywhere only to find it in one place – in the corner with a book” (Thomas Kempis). 3. “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and only some few to be chewed and digested” (Francis Bacon). �Содержание A Few Hints on Essay Writing Ask several students or teachers to tell you what an essay is and you are likely to receive several very different answers. There is no common and precise definition. For some teachers and students an essay is a five-paragraph formula (introduction, main point, main point, main point, conclusion). And for some timed-writing or test situations this sort of formula can be useful. A well-written essay is a careful and considered piece of writing which is personal and informal. It is a record of the mind in the act of thinking. It does not spring entirely well formed from your pen. It usually takes a lot of forethought, consideration and time. Yet writing an essay is always stimulating, inspiring, energizing and challenging. Although the entire process of writing an essay may seem overwhelming, do not feel disheartened. All those writing an essay face similar challenges: finding, developing, and organizing ideas; understanding what they are trying to say and expressing that effectively, getting the message across by making their point clearly, correctly and with style and personality. The traditional structure of an essay contains the following parts: an introduction in which you present your central thesis and invite the readers into your discussion of a narrowed topic; a body that classifies and explores with full factual data or arguments the major issues of the thesis; a conclusion that affirms your judgement, offers your solution, or gives a call to action. Here is a possible structure of a well organized essay, the so called TRIAC pattern, in which each letter stands for a part of the essay: T – Theme, topic, thesis: state what the essay is about, the topic the essay addresses, or what you will argue or claim. This opening may run only a sentence or two, but not longer than a paragraph. R – Restatement, restriction, refinement: rephrase the theme or thesis in sharper, slightly more particular ways. This restatement is often preceded with transition like that is, in other words, what I mean is. Again, this restatement may run only a sentence or a few sentences. I – Illustration, example: support your ideas. Give examples. Illustrate your statements. Sentences that do this are often preceded with the traditional phrases for instance or for example. These discussions form the heart of an essay or a paragraph; they give the details that make the writing convincing and interesting. A – Analysis: analysis means telling readers how to understand examples or illustrations. It means making logical, commonsense inferences between causes and effect, intentions and actions. Words like since, therefore, because, however, and nevertheless all work to signal your logic. C – Conclusion: anytime you are ready to draw together several threads of your logic, you are making a conclusion. Such sentences or paragraphs are preceded with in conclusion, thus, summing it up, though these transitions are not always necessary. Conclusions may appear in the middle of an essay and more than once. This structure, however, can vary, too. The steps can go in different orders, such as IATC: �Содержание I – intriguing illustration or an example; A – analysis of this illustration, how it works, why it works this way; T – your sense of the theme of the passage, your real topic; C – your concluding discussion of what now seems true to you and should seem true to the readers. Or you could use TITITIAC variant – three pairs of thesis/illustration followed by analysis of these three add up and a concluding discussion of what now seems accurate or true. TRIAC, in other words, is a structure that can work in lots of different sequences and combinations. They are all workable provided your essay is a careful and thought provoking piece of writing but that is also personal and presents a record of your mind in the act of thinking. �Содержание Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf The complete works of Lewis Carroll have been issued by the Nonesuch Press in a stout volume of 1293 pages. So there is no excuse – Lewis Carroll ought once and for all to be complete. We ought to be able to grasp him whole and entire. But we fail – once more we fail. We think we have caught Lewis Carroll; we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think we have caught the Rev. C.L. Dodgson – we look again and see a fairy elf. The book breaks in two in our hands. In order to cement it, we turn to the Life. But the Rev. C.L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible. He accepted every convention; he was prudish, pernickety, pious, and jocose. If Oxford dons in the nineteenth century had an essence he was that essence. He was so good that his sisters worshipped him; so pure that his nephew has nothing to say about him. It is just possible, he hints, that “a shadow of disappointment lay over Lewis Carroll’s life”. Mr. Dodgson at once denies the shadow. “My life,” he says, “is free from all trial and trouble.” But this untinted jelly contained within it a perfectly hard crystal. It contained childhood. And this is very strange, for childhood normally fades slowly. Wisps of childhood persist when the boy or girl is a grown man or woman. Childhood returns sometimes by day, more often by night. But it was not so with Lewis Carroll. For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it. And therefore as he grew older this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins. But since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do – he could return to that world; he could re-create it, so that we too become children again. In order to make us into children, he first makes us asleep. “Down, down, down, would the fall never come to an end?” Down, down, down we fall into that terrifying, wildly inconsequent, yet perfectly logical world where time races, then stands still; where space stretches, then contracts. It is the world of sleep; it is also the world of dreams. Without any conscious effort dreams come; the white rabbit, the walrus, and the carpenter, one after another, turning and changing one into the other, they come skipping and leaping across the mind. It is for this reason that the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children. President Wilson, Queen Victoria, The Times leader writer, the late Lord Salisbury – it does not matter how old, how important, or how insignificant you are, you become a child again. To become a child is to be very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is to be Alice in Wonderland. It is also to be Alice Through the Looking Glass. It is to see the world upside down. Many great satirists and moralists have shown us the world upside down, and have made us see it, as grown-up people see it, savagely. Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down as a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh, irresponsibly. Down the groves of pure nonsense we whirl laughing, laughing �Содержание They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope … And then we wake. None of the transitions in Alice in Wonderland is quite so queer. For we wake to find – is it the Rev. C.L. Dodgson? Is it Lewis Carroll? Or is it both combined? This conglomerate object intends to produce an extra-Bowdlerized edition of Shakespeare for the use of British maidens; implores them to think of death when they go to the play; and always, always to realize that “the true object of life is the development of character…” Is there, then, even in 1293 pages, any such thing as “completeness”? Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Essay 1. Read the first paragraph and define the thesis of the essay. Pay attention to the use of the word “complete” and the noun “completeness”. How are these words related to the main thesis? How many meanings does the adjective “complete” actualize in the sentence “… Lewis Carroll ought once and for all to be complete”. Whose voice can you hear in this sentence? 2. Study the second paragraph devoted to the life of the Rev. C.L. Dodgson. What image is created by the author and by what means is it created? Write out the key words, which are employed by the author to create this image. Pay special attention to the sentence: “he was prudish, pernickety, pious, and jocose”. Comment on the adjectives that are used to present Lewis Carrol’s personality and their arrangement. What are the relations between the adjectives “prudish”, “pernickety”, “pious” on the one hand and “jocose” on the other and what do these relations reflect? What, according to Virginia Woolf caused Lewis Carrol to write a book for children and about children? Comment on her ideas about the role of childhood in our lives. How much of her own life experience is reflected in her words? What is your opinion of the role of childhood in a person’s life? 3. In the next two paragraphs Virginia Woolf gives her interpretation of Carrol’s two books. How does she interpret the essence of his book? Do you agree to this interpretation? Analyze the manner of her writing. Doesn’t it remind you of Carrol’s manner of writing? How is this resemblance achieved? In fact this passage presents an example of intertextuality. What is the function of intertextuality in this case? 4. Analyze the concluding lines of the last paragraph, starting from “And then we wake”. Comment on the conclusion the author makes and the form of the conclusion. Pay special attention to the repetition of the word “complete”, here in the form of the noun in the end of the essay. Comment on the tonality of the sentence: This conglomerate object intends to produce an extra-Bowdlerized edition of Shakespeare for the use of British maidens; implores them to think of death when they go to the play; and always, always to realize that “the true object of life is the development of character…” Here we see another case of intertextuality, presented by the quotation. What function does intertextuality fulfil in this case? 5. Summarize your answers, add your own observations and get ready for the final analysis of the essay. �Содержание St. Jean de Crevecoeur (1731–1813) Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur (December 31, 1735 – November 12, 1813), naturalized in New York as John Hector St. John, was a French-American writer. He was born in Caen, Normandy, France, to the Comte and Comtesse de Crèvecœur (Count and Countess of Crèvecœur). In 1755 he immigrated to New France in North America. There, he served in the French and Indian War as a surveyor in the French Colonial Militia, rising to the rank of lieutenant. Following the British defeat of the French Army in 1759 he moved to New York State, then the Province of New York, where he took out citizenship, adopted the English-American name of John Hector St. John, and in 1770 married an American woman, Mehitable Tippet. He bought a sizable farm in Orange County, N.Y., where he prospered as a farmer and took up writing about life in the American colonies and the emergence of an American society. In 1779, during the American Revolution, the faltering health of his father forced him to travel to Europe. Accompanied by his son, he crossed British-American lines to enter Britishoccupied New York City, where he was imprisoned as an American spy for three months without being heard. Eventually, he was able to leave for Britain. In 1782, in London, he published a volume of narrative essays entitled the Letters from an American Farmer. The book quickly became the first literary success by an American author in Europe and turned Crèvecœur into a celebrated figure. He was the first writer to describe to Europeans – employing many American English terms – the life on the American frontier and to explore the concept of the American Dream, portraying American society as characterized by the principles of equal opportunity and self-determination. His work provided useful information and understanding of the “New World” that helped to create an American identity in the minds of Europeans by describing an entire country rather than another regional colony. The writing celebrated American ingenuity and its uncomplicated lifestyle and spelled out the acceptance of religious diversity in a melting pot being created from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. His application of the Latin maxim “Ubi panis ibi patria” to early American settlers also shows an interesting insight. He once praised the middle colonies for “fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields... decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where an hundred years ago all was wild, woody, and uncultivated”. From Britain, he sailed to France, where he was briefly reunited with his father. When the United States had been recognized by Britain following the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Crèvecœur returned to New York City. He learned that, in his absence, his wife had died, his farm had been destroyed, and his children were now living with neighbors. Eventually, he was able to regain custody of his children. For most of the �Содержание 1780s, Crèvecœur lived in New York City where he now served as the French consul for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1784, he published a two-volume version of his Letters from an American Farmer, enlarged and completely rewritten in French. A three-volume version followed in 1787. Both his English and his French books were translated into several other European languages and widely disseminated throughout Europe. For many years, Crèvecœur was identified by European readers with his fictional narrator, James, the “American farmer”, and held in high esteem by readers and fellow-writers across Europe. When he published another three-volume work in 1801, entitled Voyage dans la HautePensylvanie et dans l’état de New-York, however, his fame had faded, and his book was ignored. An abbreviated German translation appeared in the following year. An English translation only appeared in 1964. Much of his best work has only been published posthumously, most recently as More Letters from the American Farmer: An edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecœur, edited by Dennis D. Moore (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995). Particularly concerned by the condition of slaves, he was a member of the “Société des Amis des Noirs”, society of the Friends of the Blacks founded in Paris. In 1789, during a stay in France, he was trapped by the political upheaval that was quickly turning into the French Revolution. As an aristocrat, he soon went into hiding, while secretly attempting to gain passage to the United States. The necessary papers were finally granted to him by the new American ambassador to France, James Monroe, in 1794. At the end of his life Crèvecœur settled permanently in France. On November 12, 1813, he died in Sarcelles, Val d’Oise, France. What is an American? I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts, which must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman, when he first lands on this continent. He must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride, when he views the chain of settlement which embellishes these extended shores. When he says to himself, this is the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and impatient, took refuge here. They brought along with them their national genius, to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy, and what substance they possess. Here he sees the industry of his native country displayed in a new manner, and traces in their works the embryos of all the arts, sciences, and ingenuity which flourish in Europe. Here he beholds fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields, an immense country filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where a hundred years ago all was wild, woody, and uncultivated! What a train of pleasing ideas this fair spectacle must suggest; it is a prospect which must inspire a good citizen with the most heartfelt pleasure. The difficulty consists in the manner of viewing so extensive a scene. He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of �Содержание a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. We are a people of cultivation, scattered over an immense territory, communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself. If he travels through our rural districts he views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations. The meanest of our log-houses is a dry and comfortable habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns afford; that of a farmer is the only appellation of the rural inhabitants of our country. It must take some time ere he can reconcile himself to our dictionary, which is but short in words of dignity, and names of honor. There, on a Sunday, he sees a congregation of respectable farmers and their wives, all clad in neat homespun, well mounted, or riding in their own humble wagons. There is not among them an esquire, saving the unlettered magistrate. There he sees a person as simple as his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labor of others. We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be, nor is the pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. Many ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled. Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the millions of men whom it will feed and contain? For no European foot has as yet travelled half the extent of this mighty continent! The next wish of this traveller will be to know whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans has arisen. The eastern provinces must indeed be excepted, as being the unmixed descendants of Englishmen. In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes, to what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No! Urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Everything has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system. Here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants. Wanting vegetative mould, and refreshing showers, they withered, and were mowed down by want, �Содержание hunger, and war; but now by the power of transpiration, like all other plants they have taken root and flourished! Formerly they were not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible power has this surprising metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws and that of their industry. The laws, the indulgent laws, protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption. They receive ample rewards for their labors; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of free-men, and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly require. What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him: His country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence. Ubi panis ibi patria (Where bread is, there is a fatherland) is the motto of all emigrants. What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations: He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigor, and industry, which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; his labor is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their farther to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all, without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitude to God; can he refuse there? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. – This is an American. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. Define the type of the essay and support your opinion. 2. What is the central thesis of the essay? In what form is the thesis presented? How is this thesis supported? �Содержание 3. In what tonality is the essay written? Do you not have an impression that it sounds as a hymn to America and Americans? By what language means is this effect achieved? Pay special attention to the choice of words, the communicative types of sentences, and the syntax of the essay. 4. The main principle which underlies the structure of the essay is contrast. Point out the language means which are used by the author to build this contrast. What things are contrasted? Point out the main devices that the author employs to describe the life of the people in Europe and on the new land. Point out the key metaphors that the author exploits and their expressive effect. Pay special attention to means of expressing negation and the role of negation in the essay. Comment on the thesis Ubi panis ibi patria, which as the author points out, was the motto of all immigrants. Do you support this statement? 5. What are the components of the concept “American Dream” as they are presented in this essay? 6. What predictions did the author make about the future of American society? Have they all come true? Give facts from contemporary life to support your opinion. 7. What answer does the author give to the question presented in the title? 8. What values of American society can be pointed out from the analysis of the essay? 9. Sum up your observations in the final analysis of the essay. Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?” Samples of Student’s Essays What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water �Содержание Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?” 1. Where bread is there’s a fatherland. 2. What is an American (a Russian, an Italian etc.). The merits and demerits of stereotypes. �Содержание Samples of Student’s Essays What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water �Содержание What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes However globalised we are now, stereotypes are still a plague of our society. There has been a great progress in humanity’s world view in general (and mind that we are still on the move), as gender, racial and what not restrictions are not as severe as they used to be, yes, but we still have a long way ahead of us. It appears to me that stereotypes are unavoidable, however hard we try to deny this. Mass media may be responsible for making them pop up; the first impression of coming into contact with something alien also has its impact. Yet people sometimes tend to forget that there may be more behind the first impression, and mass media is not always the best choice to put your trust into, as in one way or another there is always this little devil of a wish to make a big stir whatever the cost. Let us take Japan as an example. If one asks a non-initiate “What is a Japanese?” the most likely answer may be “Those weird big-eyed cartoons” (meaning anime), “Sushi”, “Robots” or “Sakura” – at least these were the answers I got when trying to do a little survey. Funny thing, but most of the time people do not even realize that any other cartoon outside Japan is in fact anime in the eyes of the Japanese themselves, as this is an abbreviation of an English borrowing animation. The age brackets and choice of genre are significantly wider in Japanese animation, yes, but still it does not remove the essence of the phenomenon. Japanese culture is indeed often misunderstood by the general public, like any other more or less alien thing. The truth is that Japanese do not really mind their reputation, because as a matter of fact they have nothing to be ashamed of judging from their own perspective. If the Germans may be still haunted by the Nazi stereotype and us Russians are expected to be equipped with a set of balalaikas and draught bears from the cradle (and I am not being sarcastic about our balalaika and bears stereotypes at all, in fact I find them endearing), it seems that Japanese simply do not care a fig what the world thinks of their culture and customs. This reputation is in fact quite a handy shielding for a nation that has always been continues to be very private. Of course Japan now is not as sternly isolated as it was before yet it does not welcome just about every person with open arms. One can say that Japan is like a club where only cool kids hang out (except that they do not try to openly belittle people around them). If you want to stay in the country, you must have something to offer that will benefit Japan’s well-being. But having this “something” is one thing – you still have a language barrier to jump over. I highly doubt they have abandoned the feeling of being superior, they just buried it deep within – in our globalised society there is simply no place for it. I am not in any way trying to say that they are a bunch of secluded egomaniacs who hate each and every foreigner and wish Amaterasu’s entire wrath upon them (yet they do have an absolutely charming name for us all – baka-gaijin, literally translated as stupid foreigner – though statistics say mostly Americans are honoured with this fine title). There are some glimpses of disdain here and there, take the Japanese syllabaries hiragana and katakana for example: the first is used to write down native Japanese words, the second is used for borrowings. If hiragana is all round and pretty, katakana is like “here are some sticks, make them work – baka-gaijinisms do not deserve even the slightest piece of our mother tongue’s gracefulness”. Yet they still adapt borrowings to �Содержание make them fit into the Japanese sound pattern – if it is fairly easy to figure out what aisukurimu is, one might want to consult a dictionary to know what wanpatān, or rimokon means (it is one pattern and remo(te) con(troll) respectively). There are more serious issues of Japan giving a cold shoulder to anything non-Japanese or even half-Japanese, however. With an increased number of foreigners living and working in Japan, interracial children appear, and they are known in Japan as hafu (adaptation of half). The issue is that sometimes these children will face hostility at school for being “not pure Japanese”. It may be not that widespread in bigger cities and their vicinities, yet more distant areas tend to stick to traditions of purity – if you think about it, it has not been very long since the isolation period ended, and some things are hard to uproot. Mixed children also sometimes fall into the category of gaijin, and whereas for a real foreigner the definition looks more or less factual (from the foreigner’s perspective, from the Japanese perspective it is still derogatory), for those mixed it is offensive. Where did this feeling of superiority come from anyway? The answer is fairly easy if you know a thing or two about Japanese history – religion. This is also presumably one of the reasons that drove Japan to joining the Axis during WWII, as traditional Japanese religion – Shinto – clearly states that Japan is the land created by the gods themselves with the Japanese Emperor being the descendant of the pantheon’s main deity – Amaterasu. Moreover, according to Shinto, any Japanese is a potential kami (Japanese word for god as well as the term denoting numerous deities) – it depends on one’s doings. In actual fact, one can make almost anything a kami in Shinto – be it a person, a mountain (shout out to Fuji-san), a tree, a stone, a chair – literally anything. Of course it is not a common practice nowadays, but the grounds are pretty much so. Do whatever you want with your kami, but live in harmony with nature and everything that surrounds you in your paper-thin house – no strict codes, just a simple set of rules to keep the balance. To put it all together – Japan is indeed a land of contrasts and wonders, with their own quirks, like any other country or people. I personally find it hard to idolise it, and I am far from hating it. I do not see any in-between either. I just sit there for five years or so with my check propped on my fist and thinking “Well, this is some amusing folk indeed”. Tania Klimova, group 104e �Содержание Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland Isn’t it a natural desire to look for a better life? Any activity begins when we realize that we need or want more than we have. This need is a driving force that stands behind our motivation. The need can send us to another part of the world and make us take root there. For some people the fatherland is a country where they and their families were born and they feel very loyal towards it. However, other people are like migratory birds – when they feel that the circumstances do not satisfy them anymore, they look for a better place. Though unlike birds, they may never come back home. We all come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and walks of life. Some children are lucky enough to be born into wealthy and prosperous families. “He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” people say about them. When they grow up, their fatherland gives them an opportunity to preserve and increase their wealth. However, other people come from families which live on the edge of poverty and hunger. If their country does nothing to improve their life conditions, should they call it a fatherland? Should they set a high value on it? No doubt, a lot of poor people would never exchange their fatherland for anything else and would give away their lives for it. Though some of them would prefer to leave the country that does not care for its citizens and consider a better place to be their fatherland. The life conditions for the rich and the poor are drastically different. It is a natural balance, though one can change their life and achieve success regardless of their background. It is believed that children from poor families tend to achieve more in life. They have more motivation and a clear understanding of what they want to get in this life. Moreover, they tend to be more confident because they are not tied to what they have (as they have practically nothing), so they are able to risk everything (which in their case is not much) and start a new life. Most often a new life starts in a new place – a new city, country or even continent. The opportunities of the rich, however, are limited, as they are too concerned about not losing their money and privileges. They are not likely to leave what they have inherited from their parents and start anything from scratch. For them their fatherland is their home country which gave them this prosperity and they will stay there whatever happens to protect their treasures. Why go somewhere else if your life is perfect at home? The poor are different: nothing to lose – no fears. Oppressive legislation, poor working conditions, a low income and the absence of protection make their basic instincts wake up – if the conditions are so bad, people look for a way to escape. Sometimes the only way is to leave the home country and sacrifice the notion of fatherland. It is no wonder that the FrenchAmerican writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur said Ubi panis ibi patria (Where bread is, there is a fatherland) is the motto of all emigrants. People who were born poor and are not provided with protection, rights and the opportunity to live a decent life, naturally want to leave the fatherland for a better country. Can we blame them for it and call traitors? Hardly so. Fatherland should be a value only when the citizens are taken care of. The motto might sound too materialistic, though there is a grain of truth in it. �Содержание Need is one of the basic notions of human psychology. Need makes us take actions, look for a way out and change our lives for the better. Sometimes need drives us to another place which is better in some respect. If a person feels at home there and realizes (s)he is safe and happy, does it matter where they were born? Sometimes your fatherland is not where you come into the world, but where you forget the voice of need. Vika Kandaurova, group 124e �Содержание What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water Being an Ossetian is difficult but enjoyable. If you do not believe me you can ask my father who has been struggling with cold, language and me mother for twenty-four years. He does it with sweet smile and kind word. To be honest, I have never seen a person as friendly as my father. Anyway, it is in his blood. Actually, there is a list of characteristics that any Ossetian should follow to become at home among strangers in Russia. There are three of them: • be friendly; • make random stresses in words; • launch your own business. As I have already said, amiability runs before an Ossetian. They will always be the masters of hospitality. You will always feel like home in their company where wine flows and pies flies. But be very attentive with women. They are sly as foxes, calculating as Jews and gossiping as gutter press. A lot of women are like that but the ones I know are the new form of evil. Anyway, you will never know the truth and may disagree because they will never show or tell it. The second item in the list is not a surprise for people who have ever communicated with people from the Greater Caucasus Mountains. But only these people pronounce words and tell stories with such a pretty charm that it becomes their trademark. For years we have been collecting the best mistakes of my father and still laugh at them. One more thing about the Ossetians – they are inborn businessmen. Each of them has his or her business and if not he or she works on his or her brother or sister. This system is very unstable and I do not like it at all (maybe it is the voice of a Russian woman talks). I would rather work for ten thousand rubbles per month than for a million per somewhen. Moreover, a good man cannot make big money. The last thing is not in the list but I think it is the most important. Being an Ossetian is to be proud of where you are from and who you are. They can teach Russian people to love their country and respect the culture. They can show us how one can miss his or her motherland. They can explain how we should cherish our families. As a half-blood Ossetian I can honestly say that I am proud of this blood in my veins. And I hope that I inherited only best traits. In any case, I am a daughter of my wonderful father and my beautiful mother who raised me right. Marina Bestaeva, group 124a �Содержание Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the most influential American writers. He articulated many of the fundamental beliefs of 19th-century. As the leader of Transcendentalism, Emerson spoke out against materialism, formal religion and slavery. Though he ranked as his country’s most piercing critic, he helped to establish the “American identity” preaching and exemplifying individualism. In one of his famous phrases Emerson urges: “Trust thyself”. Emerson’s philosophic views were often considered radical at the time. He believed in a spiritual universe governed by a mystic Over-soul with which each individual soul should try to harmonize. In other words, there is a “sixth sense” which Emerson calls the sense of the Self, that inner inkling that somehow seems to know what’s best for us, even when we don’t think we know. Emerson was known first as an orator. He converted many of his orations into written works. Both his lectures and his published works were filled with wisdom expressed in a startling and impressive way. Throughout his life Emerson kept detailed journals of his thoughts and actions, and he returned to them as a source for many of his essays. Emerson’s essays are marked by eloquence, effective argumentation and emotionality achieved through the skillful use of references, imagery, large vocabulary and expressive syntax. They earned him the name of “American Socrates”. However, Emerson’s writings offer a way of life, not a system or philosophy. For Emerson, the values of individualism, self-reliance, nonconformity and reverence for nature were fundamentally grounded in experience. The essay “Self-Reliance”, for which Emerson is perhaps best known, contains the most thorough statement of the need for people to avoid conformity and false consistency, and instead follow their own instincts and ideas. The essay has three major focuses: the importance of self-reliance, self-reliance and the individual, and self-reliance and society. from Self-Reliance “Ne te quæsiveris extra” “Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. �Содержание Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.” Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat Wintered with the hawk and fox, Power and speed be hands and feet. I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, – that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, – and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. …Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty effort let us advance on Chaos and the Dark. …These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its �Содержание members. Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying , What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, – “But these impulses may be from below, not from above”. I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil’s child, I will live then from the devil”. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. …What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. …The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. �Содержание …Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the fullblown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. …Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming. …Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Its progress is only apparent like the workers of a treadmill. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But compare the health of the two men and you see that his aboriginal strength, the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white man to his grave. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory: his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? …Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and 13 deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. �Содержание I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, – but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. – But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing. …So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. What do you know about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the philosophy of Transcendentalism? How does the idea of self-reliance relate to the concept of “American identity”? 2. What ideas do the epigraphs contain? Are they expressed directly or implied? Analyse the imagery. What stylistic devices are employed by the author? 3. How does the author begin his essay? Mark the interconnection of the personal and the common in the introduction. How is it reflected in the use of pronouns? Find the statement that captures the essence of what Emerson means by “self-reliance”. 4. Analyse the allusions. Why do Moses, Plato and Milton appear in the same context? Who are “bards and sages”? 5. Interpret the last sentence of the first paragraph. How does it develop the idea of “rejected thoughts”? Do you agree that it is shameful to recognize one’s own opinion in the words of “a stranger”? 6. What metaphor is used to present Emerson’s conviction that it is necessary to depend on one’s own opinion? How does the author extend the central image of crop growing? 7. Analyse the religious references in the essay. What is the role of “the divine providence” in �Содержание the definition of a person’s place in this world? Trace the influence of Transcendentalism in the interpretation of the motto: “Trust thyself.” 8. What prevents people from trusting their own mind? Who or what acts “in conspiracy against the manhood”? What terms does the author use to represent the concept of society? What is his attitude to social conventions? How does the brevity of the author’s expression contribute to the emotionality of the text? 9. What is the danger of being a nonconformist according to the opinion of the author’s friend? Can intuition be evil? How does the author justify the sacredness of human nature? What are the arguments for the absolute value of individual opinion? 10. What is, according to the author, another barrier to self–reliance? Analyse the imagery employed to convey the idea of consistency? 11. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” says the author. Does it sound like a paradox? Who are the people Emerson includes in the good company of the misunderstood? Who can join this company? What syntactical expressive means accentuates the idea of its open membership? 12. How does the author relate the concepts of consistency and time? What picture does he give to underline human inability to live in the present. 13. What illustrations does the author give to argue the idea that “society never advances”? Are the things he mentions in the examples relevant today? What could be added to the list of objects and notions defining the life of a modern man? What syntactical expressive means support Emerson’s argumentation? 14. Do you think the acquisitions of civilization, including religious teachings, improve or destroy human nature? Why does the author use an indefinite article before the word “christianity” leaving it uncapitalised? Interpret the question containing the opposition of “a stoic” and “the Christian”. What implications does the word “Christendom” contain? 15. What is the mood and tone of the final paragraphs of the essay? What expressive means render the author’s enthusiasm and inspiration? Comment on the repeated use of the pronoun “I”, parallel constructions, enumeration, and imperative sentences. 16. What is the idea contained in the last lines of the essay? Does it sound comforting or disturbing? Can a man be happy in his absolute spiritual alienation? 17. Summarise your impressions in the final analysis of the text pointing out the language means that constitute Emerson’s elegant and poetic style. Pay attention to historical and biblical references, elaborate wording, imagery, and syntactic patterns. �Содержание Laurie Lee (1914–1997) Laurence Edward Alan “Laurie” Lee, (June 26 1914 – May 13, 1997) was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter, raised in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). The first volume recounts his childhood in the idyllic Slad Valley. The second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1935, and the third with his return to Spain in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigades. Having been born in Stroud, Lee’s family moved to the village of Slad in 1917, the move with which Cider with Rosie opens. At twelve, Laurie went to the Central Boys School in Stroud. In his notebook for 1928, when he was fourteen he lists ‘Concert and Dance Appointments’, for at this time he was in demand to play his violin at dances. He left the Central School at fifteen to become an errand boy at a Chartered Accountants in Stroud. In 1931 he first found the Whiteway Colony, two miles from Slad, a colony founded by Tolstoyan Anarchists. It gave him his first smattering of politicization and was where he met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the ‘Cleo’ who appears in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. In 1933 he met Sophia Rogers, an “exotically pretty girl with dark curly hair” who had moved to Slad from Buenos Aires, an influence on Lee who said, later in life, that he only went to Spain because “a girl in Slad from Buenos Aires taught me a few words of Spanish”. At twenty he worked as an office clerk and a builder’s labourer, and lived in London for a year before leaving for Spain in the summer of 1935. After the outbreak of war in July 1936 Lee was picked up by a British destroyer from Gibraltar collecting marooned British subjects on the southern Spanish coast. He started to study for an art degree (during these years he met a woman who helped him financially) but returned to Spain in 1937 as an International Brigade volunteer. These experiences were recounted in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), his observations of pre-Civil War Spain as he walked from Vigo, in Galicia, to Almuñécar, in Granada, and in A Moment of War (1991), an austere memoir of his experience as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Before devoting himself entirely to writing in 1951, Lee worked as a journalist and as a scriptwriter. During World War II he made documentary films for the General Post Office film unit (1939–40) and the Crown Film Unit (1941–43). From 1944 to 1946 he worked as the Publications Editor for the Ministry of Information.[4] In 1950 Lee married Catherine Francesca Polge, whose father was Provençal and whose mother was one of the Garman sisters; they had one daughter, Jessie. �Содержание “Cider with Rosie” continues to be one of the UK’s most popular books, and is sometimes used as a set English Literature text for schoolchildren. It captured images of village life from a bygone era of innocence and simplicity. Lee’s first love was always poetry, though he was only moderately successful as a poet. Lee’s first poem appeared in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in 1940 and he published his first volume of poems, The Sun My Monument, in 1944. This was followed by The Bloom of Candles (1947) and My Many Coated Man (1955). Several poems written in the early 1940s reflect the atmosphere of the war, but also capture the beauty of the English countryside. Other works include A Rose for Winter, about a trip he made to Andalusia fifteen years after the Civil War; Two Women (1983), a story of Lee’s courtship and marriage with Kathy, daughter of Helen Garman; The Firstborn (1964), about the birth and childhood of their daughter Jessye; I Can’t Stay Long (1975), a collection of occasional writing; and The Edge of Day (1960), an autobiography. Lee also wrote travel books, essays, a radio play, and short stories. In the 1960s, Laurie Lee and his wife returned to Slad to live near his childhood home, where they remained until his death in 1997, at age 82. He is buried in the local churchyard. Appetite One of the major pleasures in life is appetite, and one of our major duties should be to preserve it. Appetite is the keenness of living; it is one of the senses that tells you that you are still curious to exist, that you still have an edge on your longings and want to bite into the world and taste its multitudinous flavours and juices. By appetite, of course, I don’t mean just the lust for food, but any condition of unsatisfied desire, any burning in the blood that proves you want more than you’ve got, and that you haven’t yet used up your life. Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart’s desire, but sorrier still for those who did. I got mine once only, and it nearly killed me, and I’ve always preferred wanting to having since. For appetite, to me, is this state of wanting, which keeps one’s expectations alive. I remember learning this lesson long ago as a child, when treats and orgies were few, and when I discovered that the greatest pitch of happiness was not in actually eating a toffee but in gazing at it beforehand. True, the first bite was delicious, but once the toffee was gone one was left with nothing, neither toffee nor lust. Besides, the whole toffeeness of toffees was imperceptibly diminished by the gross act of having eaten it. No, the best was in wanting it, in sitting and looking at it, when one tasted an inexhaustible treasure-house of flavours. So, for me, one of the keenest pleasures of appetite remains in the wanting, not the satisfaction. In wanting a peach, or a whisky, or a particular texture or sound, or to be with a particular friend. For in this condition, of course, I know that the object of desire is always at its most flawlessly perfect. �Содержание Which is why I would carry the preservation of appetite to the extent of deliberate fasting, simply because I think that appetite is too good to lose, too precious to be bludgeoned into insensibility by satiation and overdoing it. For that matter, I don’t really want three square meals a day – I want one huge, delicious, orgiastic, table-groaning blow-out, say every four days, and then not be too sure where the next one is coming from. A day of fasting is not for me just a puritanical device for denying oneself a pleasure, but rather a way of anticipating a rarer moment of supreme indulgence. Fasting is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite. So I think we should arrange to give up our pleasures regularly – our food, our friends, our lovers – in order to preserve their intensity, and the moment of coming back to them. For this is the moment that renews and refreshes both oneself and the thing one loves. Sailors and travellers enjoyed this once, and so did hunters, I suppose. Part of the weariness of modern life may be that we live too much on top of each other, and are entertained and fed too regularly. Once we were separated by hunger both from our food and families, and then we learned to value both. The men went off hunting, and the dogs went with them; the women and children waved goodbye. The cave was empty of men for days on end; nobody ate, or knew what to do. The women crouched by the fire, the wet smoke in their eyes; the children wailed; everybody was hungry. Then one night there were shouts and the barking of dogs from the hills, and the men came back loaded with meat. This was the great reunion, and everybody gorged themselves silly, and appetite came into its own; the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred celebration of life. Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don’t know the pleasure of being hungry any more. Too much of anything – too much music, entertainment happy snacks, of time spent with one’s friends, creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear, or taste, or see, or love, or remember. Life is short and precious, and appetite is one of its guardians, and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are to enjoy this short life we should respect the divinity of appetite, and keep it eager and not too much blunted. It is a long time now since I knew that acute moment of bliss that comes from putting parched lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed – all one needs is the original thirst. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. Speak about Lauree Lee and the peculiarities of his style. 2. What is the tonality of the essay? Does it differ from the essays you have read in this textbook? What exactly makes it different? Does the fact that Lauree Lee was primarily a poet find its reflection in the style of the essay? Quote the text to support your opinion. 3. What is the topic addressed by the author? How does he treat it? 4. Comment on the title of the essay. Does the title reflect the problem discussed in the essay? �Содержание 5. Comment on the central thesis of the essay and the way it is presented. 6. What does the author mean by appetite? 7. How does the author extend his central thesis? What facts does he resort to support his thesis? How do the facts of his personal life find reflection in his treatment of the problem? 8. Discussing the problem of appetite the author treats it on a very broad scale addressing the modern way of life. What does he not like about modern life? How do the facts of his biography influence his perception of modern life? Do you share the author’s opinion? Express your own point of view the problem addressed in the essay. 9. What kind of conclusion does the author draw in the closing paragraph and how does he present it? 10. Comment on the stylistic peculiarities of the essay. Analyze the expressive means employed by the author and their stylistic effect. Biography and Autobiography as Nonfiction Genres �Содержание Biography and Autobiography as Non iction Genres “Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified” (José Ortega y Gasset) “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory” (Benjamin Disraeli) Nonfiction literature encompasses a wide variety of writing. Nonfiction can be defined as any writing based on true or real-life experiences. There are enough types and styles of nonfiction to seem overwhelming. One way to help organize the various types is to split nonfiction into two subcategories: informational nonfiction and literary nonfiction. Informational nonfiction includes any writing that aims to inform or give facts. Literary nonfiction includes writing that is based on real world events, but is meant to entertain. Literary nonfiction reads like fiction, which means it has elements of a story, which includes characters, setting and plot. However, in nonfiction these elements must be real and not imaginary. The stories are meant to amuse the reader, as well as inform on true stories. The two major types of literary nonfiction are biography and autobiography. Let’s look closer at these two types of literary nonfiction. Biography The first type of literary nonfiction is the biography. A biography is a true story of a person’s life that is written by someone else. This true story has all the elements of fiction: characters, setting and plot. Those elements all come from a real person’s life, so the characters are real; the setting is an actual place, and the events truly happened. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a biography is defined as “The process of recording the events and circumstances of another person’s life, esp. for publication (latterly in any of various written, recorded, or visual media); the documenting of individual life histories (and, later, other forms of thematic historical narrative), considered as a genre of writing or social history”. The key ingredient in a good biography is integrity – completeness and honesty. A biography with integrity is not simply hero worship or criticism but rather an effort to tell the truth about a life. More than a collection of facts, a biography explains the motives behind actions, the methods behind achievements, the lessons learned from setbacks. A biographer researches and uses personal letters, diaries, public documents, and interviews as sources of information. Many characteristics of good fiction appear also in biography: lively recounting of events: crisp, authentic dialogue; richness of detail; many-sided characterization. Though rooted in fact, the biography does not just report a life but makes that life rewarding, entertaining reading. To present fully the life of an individual, most biographies are book length. Biographical sketches, however, present only a few events that illustrate important characteristics of the �Содержание subject’s personality. In this way the author of a biographical sketch can capture the essence of a person’s life in a few carefully selected episodes or even in a single crucial event. Autobiography Another type of literary nonfiction is the autobiography. An autobiography is the story of a person’s life written by that person. The author of an autobiography re-creates personal events as objectively as possible and tries to see the pattern they form and the meaning they hold. The OED defines memoir as “autobiographical observations; reminiscences”. Autobiographies are the same as biographies except for one key difference: the story of a person’s life is told by that person. This means that in an autobiography, a person tells the story of his or her own life. Because of this, autobiographies are told in first-person point of view. This means that the narrator is in the story and uses the pronouns I, me and my. Another important concept to note about autobiographies is the ability to insert personal thoughts and opinions. Since the author writes about his own life, autobiographies can often be biased. This means that the author could present the information in order for him to be seen in a certain light. Sometimes weaknesses and failures can be excused or even skipped over. Not all autobiographers will do this, but it is in human nature to try to present oneself in the best light possible. It is important to be aware of this fact when reading an autobiography. Autobiographies and memoirs are similar in that they both are written in the first person and both are personal and talk about the author’s life. The difference is while autobiographies detail in chronological sequence the author’s life from birth to death, memoirs are concerned with emotional truths and focus on random aspects of the author’s life such as feelings or attitudes that stand out because they have had such an impact on the person’s life. The line between autobiographies and memoirs is fuzzy that they are often used interchangeably. �Содержание Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) Benjamin Franklin is best known as one of the Founding Fathers who drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. He was an inventor, scientist, printer, politician, freemason, diplomat and one of the most respected individuals of his time. His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking. He invented bifocal glasses and organized the first successful American lending library. A writer known for his wit and wisdom, Benjamin Franklin also published “Autobiography” and “Poor Richard’s Almanac” for the enrichment of which he borrowed or composed the utterances of worldly wisdom which are the basis of a large part of his reputation. Some of Franklin’s famous quotes include the following: • Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is. • Well done is better than well said. • If Man could have Half his Wishes, he would double his Troubles. • Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship. • Fools make feasts and wise men eat ’em. • He that lives upon Hope, dies fasting. • An empty bag will not stand upright. • Genius without education is like silver in the mine. • He that waits upon Fortune, is never sure of a Dinner. • Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices. • Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults. • No gains without pains. • Time is money. • Diligence is the mother of good luck. • Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. • The poor have little, beggars none, the rich too much, enough not one. • God helps them that help themselves. Franklin’s “Autobiography” of is the unfinished record of his own life written from 1771 to 1790. This work has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written. Editor Frank Woodworth Pine wrote: “Franklin is a good type of our American manhood. Although not the wealthiest or the most �Содержание powerful, he is undoubtedly, in the versatility of his genius and achievements, the greatest of our self-made men. The simple yet graphic story in the Autobiography of his steady rise from humble boyhood in a tallow-chandler shop, by industry, economy, and perseverance in selfimprovement, to eminence, is the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our selfmade men. It is in itself a wonderful illustration of the results possible to be attained in a land of unequaled opportunity by following Franklin’s maxims.” Benjamin Franklin articulated a belief in the virtue of common sense. In these excerpts from Franklin’s Autobiography, we see his honest pragmatism, his gentle humor, his humanity, his optimistic assurance that all men and women may better themselves through hard work and discipline. “Autobiography” is an example of the fulfillment of the American Dream. The model set forth by Franklin in this autobiography demonstrates the possibility to rise from rags to riches. His own rise from the lower middle class to one of the most admired men in the world proved that even undistinguished persons can become great figures of importance through industry and perseverance. Franklin’s “Autobiography” is also a reflection of the 18th century idealism. The 18th century was the age of men like John Locke and Isaac Newton. It is called the Age of Reason. Intellectualism flourished along with scientific and social advances. Many people optimistically believed that education and progress can help to perfect man and society. The ideals and forms of literature in Franklin’s age differ from the romantic and postromantic works. In his preference for reason, common sense, and experience over emotion or speculation, Franklin borrows from the English writers of the early eighteenth century. His satiric practice, especially his use of irony, reflects Franklin’s familiarity with the great works of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Franklin’s style is primarily didactic because “Autobiography” was intended to be read partly as a self-help book. However, he uses a great deal of wit and humor, so as not to seem arrogant. Thus, Franklin’s book is not only a manual of strategies, but a diverting narrative. The entertaining character increases the utility of the work as an educational tool, and, perhaps, the educational elements make the narrative more captivating. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (an extract) A VEGETABLE DIET When about 16 years of age I happened to meet with a book, written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet, I determined to go into it. My brother being yet unmarried, did not keep house, but boarded himself and his apprentices in another family. My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my singularity. I made myself acquainted with Tryon’s manner of preparing some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or rice, making hasty pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my brother, that if he would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books. But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the rest �Содержание going from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there alone, and, despatching presently my light repast, which often was no more than a bisket or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the pastry-cook’s, and a glass of water, had the rest of the time till their return for study, in which I made the greater progress, from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking. ...In my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon, the taking of every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could, do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying- pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do. MORAL PERFECTION It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another, – habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method. In the various enumerations of the moral virtues I had met with in my reading, I found the catalogue more or less numerous, as different writers included more or fewer ideas under the same name. Temperance, for example, was by some confined to eating and drinking, while by others it was extended to mean the moderating every other pleasure, appetite, inclination, or passion, bodily or mental, even to our avarice and ambition. I proposed to myself, for the sake of clearness, to use rather more names, with fewer ideas annexed to each, than a few names with more ideas; and I included under 13 names of virtues all that at that time occurred to me as necessary or desirable, and annexed to each a short precept, which fully expressed the extent I gave to its meaning. These names of virtues, with their precepts, were: 1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. �Содержание 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation. 11. TRANQUILITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation. 13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till 1 should have gone thro’ the 13; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquired and established, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improved in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtained rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second �Содержание place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, would keep me firm in my endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues, – Frugality and Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc. Conceiving then, that agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras (1 Greek philosopher, c. 582-c, 507 b.c.) in his Golden Verses, daily examination would be necessary, I contrived the following method for conducting that examination. The precept of Order requiring that every part of my business should have its allotted time, one page in my little book contained the following scheme of employment for the 24 hours of a natural day. 5 6 7 Rise, wash and address Powerful Goodness(’Franklin s daily prayer). – Con trivc day’s business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast 8 9 10 11 Work 12 1 Read, or overlook my accounts, and dine 2 3 4 5 Work EVENING. Question. What good have I done to-day? 6 7 8 9 Put things in their places. Supper. Music or diversion, or conversation. Examination of the day. NIGHT 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 Sleep THE MORNING Question. What good shall I do this day? NOON My list of virtues contained at first but 12; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride showed itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinced me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list, giving an extensive meaning to the word. 1 cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it. In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our national passions so hard to subdue as Pride. �Содержание Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that 1 had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. Find some facts in Benjamin Franklin’s biography that could explain his inclination towards prudence and pragmatism. 2. What experience does the author describe at the beginning of the text? Does he mean only to tell about an event from his life or to educate? What is his attitude to the experience? Is he proud, ashamed, or ironic? Focus on the use of a great deal of detail in Franklin’s writing. Comment on the choice of words. 3. What event pushed the author to break his “resolution of not eating animal food”? How does he justify himself? Is his reasoning emotional or rational? Is it good to be “a reasonable creature”? Analyse the language means that convey the author’s irony. 4. Why does the author call moral perfection a “project”? How do morality and reason interact in Franklin’s approach? What difficulty did Franklin face trying to “conquer” his bad habits? 5. How does the author happen to come to number 13 defining the moral virtues? How does he describe his strategy? What syntactical expressive means contribute to the speaker’s stepwise logic? 6. What communicative type of sentence does the author use to introduce the virtues? Do Franklin’s aphoristic maxims sound inspirational? What stylistic devices contribute to the rhythmical structure of the sentences? What allusions does the author make formulating the last virtue? Does he do it because this virtue defies a rational explanation? 7. Do we find a lot of imagery in Franklin’s text? What language means help to capture the reader’s attention and follow the chain of discourse? 8. What is the author’s logic in justifying the priority of some virtues? Analyse the manner in which his argumentation is given. 9. What expression does the author choose to describe daily routine? 10. What is Daniel Defoe’s novel that presents the similar fixation on detail, order and scheming? Is the author’s pragmatism encouraging? Do you feel like unhesitantly starting to develop oneself under Franklin’s guidance? 11. Why does the author call pride a national passion? What virtues, or vices, are among the Russian national passions? Does the author believe that exercising humility one can overcome pride? 12. Prepare the final analysis of the text pointing out the main features of Benjamin Franklin’s style of writing. �Содержание Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (1903–1966) Born in London, Evelyn Waugh was the second son of noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh. He was brought up in upper middle class circumstances, although his parents’ address in Golders Green embarrassed him. His only sibling was his older brother Alec, who also became a writer. Both his father and his brother had been educated at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been asked to leave during his final and he had then published a controversial novel, The Loom of Youth which was deemed injurious to Sherborne’s reputation. The school therefore refused to take Evelyn, and his father sent him to Lancing College, an institution of lesser social prestige with a strong High Church Anglican character. After Lancing, he attended Hertford College, Oxford as a history scholar. There, Waugh neglected academic work and was known as much for his artwork as for his writing. His social life at Oxford would provide the background for some of his most characteristic later writing. Waugh’s final exam results qualified him only for a third-class degree. He was prevented from remaining in residence for the extra term that would have been required of him and he left Oxford in 1924 without taking his degree. In 1925 he taught at a private school in Wales. He was briefly apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and afterwards maintained an interest in marquetry, to which his novels have been compared in their intricate inlaid subplots. Waugh also provided the artwork for many of his books having been greatly inspired by a chance meeting with Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí at the Slade School of Fine Art in Bloomsbury. Waugh also worked as a journalist before he published his first novel in 1928, Decline and Fall. The title is from Gibbon, but whereas the Georgian historian charted the bankruptcy and dissolution of the Roman Empire, Waugh’s was a witty account of quite a different sort of dissolution, following the career of the harmless Paul Pennyfeather, a student of divinity, as he is accidentally expelled from Oxford for indecency. Waugh entered into a brief, unhappy marriage in 1928 to the Hon. Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, youngest daughter of Lord Burghclere and Lady Winifred Herbert. Their friends called them “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn”. The marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage was annulled by the Church, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of Aubrey Herbert, and a cousin of his first wife. This marriage was successful and lasting the rest of his life, producing seven children, one of whom, Mary, died in infancy. �Содержание Waugh’s fame continued to grow between the wars, based on his satires of contemporary upper class English society, written in prose that was seductively simple and elegant. His style was often inventive. His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 was a watershed in his life and his writing. It elevated Catholic themes in his work, and aspects of his deep and sincere faith, both implicit and explicit, can be found in all of his later work. Some of Waugh’s best-loved and best-known novels come from this period. Brideshead Revisited (1945) is an evocation of a vanished pre-war England. It’s an extraordinary work which in many ways has come to define Waugh and his view of his world. It not only painted a rich picture of life in England and at Oxford University at a time (before World War II) which Waugh himself loved and embellished in the novel, but it allowed him to share his feelings about his Catholic faith, principally through the actions of his characters. Much of Waugh’s wartime experience is reflected in the Sword of Honour trilogy. It consists of three novels, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961), which loosely parallel his wartime experiences. Critics felt that these were some of the best books written about the war. The period after the war saw Waugh living with his family in the West Country, first at Piers Court, and from 1956 onwards, at Combe Florey, Somerset, where he enjoyed the life of a country gentleman and continued to write. Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, on 10 April 1966, after attending a Latin Mass on Easter Sunday. He suffered a heart attack at his home, Combe Florey. He is buried at Combe Florey, Somerset. The American conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. found in Waugh “the greatest English novelist of the century”, while Buckley’s liberal counterpart Gore Vidal called him “our time’s first satirist”. General Conversation: Myself… A winter evening; a sombre and secluded library; leather bound unread, unreadable books lining the walls; below the windows, subdued, barely perceptible, like the hum of a mowing machine in summer on distant lawns’ the sound of London traffic; overhead, in blue and white plaster, an elegant Adam ceiling; a huge heap of glowing coal in the marble fireplace, a leather topped, mahogany writing table; the pen poised undecisively above the foolscap – what is more needed to complete the picture of a leisured litterateur upon his delicate labour? Alas! Too much. An elderly man has just entered, picked up a French novel and glanced at me resentfully. This is not my library. Nor, in the words of a French exercise, are these my pens, ink or paper. I am in my Club, in the room set aside for silence and after-luncheon sleep. It is three days past the date on which I promised delivery of copy. Leisured literature my foot. “Eats well, sleeps well, but the moment he sees a job of work he comes over queer.” That is my trouble, an almost fanatical aversion from pens, ink or paper. I keep seeing books – though not, I think, as often as I used – about young men who have literary souls and are thwarted and even made to go into the family business and become mere money-makers and breeders of children instead of great writers. My plight is the exact opposite. I was driven into writing because I found it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated �Содержание man could get a decent living. I am not complaining about the wages. They always seem to me disproportionately high. What I mind so much is the work. Of course, in my case, writing happens to be the family business; that takes away some of the glamour. My father is a literary critic and publisher. I think he can claim to have more books dedicated to him that any living man. They used to stand together on his shelves, among hundreds of inscribed copies from almost every English writer of eminence, until on one of my rare, recent visits to my home, I inadvertently set the house on fire, destroying the carefully garnered fruits of a lifetime of literary friendships. I remember in childhood the Saturday morning hush over the home, when he was at work on his weekly article. I remember the numerous, patronising literary elders who frequented our table. My brother took to the trade without a moment’s reluctance. He wrote a best seller before he was eighteen and has been at it uninterruptedly ever since. You can see his fingers twitching for a pen as he talks to you. I held out until I was twenty-four, swimming manfully against the tide; then I was sucked under. I tried everything I could think of first. After an inglorious career at the University I tried to be a painter, and went daily for some months to an Art School crowded with young women in pinafores whose highest ambition was to design trademarks for patient medicines. We stood at easels in a large, hideously overheated studio and drew from the nude from ten until four. Heavens, how badly I drew! The trouble about my upbringing was that whereas my family knew very well how badly I wrote, they had rosy illusions about my drawing. They could turn out a fine graphic picture in paper games, but none of them had drawn from the nude from ten till four, and they were fatally encouraging about my horrible, charcoal cartoons. It took me about three months to realise that I should not ever be up to designing a trade-mark. Meanwhile the annual deficit of expenditure over allowance had reached a formidable total and I looked for some way of making money – or, at any rate, of avoiding spending it. There are only two sorts of jobs open under the English social system – domestic service and education. However abominable one’s record, though one may be fresh from prison or lunatic asylum, one can always look after the silver or teach the young. I had not the right presence for a footman, so I chose the latter. For eighteen happy months I taught the young. I taught them almost everything – classics, history, modern languages, boxing, tennis and Rugby football – games I had never before played – the elements of religion, shooting and (believe it or not) drawing. At first the boys despised me, but I bought a motor bicycle and from that moment was the idol of the school. I bribed them to behave well by letting them take down the engine. I thought the system was working well, but after the fourth term I got the sack. My next plan was to be a carpenter, and for a winter I went regularly to classes in a government polytechnic. Those were delightful days, under the tuition of a brilliant and completely speechless little cabinet-maker who could explain nothing and demonstrate everything. To see him cutting concealed dovetails gave me the thrill which, I suppose, others get from seeing their favourite batsman at the wicket or bullfighter in the ring. It was a charming class, too. There was one young woman there who, during the whole time I was there, was engaged in sawing longways an immense log of teak. She worked and worked at it hour by �Содержание hour and had cut about a yard when I left. I often wonder if she is still at it. There were two Egyptians who did veneering of exquisite skill and the most atrocious designs conceivable. I never got so far as veneering curved surfaces, but I made an indestructible mahogany bedtable, which I gave to my father, and which survived the fire. It soon became apparent, however, that it would be many years before I should qualify for a wage, and then for a few shillings a week. That did not worry me, but I had an inclination to get married, so I looked for more remunerative work. Some dreary weeks followed during which, though I cannot claim to have trudged the streets without food, I certainly made a great number of fruitless and rather humiliating calls upon prospective employers. Dickens held it against his parents that they tried to force him into a blacking factory instead of letting him write. The last firm at which I solicited a job was engaged, among other things, in the manufacture of blacking. If I wasn’t employed there I should be driven to Literature. But the manager was relentless. It was no use my thinking of blacking. That was not for the likes of me. I had better make up my mind and settle down to the humble rut which fate had ordained for me. I must write a book. The value of writing books is that it gives a market for articles. So here I am, pen poised undecisively over the foolscap, earning my living. But I am not utterly enslaved. I still have dreams of shaking off the chains of creative endeavour. Rimbaud got away from it and became a gunrunner. Vanbrugh gave up writing plays to build the most lovely houses in England. Disraeli and A.P. Herbert went into politics and did themselves proud. John Buchan is lording in Quebec. Boulestin took to cooking. Perhaps there is a chance of freedom. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. Give brief information about the author of the essay. What is the most characteristic feature of Evelyn Waugh’s manner of writing? 2. What is the subject matter of the essay? Is it reflected in the title? Comment on the aposiopesis in the title and its effect. What is the central thesis of the essay? How is it presented? 3. What is the general tone of the essay? How is it sustained throughout the essay? How does this essay differ from the essay by Virginia Woolf, which is also about books and writers? What is the effect of the first-person narration? 4. Analyse the first paragraph of the essay. What function does it play in the composition of the essay? Does it not produce the effect of a piece of classical British painting on you? If your answer is “yes” how is this effect achieved? How does the author manage to create a synaesthetic effect? Comment on the syntactic arrangement of the paragraph and the concluding lines of it. 5. How is the second paragraph connected with the first one? Comment on the word “litterateur” employed by the writer. What kind of self-portrait does Evelyn Waugh make? What language means are used to paint this portrait with the help of words? 6. How does the author explain the fact of his becoming a writer? Analyze the paragraphs �Содержание devoted to the description of his family business. What is the writer’s tone in describing it? How is it created? Does he treat writing as a noble occupation or otherwise? What is the connotation of the metaphor “garnered fruits of a lifetime of literary friendships”? 7. Analyse the paragraphs devoted to the description of his futile attempts “to swim against the tide”. What is the point of his satire pointed at? Comment on the means of achieving a humorous effect in the description of his Odyssey. Pay special attention to the choice of words and the imagery of the passage. Analyse the metaphors he employs. Are they original or hackneyed? How can you explain his choice? 8. The last paragraph dealing with the outcome of his futile attempts to avoid the career of a writer opens with the allusion to Charles Dickens. What is its effect? Is the choice of Dickens random? Comment on the words: “It was no use my thinking of blacking… I must write a book”. Whose words are these? 9. Study the closing paragraph of the essay. What is the effect of the numerous allusions in it? What are the key words of this paragraph and, perhaps, the whole essay? Try and state the central thesis of the essay. 10. In an introduction to the chapter about biography and autobiography we read: “Since the author writes about his own life, autobiographies can often be biased. This means that the author could present the information in order for him to be seen in a certain light. Sometimes weaknesses and failures can be excused or even skipped over. Not all autobiographers will do this, but it is in human nature to try to present oneself in the best light possible” Does this opinion apply to the autobiographic essay we have just read. Does Evelyn Waugh try to present himself in the best light possible? 11. Sum up your observations of Evelyn Waugh’s manner of writing as it manifests itself in the essay. In his other essay “Literary style in England and America” Evelyn Waugh wrote: “Individuality needs little explanation. It is the hand-writing, the tone of voice that makes a work recognisable as being by a particular artist…” and also: “One thing I hold as certain that a writer, if he is to develop, must concern himself more and more with Style… He cannot hope to interest the majority of his readers in his progress. It is his own interest that is at stake. Style alone can keep him from being bored with his own work. In youth high spirits carry one over a book or two. The world is full of discoveries that demand expression. Later a writer must face the choice of becoming an artist or a prophet. He can shut himself up at his desk and selfishly seek pleasure in the perfection of his own skill or he can pace about, dictating dooms and exhortations on the topics of the day. The recluse at the desk has a bare chance of giving abiding pleasure to others; the publicist has none at all.” Judging by this essay, can we say that Evelyn Waugh acts up to his words? Give facts from the text to support your opinion. �Содержание Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born 1939) Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian author, poet, critic, essayist, feminist and social campaigner. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award seven times, winning twice. While she may be best known for her work as a novelist, she is also an award winning poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths, and fairy tales, which were an interest of hers from an early age. Atwood has also published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper’s, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, Playboy, and many other magazines. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Atwood is the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy (née Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was 11 years old in sixth grade. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto and graduated in 1957. Atwood began writing at the age of six and realized she wanted to write professionally when she was 16. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. In late 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard’s Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master’s degree from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University for 2 years, but never finished because she never completed a dissertation on “The English Metaphysical Romance” in 1967. She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967–68), the University of Alberta (1969–70), York University in Toronto (1971–72), and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English. The Handmaid’s Tale received the very first Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year, in 1987. It was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, and the 1987 Prometheus Award, both science fiction awards. �Содержание Atwood was at one time offended at the suggestion that The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, insisting to The Guardian that they were speculative fiction instead: “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen”. She told the Book of the Month Club: “Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians” and on BBC Breakfast explained that science fiction, as opposed to what she wrote, was “talking squids in outer space”. The latter phrase particularly rankled among advocates of science fiction, and frequently recurs when her writing is discussed. Atwood has since said that she does at times write science fiction, and that Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake can be designated as such. She clarified her meaning on the difference between speculative and science fiction, while admitting that others use the terms interchangeably: “For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can’t yet do... speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand and that takes place on Planet Earth”, and said that science fictional narratives give a writer the ability to explore themes in ways that realistic fiction cannot. Ultimately, according to her theories in works such as Survival and her exploration of similar themes in her fiction, Atwood considers Canadian literature as the expression of Canadian identity. According to this literature, Canadian identity has been defined by a fear of nature, by settler history and by unquestioned adherence to the community. In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, whom she divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto. In 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. Atwood returned to Toronto in 1980. She divides her time between Toronto and Pelee Island, Ontario. Atwood has strong views on environmental issues, such as suggesting that gas-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers be banned, and has made her own home more energy efficient by installing awnings and skylights that open, and by not having air-conditioning Great Unexpectations In 1960 I was nineteen years old. I was in third-year college in Toronto, Ontario, which was not then known as People City or The Paris of the Northeast; but as Hogtown, which was not an inaccurate description. I had never eaten an avocado or been on an airplane or encountered a croissant or been south of Vermont. Panty hose had not yet hit the market; neither had the Pill. We were still doing garter belts and repression. Abortion was not a word you said out loud, and lesbians might as well have been mythological hybrids, like Sphinxes; in any case I was quite certain I had never met one. I wanted to be – no, worse–was determined to be, was convinced I was – a writer. I was scared to death. I was scared to death for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I was Canadian, and the prospects for being a Canadian and a writer, both at the same time, in 1960, were dim. The only writers I had encountered in high school had been dead and English, and in university we barely studied American writers, much less Canadian ones. Canadian writers, it was assumed – by my professors, my contemporaries, and myself – were a freak of nature, like duck-billed platypuses. Logically they ought not to exist, and when they did so anyway, they were just �Содержание pathetic imitations of the real thing. This estimate was borne out by statistics: for those few who managed, despite the reluctance of publishers, to struggle into print (five novels in English in 1960), two hundred copies of a book of poetry was considered average to good, and a thousand made a novel a Canadian best seller. I would have to emigrate, I concluded gloomily. I faced a future of scrubbing restaurant floors in England – where we colonials could go, then, much more easily than we could to the United States – writing masterpieces in a freezing cold garret at night, and getting T.B., like Keats. Such was my operatic view of my own future. But it was more complicated than that, because, in addition to being a Canadian, I was also a woman. In some ways this was an advantage. Being a male writer in Canada branded you a sissy, but writing was not quite so unthinkable for a woman, ranking as it did with flower painting and making roses out of wool. As one friend of my mother’s put it, trying to take a cheerful view of my eccentricity, “Well, that’s nice dear, because you can do it at home, can’t you?” She was right, as it turned out, but at that moment she aroused nothing but loathing in my adolescent soul. Home, hell. It was garret or nothing. What did she think I was, inauthentic? However, most people were so appalled by my determination to be a writer that no one even thought of saying I couldn’t because I was a girl. That sort of thing was not said to me until later, by male writers, by which time it was too late. Strangely, no one was pushing early marriage, not in my case. Canada, being a cultural backwater, had not been swept by the wave of Freudianism that had washed over the United States in the fifties – Canadian women were not yet expected to be fecund and passive in order to fulfill themselves – and there were still some bluestockings around in the educational system, women who warned us not to get silly about boys too soon and throw away our chances. What my elders had in mind for me was more along academic lines. Something, that is to say, with a salary. But, since gender is prior to nationality, the advantages of being a Canadian woman writer were canceled out by the disadvantages of being a woman writer. I’d read the biographies, which were not encouraging. Jane Austen never married Mr. Darcy. Emily Bronte died young, Charlotte in childbirth. George Eliot never had children and was ostracized for living with a married man. Emily Dickinson flitted; Christina Rossetti looked at life through the wormholes in a shroud. Some had managed to combine writing with what I considered to be a normal life – Mrs. Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe – but everyone knew they were second rate. My choices were between excellence and doom on the one hand, and mediocrity and cosiness on the other. I gritted my teeth, set my face to the wind, gave up double dating, and wore hornrims and a scowl so I would not be mistaken for a puffball. It was in this frame of mind that I read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which further terrified me. Graves did not dismiss women. In fact he placed them right at the center of his poetic theory; but they were to be inspirations rather than creators, and a funny sort of inspiration at that. They were to be incarnations of the White Goddess herself, alternately loving and destructive, and men who got involved with them ran the risk of disembowelment or worse. A woman just might – might, mind you – have a chance of becoming a decent poet, but only if she too took on the attributes of the White Goddess and spent her time seducing men and then doing them in. All this sounded a little strenuous, and appeared to rule out �Содержание domestic bliss. It wasn’t my idea of how men and women should get on together – raking up leaves in the backyard, like my mom and dad – but who was I to contradict the experts? There was no one else in view giving me any advice on how to be a writer, though female. Graves was it. That would be my life, then. To the garret and the T.B. I added the elements of enigma and solitude. I would dress in black. I would learn to smoke cigarettes, although they gave me headaches and made me cough, and drink something romantic and unusually bad for you, such as absinthe. I would live by myself, in a suitably painted attic (black) and have lovers whom I would discard in appropriate ways, though I drew the line at bloodshed. (I was, after all, a nice Canadian girl.) I would never have children. This last bothered me a lot, as before this I had always intended to have some, and it seemed unfair, but White Goddesses did not have time for children, being too taken up with cannibalistic sex, and Art came first. I would never, never own an automatic washer-dryer. Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, and Ionesco, I was sure, did not have major appliances, and these were the writers I most admired. I had no concrete ideas about how the laundry would get done, but it would only be my own laundry, I thought mournfully – no fuzzy sleepers, no tiny T-shirts – and such details could be worked out later. I tried out the garrets, which were less glamorous than expected; so was England, and so were the cigarettes, which lasted a mere six months. There wasn’t any absinthe to be had, so I tried bad wine, which made me sick. It began to occur to me that maybe Robert Graves didn’t have the last word on women writers, and anyway I wanted to be a novelist as well as a poet, so perhaps that would let me off the homicide. Even though Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton had been setting new, high standards in self-destructiveness for female poets, and people had begun asking me not whether but when I was going to commit suicide (the only authentic woman poet is a dead woman poet?), I was wondering whether it was really all that necessary for a woman writer to be doomed, any more than it was necessary for a male writer to be a drunk. Wasn’t this just some entire sort of postromantic collective delusion? If Shakespeare could have kids and avoid suicide, then so could I, dammit. When Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir came my way, like shorebirds heralding land, I read them with much interest. They got a lot right, for me, but there was one thing they got wrong. They were assuring me that I didn’t have to get married and have children. But what I wanted was someone to tell me I could. And so I did. The marriage and the children came in two lots – marriage with one, child with another – but they did come. This is the part that will sound smug, I suppose, but I also suppose it’s not that much smugger than my black-sweatered, garter-belted, black-stockinged, existential pronouncements at the age of nineteen. I now live a life that is pretty close to the leaves-in-the-backyard model I thought would have been out of bounds forever. Instead of rotting my brains with absinthe, I bake (dare I admit it?) chocolate chip cookies, and I find that doing the laundry with the aid of my washer-dryer is one of the more relaxing parts of my week. I worry about things like remembering Parents’ Day at my daughter’s school and running out of cat food, though I can only afford these emotional luxuries with the aid of some business assistants and a large man who likes kids and cats and food, and has an ego so solid it isn’t threatened by mine. This state of affairs was not achieved without struggle, some of it �Содержание internal – did an addiction to knitting brand me as an inauthentic writer? – but it was reached. The White Goddess still turns up in my life, but mainly as a fantasy projection on the part of certain male book reviewers, who seem to like the idea of my teeth sinking into some cringing male neck. I think of this as fifties nostalgia. As for writing, yes. You can do it at home. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. Give the most important facts of Margaret Atwood’s biography which are important for the interpretation of the essay. 2. Comment on the title of the essay. Is the title suggestive of the central thesis of the essay or is it rather vague? What is the central thesis of the essay? Does the writer state it directly or do we have to infer it? How does she support her thesis? 3. In what manner is the essay written? What is the tonality of the essay and how is it created? 4. Comment on the way she presents her self-portarait and the atmosphere in which she lived. How does she describe the position of Canada in the world? Pay special attention to the role of various habitual things which serve as the markers of the epoch. How did she estimate her chances of becoming a writer? What were the two main obstacles on the path to writing? What is the role of the allusions in the essay? 5. Comment on the issues of gender addressed in the essay and the manner in which Margaret Atwood discusses the gender issue. 6. What was the effect of Robert Graves’ “White Goddess” on her? Analyze the paragraph in which she draws her prospect on the way to becoming a writer and the things she would have to sacrifice. Did these predictions come true? 7. Analyze the final paragraphs of the essay and comment on the message they contain. Is this message presented directly or indirectly? Comment on the concluding sentence of the essay: “As for writing, yes. You can do it at home”. 8. Summarize your answers and prepare the final analysis of the essay. Essays for Self-Guided Analysis H.G. Wells. Ellis Island Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar Susan Sontag. Beauty �Содержание Essays for Self-Guided Analysis H.G. Wells. Ellis Island Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar Susan Sontag. Beauty �Содержание H.G. Wells. Ellis Island Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), the English novelist and journalist, was born in Kent, the son of a lady’s maid and a small shopkeeper who also played professional cricket. Wells had a spotty education but was an omnivorous reader and after failing to make a go at various apprenticeships, won at eighteen a scholarship that enabled him to graduate from London University in 1888. After teaching science for a few years, Wells turned to journalism, and in 1895 wrote his first novel, The Time Machine, which was an immediate success and which was followed by a number of scientific romances, including The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the World (1898), and Tales of Space and Time (1899). By 1900 Wells had begun to turn his attention to sociology; he wrote several successful novels dealing with the aspirations of the lower-middle class: Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). He joined the socialist movement in 1903 and out of that commitment wrote many studies of society from a utopian perspective, a point of view that was shattered by World War I. After the War, he decided that only popular education could ensure human progress, so he wrote The Outline of History (1920), The Science of Life (1931), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932). Wells grew increasingly pessimistic during World War II and wrote several bleak depictions of mankind’s prospects. The following selection, however, from The Future in America (1906) shows Wells writing in his earlier, more optimistic vein. I visited Ellis Island yesterday. It changed to be a good day for my purpose. For the first time in its history this filter of immigrant humanity has this week proved inadequate to the demand upon it. It was choked, and half a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfortably up the harbor, replete with twenty thousand or so of crude Americans from Ireland and Poland and Italy and Syria and Finland and Albania; men, women, children, dirt, and bags together. Of immigration I shall have to write later; what concerns me now is chiefly the wholesale and multitudinous quality of that place and its work. I made my way with my introduction along white passages and through traps and a maze of metal lattices that did for a while succeed in catching and imprisoning me, to Commissioner Wachorn, in his quiet, green-toned office. There, for a time, I sat judicially and heard him deal methodically, swiftly, sympathetically, with case after case, a string of appeals against the sentences of deportation pronounced in the busy little courts below. First would come one dingy and strangely garbed group of wild-eyed aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies, South Italians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under the intelligent guidance of a uniformed interpreter, and a case would be started, a report made to Washington, and they would drop out again, hopeful or sullen or fearful as the evidence might trend… Down-stairs we find the courts, and these seen, we traverse long refectories, long aisles of tables, and close-packed dormitories with banks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and galleries and passages innumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows systematic with the Commissioner’s explanations. �Содержание Here is a huge, gray, untidy waiting-room, like a big railway-depot room, full of a sinister crowd of miserable people, loafing about or sitting dejectedly, whom America refuses, and here a second and a third such chamber each with its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates us, and that even ventures to groan and hiss at us a little for our glimpse of its large dirty spectacle of hopeless failure, and here, squalid enough indeed, but still to some degree hopeful, are the appeal cases as yet undecided. In one place, at a bank of ranges, works an army of men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of the Ellis Island laundry, washing blankets, drying blankets, day in and day out, a big clean steamy space of hurry and rotation. Then, I recall a neat apartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers, a card-index of the names and nationalities and significant circumstances of upward of a million and a half of people who have gone on and who are yet liable to recall. The central hall is the key of this impression. All day long, through an intricate series of metal pens, the long procession files, step by step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner and that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the clerks. At every point immigrants are being picked out and set aside for further medical examination, for further questions, for the busy little courts; but the main procession satisfies conditions, passes on. It is a daily procession that, with a yard of space to each, would stretch over three miles, that any week in the year would more than equal in numbers that daily procession of the unemployed that is becoming a regular feature of the London winter, that in a year could put a cordon round London or New York of close-marching people, could populate a new Boston, that in a century – What in a century will it all amount to? … On they go, from this pen to that, pen by pen, toward a desk at a little metal wicket – the gate of America. Through this metal wicket drips the immigration stream – all day long, every two or three seconds an immigrant, with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and goes on past the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully organized separating ways that go to this railway or that, past the guiding, protecting officials – into a new world. The great majority are young men and young women, between seventeen and thirty, good, youthful, hopeful, peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting to go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with cheap portmanteaus, with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone, women with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All day that string of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; all day and every day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the end beads through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the hundreds to thousands… Yes, Ellis Island is quietly immense. It gives one a visible image of one aspect at least of this world-large process of filling and growing and synthesis, which is America. “Look there!” said the Commissioner, taking me by the arm and pointing, and I saw a monster steamship far away, and already a big bulk looming up the Narrows. “It’s the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. She’s got – I forget the exact figures, but let us say – eight hundred and fifty-three more for us. She’ll have to keep them until Friday at the earliest. And there’s more behind her, and more strung out all across the Atlantic.” �Содержание In one record day this month 21,000 immigrants came into the port of New York alone; in one week over 50,000. This year the total will be 1,200,000 souls, pouring in, finding work at once, producing no fall in wages. They start digging and building and making. Just think of the dimensions of it! �Содержание Carl Sandburg from A Lincoln Preface Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) gained a knowledge and love of America and its people through much travel, as well as through a variety of odd jobs such as milk deliverer, firefighter, truck driver, house painter, and reporter. Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Collected Poems and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg added new dimensions to the world’s understanding of Lincoln, showing him to be a man of strength as well as compassion, of tears as well as laughter. The following is an excerpt from the preface to Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, the beginning of a sixvolume work about Lincoln. In the time of the April lilacs in the year 1865, a man in the city of Washington, D.C., trusted a guard to watch at a door, and the guard was careless, left the door, and the man was shot, lingered a night, passed away, was laid in a box, and carried north and west a thousand miles; bells sobbed; cities wore crepe; people stood with hats off as the railroad burial car came past at midnight, dawn, or noon. During the four years of time before he gave up the ghost, this man was clothed with despotic power, commanding the most powerful armies till then assembled in modern warfare, enforcing draft of soldiers, abolishing the right of habeas corpus, directing politically and spiritually the wild, massive forces loosed in civil war. Four billion dollars’ worth of property was taken from those who had been legal owners of it, confiscated, wiped out as by fire, at his instigation and executive direction; a class of chattel property recognized as lawful for two hundred years went to the scrap pile. When the woman who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to see him in the White House, he greeted her, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,” and as they seated themselves at a fireplace, “I do love an open fire; I always had one to home”. As they were finishing their talk of the days of blood, he said, “I shan’t last long after it’s over”. An Illinois Congressman looked in on him as he had his face lathered for a shave in the White House, and remarked, “If anybody had told me that in a great crisis like this the people were going out to a little one-horse town and pick out a one-horse lawyer for President, I wouldn’t have believed it”. The answer was, “Neither would I. But it was a time when a man with a policy would have been fatal to the country. I never had a policy. I have simply tried to do what seemed best each day, as each day came”. “I don’t intend precisely to throw the Constitution overboard, but I will stick it in a hole if I can,” he told a Cabinet officer. The enemy was violating the Constitution to destroy the Union, he argued, and therefore, “I will violate the Constitution, if necessary, to save the Union”. He instructed a messenger to the Secretary of the Treasury, “Tell him not to bother himself about the Constitution, say that I have that sacred instrument here at the White House, and I am guarding it with great care”. His life, mind, and heart ran in contrasts. When his white kid gloves broke into tatters while �Содержание shaking hands at a White House reception, he remarked, “This looks like a general bustification”1. When he talked with an Ohio friend one day during the 1864 campaign, he mentioned one public man, and murmured, “He’s a thistle! I don’t see why God lets him live.” Of a devious Senator, he said, “He’s too crooked to lie still!” And of a New York editor, “In early life in the West, we used to make our shoes last a great while with much mending, and sometimes, when far gone, we found the leather so rotten the stitches would not hold. Greeley is so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful; the stitches all tear out”. While the luck of war wavered and broke and came again, as generals failed and campaigns were lost, he held enough forces of the Union together to raise new armies and supply them, until generals were found who made war as victorious war has always been made, with terror, frightfulness, destruction, and valor and sacrifice past words of man to tell. His own speeches, letters, telegrams, and official messages during that war form the most significant and enduring document from any one man on why the war began, why it went on, and the dangers beyond its end. As the platoons filed before him at a review of an army corps, he asked, “What is to become of these boys when the war is over?” He was a chosen spokesman; yet there were times he was silent; nothing but silence could at those times have fitted a chosen spokesman; in the mixed shame and blame of the immense wrongs of two crashing civilizations, with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and wept at those times in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic. His hat was shot off as he rode alone one night in Washington; a son he loved died as he watched at the bed; his wife was accused of betraying information to the enemy, until denials from him were necessary; his best companion was a fine-haired and brilliant son with a deformed palate and an impediment of speech; when a Pennsylvania Congressman told him the enemy had declared they would break into the city and hang him to a lamppost, he said he had considered “the violent preliminaries” to such a scene; on his left thumb was a scar where an ax had nearly chopped the thumb off when he was a boy; over one eye was a scar where he had been hit with a club in the hands of a man trying to steal the cargo off a Mississippi River flatboat; he threw a cashiered officer out of his room in the White House , crying, “I can bear censure, but not insult, I never wish to see your face again”. He rebuked with anger a woman who got to her knees to thank him for a pardon that saved her son from being shot at sunrise; and when an Iowa woman said she had journeyed out of her way to Washington just for a look at him, he grinned, “Well, in the matter of looking at one another, I have altogether the advantage”. He sent hundreds of telegrams, “Suspend death sentence” or “Suspend execution” of so-andso, who was to be shot at sunrise. The telegrams varied oddly at times, as in one, “If Thomas Samplogh, of the first Delaware Regiment, has been sentenced to death, and is not yet executed, suspend and report the case to me”. And another, “Is it Lieutenant Samuel B. Davis whose death sentence is commuted? If not done, let it be done”. 1 A. Lincoln coins this word from the verb “ to bust” by analogy with “ justification”. �Содержание While the war drums beat, he liked best, of all the stories told of him, one about two Quakeresses heard talking in a railway car. “I think that Jefferson will succeed.” “Why does thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.” “Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.” An Indiana man at the White House heard him say, “Voorhees, don’t it seem strange to you that I, who could never so much as cut off the head of a chicken, should be elected, or selected, into the midst of all this blood?” Of men taking too fat profits out of the war, he said, “Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together”. An enemy general, Longstreet, after the war, declared him to have been “the one matchless man in forty millions of people,” while one of his private secretaries, Hay, declared his life to have been the most perfect in its relationships and adjustments since that of Christ. Between the days in which he crawled as a baby on the dirt floor of a Kentucky cabin, and the time when he gave his final breath in Washington, he packed a rich life with work, thought, laughter, tears, hate, love. With vast reservoirs of the comic and the droll, and notwithstanding a mastery of mirth and nonsense, he delivered a volume of addresses and letters of terrible and serious appeal, with import beyond his own day, shot through here and there with far, thin ironies, with paragraphs having raillery of the quality of the Book of Job, and echoes as subtle as the whispers of wind in prairie grass. Perhaps no human clay pot has held more laughter and tears. The facts and myths of his life are to be an American possession, shared widely over the world, for thousands of years, as the traditions of Knute or Alfred, Lao-tse or Diogenes, Pericles or Caesar, are kept. This because he was not only a genius in this science of neighborly human relationships and an artist in the personal handling of life from day, but a Strange Friend and a Friendly Stranger to all forms of life that he met. He lived fifty-six years, of which fifty-two were lived in the West – the prairie years. �Содержание Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar Political and technological developments are rapidly obliterating all cultural differences and it is possible that, in a not remote future, it will be impossible to distinguish human beings living on one area of the earth’s surface from those living on any other, but our different pasts have not yet been completely erased and cultural differences are still perceptible. The most striking difference between an American and a European is the difference in their attitudes towards money. Every European knows, as a matter of historical fact, that, in Europe, wealth could only be acquired at the expense of other human beings, either by conquering them or by exploiting their labor in factories. Further, even after the Industrial Revolution began, the number of persons who could rise from poverty to wealth was small: the vast majority took it for granted that they should not be much richer nor poorer than their fathers. In consequence, no European associates wealth with personal merit or poverty with personal failure. To a European, money means power, the freedom to do as he likes, which also means that, consciously or unconsciously, he says: “I want to have as much money as possible myself and others to have as little money as possible.” In the United States, wealth was also acquired by stealing, but the real exploited victim was not a human being but poor Mother Earth and her creatures who were ruthlessly plundered. It is true that the Indians were expropriated, but this was not, as it had always been in Europe, a matter of the conqueror seizing the wealth of the conquered, for the Indian had never realized the potential riches of his country. It is also true that, in the Southern states, men lived on the labor of slaves, but slave labor did not make them fortunes; what made slavery in the South all the more inexcusable was that, in addition to being morally wicked, it didn’t even pay off handsomely. Thanks to the natural resources of the country, every American, until quite recently, could reasonably look forward to making more money than his father, so that, if he made less, the fault must be his; he was either lazy or inefficient. What an American values, therefore, is not the possession of money as such, but his power to make it as a proof of his manhood; once he has proved himself by making it, it has served its function and can be lost or given away. In no society in history have rich men given away so large a part of their fortunes. A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothing to increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis? In the Fifth Circle on the Mount of Purgatory, I do not think that many Americans will be found among the Avaricious; but I suspect that the Prodigals may be almost an American colony. The great vice of Americans is not materialism but a lack of respect for matter. �Содержание Susan Sontag. Beauty For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: a kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be what we now have to call – lamely, enviously, – WHOLE persons. If it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish between a person’s “inside” and “outside”, they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Americans who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honourable, so seductive – and so ugly. One of Socrates’ main pedagogical acts was to be ugly – and teach those innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples of his how full of paradoxes life really was. They may have resisted Socrates’ lessons. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off with the greatest facility – the “inside” (character, intellect) from the “outside” (looks); but we are actually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good. It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideas of human excellence. By limiting excellence (“virtus” in Latin) to moral virtues only, Christianity set beauty adrift – as an alienated, arbitrary, superficial enchantment. And beauty has continued to lose prestige. For close to two centuries it has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes: the sex, which, however Fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally. A beautiful woman, we say in English. But a handsome man. “Handsome” is the masculine equivalent of – and refusal of – a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning overtone, by being reserved for women only. That one can call a man “beautiful” in French and in Italian suggests that Catholic countries – unlike those countries shaped by the Protestant version of Christianity – still retain some vestiges of the pagan admiration for beauty. But the difference, if one exists, is of degree only. In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women ARE the beautiful sex – to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women. To be called beautiful is thought to name something essential to women’s character and concerns. (In contrast to men whose essence is to be strong, or effective, or competent.) It does not take someone in the throes of advanced feminist awareness to perceive that the way women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity. Everybody (women and men) knows that. For it is “everybody”, a whole society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how one LOOKS. (In contrast to being masculine-which is identified with caring about what one IS and DOES and only secondarily, if at all, about how one looks). Given these stereotypes, it is no wonder that beauty enjoys, at best, a rather mixed reputation. It is not, of course, the desire to be beautiful that is wrong but the obligation to be – or to try. What is accepted by most women as a flattering idealisation of their sex is a way of making women feel inferior to what they actually are- or normally grow to be. For the ideal of beauty is �Содержание administered as a form of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and to evaluate each part separately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on-each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, often despairing scrutiny. Even if some pass muster, some will always be found wanting. Nothing less than perfection will do. In men, good looks is a whole, something taken in at a glance. It does not need to be confirmed by giving measurements of different regions of the body, nobody encourages a man to dissect his appearance, feature by feature. As for perfection, that is considered trivial – almost unmanly. Indeed, in the ideally good-looking man a small imperfection or blemish is considered positively desirable. According to one movie critic (a woman) who is a declared Robert Redford fan, it is having that cluster of skin-coloured moles on the cheek that saves Redford from being merely a “pretty face”. Think of the depreciation of women – as well as of beauty – that is implied in that judgement. “The privileges of beauty are immense,” said Cocteau. To be sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly so. What is lamentable is that it is the only form of power that most women are encouraged to seek. This power is always conceived in relation to men; it is not the power to do but the power to attract. It is a power that negates itself. For this power is not one that can be chosen freely – at least, not by moment – or renounced without social censure. To preen, for a woman, can never be just a pleasure. It is also a duty. It is her work. If a woman does real work – and even if she has clambered up to a leading position in politics, law, medicine, business, or whatever-she is always under pressure to confess that she still works as being attractive. But in so far as she is keeping up as one of the Fair Sex, she brings under suspicion her very capacity to be objective, professional, authoritative, thoughtful. Damned if they do-women are. And damned if they don’t. One could hardly ask for more important evidence of the dangers of considering persons as split between what is “inside” and what is “outside” than that interminable half-comic halftragic tale, the oppression of women. How easy it is to start off by defining women as caretakers of their surfaces, and then to disparage them (or find them adorable) for being “superficial”. It is a crude trap, and it has worked for too long. But to get out of the trap requires that women get some critical distance from that excellence and privilege which is beauty, enough distance to see how much beauty itself has been abridged in order to prop up the mythology of the “feminine”. There should be a way of saving beauty FROM women – and FOR men. �Содержание PART II. THE LANGUAGE OF PUBLIC SPEAKING The Main Features of Publicistic Style Analysing Speeches Analysing Political Speeches Donald Trump. The Crossroads In Our History Theodore Roosevelt. The Man with the Muck-rake Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech Donald Trump. Inaugural Address Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS �Содержание The Main Features of Publicistic Style Publicistic style is used in public speeches and printed public works which discuss important social or political events and problems of cultural or moral character. It falls into three varieties. Unlike other literary styles, the publicistic style has a spoken variety – the oratorical sub-style. The development of radio and television has brought into being a new spoken variety of the radio and television commentary. The other two sub-styles are essay (moral, philosophical, literary) and journalistic articles (political, social, economic) in newspapers, journals and magazines. Publicistic style is characterized by brevity of expression. In some varieties of this style it becomes a leading feature. In essays brevity sometimes becomes epigrammatic. Syntactical features of the publicistic style include: • coherent and logical syntactical structure; • careful paragraphing; • simple rather than complex sentences; • expanded system of connectives; • brevity of expression; • abundant use of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs). Lexical features: • emphasis on accessibility and easy understanding; • paraphrases rather than special terms, established and generally understood terms; • words with emotive and evaluative connotations; • euphemisms; • traditional metaphors and similes; • allusions and quotations; • newspaper clichés; • numerals, abbreviations, symbols. The main aim of the publicist style is to influence public opinion. The writer or speaker tries to convince the reader or the listener that their point of view is the right one. They make the reader accept the point of view expressed in the speech, or article not merely by logical argumentation, but by emotional appeal as well. The combination of logical argumentation and emotional appeal makes the publicistic style similar to the style of scientific prose or official documents, on the one hand, and that of emotive prose, on the other. The features which the publicistic style shares with scientific prose are coherent and logical syntactic structures, an expanded system of connectives and careful paragraphing. Its emotional appeal is generally achieved by the use of connotative vocabulary, imagery and stylistic devices as in emotive prose. Sometimes the publicistic style has elements of colloquial style because the authors do not �Содержание intend to make their speech impersonal (as in scientific or official style), but, on the contrary, try to approximate the text to lively communication. The way the speakers attempt to share a sense of themselves with their audience reveals how they want to be viewed. Humorous anecdotes, for instance, are often used by politicians to alter the public perception of them. They can reduce the distance between the speaker and their audience, in order to make them appear less stiff and more human. Essays and speeches have greater individuality than newspaper and magazine articles where it is usually limited by the requirements of the style. Analysing Speeches Analysing Political Speeches �Содержание Analysing Speeches The oratorical style is a subdivision of the publicistic style. This style is evident in addresses on various occasions from public speeches on political and social problems of the day, to speeches at weddings and jubilees. Political speeches aim at convincing the listener by arguments, to persuade them on an emotional level or even manipulate them. Often there is a mixture if these. Direct contact with the listeners permits the combination of the syntactical, lexical and phonetic peculiarities of both the written and spoken varieties of language. Analysing speeches the reader, unlike the listener, has all the benefit of the text and a more comprehensive impression of the strategies and techniques employed in the speech. To arrange them into a well–structured presentation one can make use of a few suggestions offered here. Introduction Approaching a speech the reader should pay attention to the elements of the rhetorical pentangle. Answering the following questions the reader will introduce the context of the speech and outline the main directions of its analysis. • What do you know/what can you find out about the writer/speaker as a person? • What sort of people constitutes the audience? • On what occasion is the speech made? Under what circumstances? • What is the speech about? What is the topic? • What seems to be the speaker’s purpose? • What language means does the speaker use? • The study of the form of a text will make up the biggest part of any stylistic analysis. That is why analyzing the speech one should focus on the linguistic elements that foreground the meaning contained in it. �Содержание Here are some areas to look at. Structure How is the speech structured? This question points toward the strategies used in the main parts of a speech: introduction – body – conclusion. A political speech, for example, generally starts with an introduction by which the speaker intends to attract the audience’s attention making clear the purpose of the speech, mentioning the topic and emphasizing its importance. The speaker may begin with question or a little story. In the body of the speech the speaker tries to maintain the audience’s attention developing main points step by step, backing up main ideas with facts and background information, suggesting what should be done to improve the situation or presenting solutions to the problem. At the end the speaker makes a conclusion by appealing again to the audience’s intellect and/or emotions, for example, summing up the main arguments in one or two sentences, or asking the audience to support his point of view. Analysing the structure of a speech the reader can comment on the effectiveness of the speaker’s argumentation. Consider the following questions: • Is there a governing idea running through the speech? • How does the speaker build his argumentation? • What grounds are given? • Is the argumentation solid? The speaker’s strategies in making their arguments more persuasive can include some of these: • the use of key symbols, slogans, stereotypes; • the use of opposition; • abstractions and generalizations vs. the presentation of specific issues or events; • references and illustrations, etc. Another element relating to the structure is coherence. • Do the various parts of the speech relate logically? • How are the individual parts tied together? • What connecting words are used? Language Means No matter how logically some orators may reason and may order the ideas, without a clever handling of the language in which they communicate they cannot exert the intended influence on their listeners. In the speeches intended to instill in the listener conformity to the ideas proposed by the speaker all rhetorical techniques go hand in hand with stylistic devices. Further analysis of the persuasive strategies and techniques employed in the speech will require a closer look at the text, with special attention to the language means. Some of them are: • key words and phrases; • stylistically coloured words; �Содержание • the use of the superlative degree of adjectives; • clusters of words (words related to each other in meaning): synonyms, thematic groups of words, words with common semantic component; • antonyms; • lexical expressive means (metaphors, similes, epithets, allusions, periphrases, irony, etc.); • syntactical expressive means (repetition, parallel constructions, antithesis, etc.); • phonetic expressive means (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhyme, rhythm); • the use of personal pronouns (e.g. “I”, “us”, “we”, “you”, “they” etc.). Evaluation At the end the reader is asked to give their commentary on a personal level. Thus, the reader needs to have some social, cultural and political background knowledge in order to be able to evaluate the speech properly. • Is the speech successful? • Is it a good speech? • Does it communicate its intended message? • Does it hit its target audience? • Does it fit the occasion? • Is it convincing? �Содержание Analysing Political Speeches The language of politics is very persuasive and powerful. It aims to inspire and challenge people to create a better world. Such outstanding politicians as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill raised their people to defeat Fascism during the 2-nd World War. In his inaugural address John F. Kennedy energised the nation with his famous words “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. Nelson Mandela became a symbol of global peace-making inspiring the civil rights activists worldwide. However, language can be deliberately used by politicians and their speechwriters for many different purposes. Political rhetoric can mislead, deceive and manipulate. We are fed a daily diet of political language as presidential campaigns seem to get started earlier each term. Speeches of national leaders saturate the media becoming more and more elaborate in the techniques used to influence public opinion. Classifying the means, or tricks, used in propaganda Donna Woolfolk Cross enumerates the following devices. • Name-calling, or labeling people or ideas with words of bad connotation, can be used against policies, practices, beliefs and ideals, as well as against individuals, groups, races, nations. Name-calling is at work when we hear a candidate for office described as a “foolish idealist” or a “two-faced liar” or when an incumbent’s policies are denounced as “reckless”, “reactionary”, or just plain “stupid.” • Glittering generalities are really name-calling in reverse. Name-calling uses words with bad connotations; glittering generalities are “virtue words”. While name-calling tries to get us to reject and condemn someone or something without examining the evidence, glittering generalities try to get us to accept and agree without examining the evidence. People believe in “virtue words” which they feel deeply about: “justice”, “motherhood”, “our Constitutional rights”. • “Plain folks” is the device by which a speaker tries to win our confidence and support by appearing to be a person like everyone else – “just one of the plain folks”. • Argumentum ad populum means “argument to the people” or “telling the people what they want to hear”. People like to hear nice things about themselves. So it stands to reason that the public will respond warmly to a person who tells they are “hard-working taxpayers” or “the most generous, free-spirited nation in the world”. • Argumentum ad hominem means “argument to the man” and that’s exactly what it is. When a propagandist uses argumentum ad hominem, he wants to distract people’s attention from the issue under consideration with personal attacks on the involved. • Guilt (or glory) by association. In glory by association, the propagandist tries to transfer the positive feelings of something we love and respect to the group or idea he wants us to accept. “This bill for a new dam is in the best tradition of this country, the land of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington,” is glory by association at work. Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington were great leaders that most of us revere and respect, but they have no logical connection to the proposal under consideration – the bill to build a new dam. �Содержание • Bandwagon urges people to support an action or an opinion because it is popular – because “everyone else is doing it”. • Faulty cause and effect is the device that sets up a cause-and-effect relationship that may not be true. People are promised that if they swallow X product the headache will go away, if they elect Y official unemployment will go down. • False Analogy. An analogy is a comparison between two ideas, events or things. But comparisons can be fairly made only when the things being compared are alike in significant ways. When they are not, false analogy is the result. • Begging the question occurs when, in discussing a questionable or debatable point, a person assumes as already established the very point that he is trying to prove. For example, “No thinking citizen could approve such a completely unacceptable policy as this one”. • The two-extremes fallacy (false dilemma) is at work, for example, in the slogan, “America: Love it or leave it”. One should always ask, “Are those really the only two options I can choose from? Are there other alternatives not mentioned that deserve consideration?” • Card stacking is a device of propaganda which selects only the facts that support the propagandist’s point of view, and ignores all the others. • Testimonial device consists in having some loved or respected person give a statement of support for a given idea. When confronting rhetoric, it is important to be able to listen to the nuances, to see what is being spoken, and what is being unspoken. The name for the language that conceals ideas or prevents thinking was invented by George Orwell. In his novel 1984 he introduced the notion of doublespeak. William Lutz, an American linguist, in his famous essay The World of Doublespeak defines it as “language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t”, and “language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable”. Among other devices doublespeak is most evident in euphemism. An inoffensive or positive word or phrase is often designed to avoid a harsh, unpleasant, or distasteful reality. Thus a tax increase turns into “revenue enhancement”. Airplanes don’t crash, they just have “uncontrolled contact with the ground”. Specific sphere of implementing euphemism is political correctness. This term is used to describe language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to avoid offence or disadvantage towards racial, cultural, or other identity groups. Some people believe that political correctness is a serious movement aiming to change the nature of Western society. Others think that it is subjective, and corresponds to the sponsored view of the government, minority, or a special interest group. The impact of the feminist movement spread into the sphere of language starting with the bias against English vocabulary and grammar that reflect a male-oriented perspective. In vocabulary, for example, we observe the replacement of “male” words with a generic meaning by neutral words (chairman – chairperson, stewardess– flight attendant). In grammar the lack of a sex-neutral third-person singular pronoun required by sex-neutral nouns (speaker, student, �Содержание teacher) and indefinite pronouns (somebody, anybody) resulted in the use of the third-person plural pronouns (they, their, them) or the use of the third-person singular pronouns of both genders (he or she, his or her, him or her). To refer to a singular person with a plural pronoun is now quite widely accepted. Which pronoun to choose is up to the speaker; they are all grammatically correct, but they are not all equally politically correct. Politicians are known to have been the best manipulators of masses of people. In order to persuade their audience the speakers have to seduce their audiences with their words. Many persuasive and manipulative strategies are linguistically realised in political discourse. However, whether a given instance of the use of language is justifiably treated as strategic is a matter of social and political judgment. To be able to interpret the speaker’s intention one should not only master the language but be aware of current affairs. Everything from becoming an informed voter to donating to a cause is influenced by one’s consciousness of the world issues. TASK. On October 13th 2016, Presidential Candidate Donald Trump delivered a stunning speech The Crossroads In Our History. Part of this speech is given below. Focus on the rhetorical techniques and stylistic devices visible in Donald Trump’s speech to point out their manipulative undertones. �Содержание Donald Trump from The Crossroads In Our History …Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People. There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense. The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself. The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. As an example, just one single trade deal they’d like to pass, involves trillions of dollars controlled by many countries, corporations and lobbyists. For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests they partner with, our campaign represents an existential threat. This is not simply another 4-year election. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government. The political establishment that is trying everything to stop us, is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled this country dry. The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries throughout the world. Our just-announced jobs numbers are anemic, and our gross domestic product, or GDP, is barely above one percent. Workers in the United States, were making less than they were almost 20 years ago – and yet they are working harder. It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities. Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan – and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare, and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs. The Clinton Machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers. And, likewise, the emails show that the Clinton Machine is so closely and irrevocably tied to media organizations that she is given the questions and answers in advance of her debates. Clinton is also given approval and veto power over quotes written about her in the New York Times. And the emails show the reporters collaborate and conspire directly with the Clinton Campaign on helping her win the election. �Содержание With their control over our government at stake, with trillions of dollars on the line, the Clinton Machine is determined to achieve the destruction of our campaign, which has now become a movement the likes of which our country has never seen before – and we won’t let them do that. The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media. Let’s be clear on one thing: the corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They are a political special interest, no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with an agenda. And their agenda is to elect the Clintons at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy. For them, it is a war – and for them, nothing is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. This election will determine whether we are a free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of Democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system. This is not just conspiracy but reality, and you and I know it. The establishment and their media enablers wield control over this nation through means that are well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed. They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and reputation. And they will lie, lie and lie even more. The Clintons are criminals. This is well-documented, and the establishment that protects them has engaged in a massive cover-up of widespread criminal activity at the State Department and Clinton Foundation in order to keep the Clintons in power. Never in history have we seen such a cover-up as this, one that includes the destruction of 33,000 emails, 13 phones, laptops, missing boxes of evidence, and on and on. People who are capable of such crimes against our nation are capable of anything. …But I take all of these slings and arrows for you. I take them for our movement, so that we can have our country back. Our great civilization, here in America and across the civilized world, has come upon a moment of reckoning. We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global government and global trade deals and global immigration deals that have destroyed their sovereignty. But the central base of world political power is here in America, and it is our corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people. Their financial resources are unlimited. Their political resources are unlimited. Their media resources are unlimited. And, most importantly, the depths of their immorality is unlimited. �Содержание Our political establishment has no soul. I knew these false attacks would come. I knew this day would arrive. And I knew the American people would rise above it and vote for the future they deserve. The only thing that can stop the Corrupt Clinton Machine is you. The only force strong enough to save this country is you. The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment is you, the American People. They control the Department of Justice, and they even clandestinely meet with the Attorney General of the United States – in the back of her airplane, while on the runway – for 39 minutes – to most likely discuss her reappointment in a Clinton Administration just prior to the Attorney General making a decision over whether or not to prosecute Hillary Clinton. Likewise, they have corrupted the Director of the FBI to the point at which stories are already saying the great men and women who work for the FBI are embarrassed and ashamed to what he’s done to one of our great institutions. Hillary Clinton is guilty of all of the things that Director Comey stated at his press conference and Congressional hearings, and far more – and yet he let her off the hook, while others lives are being destroyed for far less. This is a conspiracy against you, the American people. This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization. I didn’t need to do this. I built a great company, and I had a wonderful life. I could have enjoyed the benefits of years of successful business for myself and my family, instead of going through this absolute horror show of lies, deceptions and malicious attacks. I’m doing it because this country has given me so much, and I feel strongly it was my turn to give back. Some people warned me this campaign would be a journey to hell. But they are wrong, it will be a journey to heaven because we will help so many people. In my former life, I was an insider as much as anybody else – and I know what’s like to be an insider. Now I am being punished for leaving their special club and revealing to you their great scam. Because I used to be part of the club, I’m the only one who can fix it. I’m doing this for the people, and this movement is just right – and we will take back this country for you and Make America Great Again. The corrupt establishment knows that we are an existential threat to their criminal enterprise. They know, that if we win, their power is gone and returned to you. The clouds hanging over our government can be lifted, and replaced with a bright future – but it all depends on whether we let the New York Times decide our future, or whether we let the American people decide our future. If this Clinton Campaign of Destruction is allowed to work, then no other highly successful person – which is what our country needs – will ever again run for this office. I will not lie to you. These false attacks hurt. To be lied about, to be slandered, to be smeared so publicly and before your family, is painful. �Содержание What the Clinton Machine is doing to me, and my family, is egregious beyond words. It is reprehensible beyond description. But I also know, it’s not about me – it’s about all of you. It’s about all of us, together, as a country. It’s about the Veterans who need medical care, the mothers who’ve lost children to terrorism and crime, it’s about the inner cities and the border towns who desperately need our help, it’s about the millions of jobless Americans. This election is about the people being crushed by Obamacare, and it’s about defeating ISIS and appointing Supreme Court Justices who will defend our Constitution. This election is also about the African-American and Hispanic communities whose communities have been plunged into crime, poverty and failing schools by the policies of Hillary Clinton. They’ve robbed these citizens of their future, and I will give them their hope, jobs and opportunities back. I will deliver. This election is about every man, woman and child in our country who deserves to live in safety, prosperity and peace. We will rise above the lies, the smears, and the ludicrous slanders from ludicrous reporters. We will vote for the country we want. We will vote for the future we want. We will vote for the politics we want. We will vote to put this corrupt government cartel out of business. We will remove from our politics the special interests who have betrayed our workers, our borders, our freedoms, and our sovereign rights as a nation. We will end the politics of profit, we will end the rule of special interests, we will put a stop to the raiding of our country – and the disenfranchisement of our people. Our Independence Day is at hand, and it arrives, finally, on November 8th. Join me in taking back our country, and creating a bright and glorious new dawn for our people. �Содержание Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) In September 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, the young and robust Republican politician, unexpectedly became the 26th president of the United States. He brought a new energy to the White House, and won a second term on his own merits in 1904. He was the first president to win reelection after gaining the White House due to the death of his predecessor. Early in his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt sparked a scandal when he invited the African-American educator Booker T. Washington to dine with him and his family; he was the first president ever to entertain a black man in the White House. In domestic policy, Roosevelt was a radical within the Republican Party. He was a champion of reform. Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” proclaimed the battle against large industrial trusts which threatened to restrain trade. In 1902, his government brought a successful suit under the previously ineffective Sherman Antitrust Act against the Northern Securities Company, a railroad group formed by James J. Hill, E.H. Harriman and J.P. Morgan. Roosevelt also halted a prolonged coal strike in Pennsylvania negotiating a payment increase for the miners. Besides, he set aside almost 200 million acres – almost five times as much land as all his predecessors combined – for national forests, reserves and wildlife refuges. In his foreign policy Roosevelt sought to bring the United States out of its isolation and fulfill its responsibility as a world power. Theodor Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War. In 1903, he helped Panama separate from Colombia in order to facilitate the beginning of the construction of the Panama Canal, which he later claimed as his greatest accomplishment as president. To prepare the United States for its expanded role on the world stage, Roosevelt sought to build up the country’s defenses, and by the end of his presidency he had transformed the U.S. Navy into a major international force at sea. Theodor Roosevelt is said to have ushered in a “rhetorical presidency”. He was an extremely popular President and the first to use the media to appeal directly to the people. He took advantage of his popularity to expand the power of the government, supporting policies that he believed would benefit the nation. His powerful speeches were made headlines and called for change. Journalists exemplified progressive ideals as they investigated corruption within business and government. Muckrakers attacked the robber barons and great industries for the way they abused workers and public trust. The term, which referred to the “man with a muck rake” in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s �Содержание Progress, was first used by Theodor Roosevelt in his famous speech “Man With the Muckrake”. This speech epitomizes the ideals of the Progressive Era. from The Man with the Muck-rake delivered on the 14th of April 1906 Over a century ago Washington laid the corner stone of the Capitol in what was then little more than a tract of wooded wilderness here beside the Potomac. We now find it necessary to provide by great additional buildings for the business of the government. This growth in the need for the housing of the government is but a proof and example of the way in which the nation has grown and the sphere of action of the national government has grown. We now administer the affairs of a nation in which the extraordinary growth of population has been outstripped by the growth of wealth in complex interests. The material problems that face us today are not such as they were in Washington’s time, but the underlying facts of human nature are the same now as they were then. Under altered external form we war with the same tendencies toward evil that were evident in Washington’s time, and are helped by the same tendencies for good. It is about some of these that I wish to say a word today. In Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck Rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. In “Pilgrim’s Progress” the Man with the Muck Rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. …One of the chief counts against those who make indiscriminate assault upon men in business or men in public life is that they invite a reaction which is sure to tell powerfully in favor of the unscrupulous scoundrel who really ought to be attacked, who ought to be exposed, who ought, if possible, to be put in the penitentiary. If Aristides is praised overmuch as just, people get tired of hearing it; and over-censure of the unjust finally and from similar reasons results in their favor. �Содержание Any excess is almost sure to invite a reaction; and, unfortunately, the reactions instead of taking the form of punishment of those guilty of the excess, is apt to take the form either of punishment of the unoffending or of giving immunity, and even strength, to offenders. The effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service at any price. …At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea is not for immunity to, but for the most unsparing exposure of, the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business man who makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such man out of the position he has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself. It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that I ask the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone. If the whole picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals for distinction from their fellows. Such painting finally induces a kind of moral color blindness; and people affected by it come to the conclusion that no man is really black, and no man really white, but they are all gray. …The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every good American, than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition. There is any amount of good in the world, and there never was a time when loftier and more disinterested work for the betterment of mankind was being done than now. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and timid, no less than a wicked thing, to blink the fact that the forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse to fail to take into account the strength of the forces that tell for good. Hysterical sensationalism is the poorest weapon wherewith to fight for lasting righteousness. The men who with stern sobriety and truth assail the many evils of our time, whether in the public press, or in magazines, or in books, are the leaders and allies of all engaged in the work for social and political betterment. But if they give good reason for distrust of what they say, if they chill the ardor of those who demand truth as a primary virtue, they thereby betray the good cause and play into the hands of the very men against whom they are nominally at war. �Содержание …At this moment we are passing through a period of great unrest – social, political, and industrial unrest. It is of the utmost importance for our future that this should prove to be not the unrest of mere rebelliousness against life, of mere dissatisfaction with the inevitable inequality of conditions, but the unrest of a resolute and eager ambition to secure the betterment of the individual and the nation. So far as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form of a fierce discontent with evil, of a determination to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or politics, the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy life. If, on the other hand, it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against appetite, of a contest between the brutal greed of the “have nots” and the brutal greed of the “haves,” then it has no significance for good, but only for evil. If it seeks to establish a line of cleavage, not along the line which divides good men from bad, but along that other line, running at right angles thereto, which divides those who are well off from those who are less well off, then it will be fraught with immeasurable harm to the body politic. …The first requisite in the public servants who are to deal in this shape with corporations, whether as legislators or as executives, is honesty. This honesty can be no respecter of persons. There can be no such thing as unilateral honesty. The danger is not really from corrupt corporations; it springs from the corruption itself, whether exercised for or against corporations. The eighth commandment reads, “Thou shalt not steal”. It does not read, “Thou shalt not steal from the rich man”. It does not read, “Thou shalt not steal from the poor man”. It reads simply and plainly, “Thou shalt not steal”. No good whatever will come from that warped and mock morality which denounces the misdeeds of men of wealth and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their expense; which denounces bribery, but blinds itself to blackmail; which foams with rage if a corporation secures favors by improper methods, and merely leers with hideous mirth if the corporation is itself wronged. The only public servant who can be trusted honestly to protect the rights of the public against the misdeeds of a corporation is that public man who will just as surely protect the corporation itself from wrongful aggression. If a public man is willing to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to the men of wealth or to rich corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity comes he will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in the interest of a corporation. But in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No honesty will make a public man useful if that man is timid or foolish, if he is a hot-headed zealot or an impracticable visionary. As we strive for reform we find that it is not at all merely the case of a long uphill pull. On the contrary, there is almost as much of breeching work as of collar work. To depend only on traces means that there will soon be a runaway and an upset. The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find �Содержание that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth. On the other hand, the wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the entire existing order, the men who act crookedly, whether because of sinister design or from mere puzzle headedness, the men who preach destruction without proposing any substitute for what they intend to destroy, or who propose a substitute which would be far worse than the existing evils-all these men are the most dangerous opponents of real reform. If they get their way they will lead the people into a deeper pit than any into which they could fall under the present system. If they fail to get their way they will still do incalculable harm by provoking the kind of reaction which in its revolt against the senseless evil of their teaching would enthrone more securely than ever the evils which their misguided followers believe they are attacking. More important than aught else is the development of the broadest sympathy of man for man. The welfare of the wage worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, upon these depend the welfare of the entire country; their good is not to be sought in pulling down others; but their good must be the prime object of all our statesmanship. Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all men, so that each shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which he is made. Spiritually and ethically we must strive to bring about clean living and right thinking. We appreciate that the things of the body are important; but we appreciate also that the things of the soul are immeasurably more important. The foundation stone of national life is, and ever must be, the high individual character of the average citizen. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. What is Theodore Roosevelt’s political reputation? What do you know about American Progressive Era? 2. The speech was delivered at the laying of the foundation of the office building of the House of Representatives. How does Roosevelt use this event at the beginning of his speech to argue the expansion of the government influence? 3. Opening the speech, Roosevelt suggests an image of George Washington. What aspect of Americanism does this image call for? Does it give more authenticity to Roosevelt’s message? 4. What is the central topic of Roosevelt’s speech? How does he formulate it? What does the phrase “the underlying facts of human nature” stand for? 5. Analyse the allusion to John Bunyan’s book. How does the speaker interpret the episode from Pilgrim’s Progress? What feature is accentuated in the image of the man with the muck rake? What is allegorically represented by “the filth of the floor” and “a celestial crown”? Comment on the choice of words. What is the role of repetition in the speaker’s argumentation? 6. What is the danger in being fixed on the “filth”? Can muckraking help or harm society? Is it possible to reach the balance between the two sides of sensational writing: exposure of �Содержание wrongdoing and excessive dramatization? What illustrations does the speaker give to criticise the negative influence of any excess in journalism? What language means foreground the enthusiastic tone and emotionality of the text? 7. Theodore Roosevelt has been labeled a “trust-buster”. Do you see evidence of trustbusting in this speech? What can you conclude about his perspective of big business? Analyse the imagery employed to convey the necessity of radical measures against corruption. Pay attention to the use of modal verbs and superlative adjectives. 8. How does the speaker develop the image of the man with the muck rake? What is the purpose of referring to it again? 9. Analyse the concept of “moral color blindness”. What can be worse than that according to the speaker’s words? 10. How can one justify the gradual transition from the specific issue of sensational journalism to the general remarks concerning American patriotism, and then the goodness of mankind in the text? What language means partake in the lofty rhetoric of the passage? 11. Does the speaker defend the poor or the rich in his attempt to promote social and political betterment? How does he manage to reconcile the “have not” and “haves”, “those who are well off” and “those who are less well off”? Where does the ambiguity of his arguments lie? 12. What is Roosevelt’s definition of a good public servant? What are his best qualities? 13. How does the speaker project his views on sensational journalism upon the reform policy of the government? 14. Analyse the last paragraphs of Roosevelt’s speech. What ideas contained in them tie the whole text together? What is the speaker’s main message? Is it stated directly or implied? 15. Analyse the language of the speech. What language means and stylistic devices used in the text are typically employed in the publicistic style? 16. Theodore Roosevelt’s speech is most remembered today for the coinage of the term “muckraker”, brilliantly used by the speaker to create a compelling symbol for his message. What are the metaphoric connotations associated with the term “muck-rake?” Does this metaphor still apply to modern-day journalism? Are there any updated metaphors that apply better to today’s investigative reporting? 17. Prepare the final analysis of the speech. Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech Donald Trump. Inaugural Address Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS �Содержание Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech Donald Trump. Inaugural Address Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS �Содержание Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western world. A cold war warrior, an amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of these things? Well yes, if that’s how they… Yes I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke, yes if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life. And by they, I mean that somewhat strange alliance between the comrades of the Russian Defence Ministry – and our Defence Minister. They’re welcome to call me what they like if they believe that we should ignore the build-up of Russian military strength, and that we should not disturb their dreams of detente by worrying over the communist presence in Angola. But I happen to believe that what is at stake is important and is crucial to our future both in this country and in the world as a whole. We’re waging a battle on many fronts. We must not forget the guns and missiles aimed at us – but equally we must not let them blind us to the insidious war on words which is going on. It is not just a matter of hurling insults – where he who hurls loudest, hurls last – that is the final resort of the man who has already lost the argument, No, this is not such a war. The war is a true war of words, where meanings get lost in a mist of revolutionary fantasy; where accuracy is slipped quietly under the carpet; and where truth is twisted and bent to suit the latest propagandist line. That is what we are up against. And we have to fight it if only because we find it totally alien to our notions of freedom and truth. To illustrate what I mean, let us take that last sentence. It contains in it two words which, together, are among the most abused in the language of the struggle. Freedom and Fight. The Marxist has applied the description of freedom fighter to one who helps to bring about Marxism, a system which denies basic freedoms. In other words, that so-called freedom fighter is a man who helps to destroy freedom. Such is the corruption of the language they use. Necessary in their eyes because they know freedom is an appealing word. �Содержание The men of the Khmer Rouge whose first act on “liberating” – as they put it – Cambodia last year, was brutally to drive a large part of the population out of the capital Phnom Penh. Yet they were called “freedom fighters”. The men who tried to reverse the clear wishes of the people of Portugal – as expressed through the ballot box – in Marxist vocabulary they were “freedom fighters” too. This surely must have been one of the most blatant attempts at subversion we have seen in recent times. So do not let us be misled by their abuse of these words. But the fallacies of the present propaganda war come nearer to home than this. Let us look at another word being just a subtly corrupted in the litany of the left. The word is “Public”. We use it many times a day. It is with us all the time – because we are the public. All of us. Yet the word has become distorted. Take for example “Public Ownership”. In theory: We own the mines. We own the railways. We own the Post Office. But in practice we don’t really own anything. “Public ownership” should mean that you and I own something, that we have some say in how it is run, that it is accountable to us. But the fact is that the words “public ownership” have come to mean the very, very private world of decisions taken behind closed doors, and of accountability to no-one. How good for us all public ownership is presented as being. What a glimpse of socialist heaven it offers. The Socialists tell us that there are massive profits in a particular industry and they should not go to the shareholders – but that the public should reap the benefits. Benefits? What benefits? When you take into public ownership a profitable industry, the profits soon disappear. The goose that laid the golden eggs goes broody. State geese are not great layers. The steel industry was nationalised some years ago in the public interest – yet the only interest now left to the public is in witnessing the depressing spectacle of their money going down the drain at a rate of a million pounds a day. �Содержание Socialists then shift the ground for taking industries into “public ownership”. They then tell us that some industries cannot survive any longer unless they are taken into public ownership, allegedly to protect the public from the effects of their collapse. It all sounds so cosy, and so democratic. But is it true? No, of course it isn’t. The moment ownership passes into the name of the public is the moment the public ceases to have any ownership or accountability, and often the moment when it ceases to get what it wants. But it is invariably the moment when the public starts to pay. Pays to take the industry over. Pays the losses by higher taxes. Pays for inefficiencies in higher prices. Outside many pits in the country is a notice which says: “Managed on behalf of the people.” But will the people ever get to know who was responsible for the massive losses sustained since the mining industry was nationalised in 1947? If these are public industries, then surely the public has a right to know? The more so, because they are monopoly industries. In fact, publicly owned authorities are usually the most private imaginable. We need to revise our vocabulary and call something public only when ordinary members of the public are in actual control. The fact is that the British public more truly own firms like Marks & Spencer and others, than they do any of our nationalised industries. Some of them directly own shares in M&S. This gives them the right to ask questions about its management – its successes, its failures, and if they are not satisfied, they can sell their shares and invest their money elsewhere. Many more have an indirect share in it through pension funds at their own work. The managers of those funds are paid to ask the very questions which keep the company on its toes. And millions of us use the option every year of voting with our feet on the success of St. Michael. �Содержание We can choose whether to buy there or somewhere else. That is real public ownership – and if the public ceased to benefit, then M&S would cease to exist. What is it, then, that keeps them going? It is their incentive to satisfy their customers – you and me – the public. Despite what the Socialists would have you think, theirs is not an unusual story. It is reflected in thousands of firms throughout the land. Successful firms, proving by their results that today’s crisis is not one of free enterprise, but one caused by Socialism. Despite the handicaps imposed upon them, the taxation, the restrictions – they are still managing to give the public what it wants. These are the fallacies in the use of the word “public”. We must not let them get away with the deceptions and the half – truths which swarm around their dogma. Whenever we see the word “public” we must question it. How do the public benefit? What choice does the public have? Choice is crucial in this. When a man moves his family into a Council house, we must make sure he has the chance of buying it. The ambition to own the roof over your head is a totally natural one – and judging by the way the present Cabinet indulges in it – a pretty strong instinct it is, too. Why, then, do these so-called socialists work so actively to prevent home ownership in the Council estates? The answer is that if you give the ambitious man in the Council house the chance to buy it, you lose control over him. A socialist system which has penetrated so far in its control over people that it can dictate the colour of their front doors is a system which will never let go control of the whole house. People might paint their doors a different colour, for a start. We have always been the party of home ownership. Home ownership not only means security for the individual, it also means security and continuity for society as well. �Содержание Security because people who work hard to buy their own homes have learned the responsibility of property and have a respect for other people’s property as well. Continuity because the ownership of a house is not just for one generation – its value is in more ways than one passed on to the next, and the next. The only way for the majority of people to have any real say in where they live and how they live is by extending home ownership. When we came to power in 1951, home ownership was only 29 per cent. In 1964 it was 45 per cent. By the time we had left Office in 1974 it was 52 per cent. And with our policies the figure will go even higher. Housing policy shows that the Conservative way really does work for the public in the true sense of the word. When parents send their children to school, and I am talking about local authority schools – not fee paying schools – we must also see that some choice is available. In no field has the exclusion of the public been so severe as in the schools they nominally own, in whose name they are nominally run. I do not wish to get embroiled here in the controversy currently raging about the running of William Tyndale School. It would be quite wrong for me to comment while the inquiry is still sitting. But there is one observation of fact about it, which can be made. That is that matters came to a head when the numbers of ordinary parents withdrawing their children from the school reached alarming proportions. That was the only way they could make their views felt. They voted with their feet – just as surely as people would vote with their feet if Marks and Spencers ceased to provide value for money. Nobody wants to see a school shut down – no more than they want to see a firm put out of business. That is why from the start we must make them more responsive to parents’ wishes. That is why there must be choice of the type of education our children are given. It is true that some children flower quickly in the atmosphere of what is called the “progressive” classroom. Others need the more organised structure of the traditional system. But parents should not be told which their children are going to get, and denied any choice at all. We believe people are not mere cyphers to be ordered this way and that, into this job or that, into this house or that, their children sent to this school or that. �Содержание Socialists believe people are not to be trusted with choice. I suppose because we might learn to use it. And enjoy it. And then where would it all end? Socialism is the denial of choice, the denial of choice for ordinary people in their everyday lives. There is a will in Britain to work and build up the future for our children. But Socialists don’t trust the people. Churchill did. We do. �Содержание Donald Trump. Inaugural Address Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, fellow Americans and people of the world – thank you. We the citizens of America have now joined a great national effort to rebuild our county and restore its promise for all our people. Together we will determine the course of America for many, many years to come. Together we will face challenges. We will confront hardships. But we will get the job done. Every four years we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power. And we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent, thank you. Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another – but transferring it from Washington DC and giving it back to you the people. For too long a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. While they have celebrated there has been little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment. It belongs to you. It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America today. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this – the United States of America – is your country. What truly matters is not what party controls our government but that this government is controlled by the people. Today, January 20 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. �Содержание You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement – the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the centre of this movement is a crucial conviction – that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighbourhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. An education system flushed with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs which deprive people of so much unrealised potential. We are one nation, and their pain is our pain, their dreams are our dreams, we share one nation, one home and one glorious destiny. Today I take an oath of allegiance to all Americans. For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidised the armies of other countries, while allowing the sad depletion of our own military. We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own. And spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We have made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. One by one, shutters have closed on our factories without even a thought about the millions and millions of those who have been left behind. But that is the past and now we are looking only to the future. We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, in every hall of power – from this day on a new vision will govern our land – from this day onwards it is only going to be America first – America first! Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every bone in my body and I will never ever let you down. America will start winning again. America will start winning like never before. We will bring back our jobs, we will bring back our borders, we will bring back our wealth, we will bring back our dreams. �Содержание We will bring new roads and high roads and bridges and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off welfare and back to work – rebuilding our country with American hands and American labour. We will follow two simple rules – buy American and hire American. We see good will with the nations of the world but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their nations first. We will shine for everyone to follow. We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones, and untie the world against radical Islamic terrorism which we will eradicate from the face of the earth. At the bed rock of our politics will be an allegiance to the United States. And we will discover new allegiance to each other. There is no room for prejudice. The bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when god’s people live together in unity. When America is united, America is totally unstoppable. There is no fear, we are protected and will always be protected by the great men and women of our military and most importantly we will be protected by god. Finally, we must think big and dream even bigger. As Americans, we know we live as a nation only when it is striving. We will no longer accept politicians who are always complaining but never doing anything about it. The time for empty talk is over, now arrives the hour of action. Do not allow anyone to tell you it cannot be done. No challenge can match the heart and fight and spirit of America. We will not fail, our country will thrive and prosper again. We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the earth from the miseries of disease, to harvest the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow. A new national pride will stir ourselves, lift our sights and heal our divisions. It’s time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots. We all enjoy the same glorious freedoms and we all salute the same great American flag and whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look at the same night sky, and dream the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath by the same almighty creator. �Содержание So to all Americans in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, from ocean to ocean – hear these words – you will never be ignored again. Your voice, your hopes and dreams will define your American destiny. Your courage, goodness and love will forever guide us along the way. Together we will make America strong again, we will make America wealthy again, we will make America safe again and yes – together we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. And god bless America. �Содержание Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1995. The charismatic alumna and one of Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires returned to campus to deliver the Class Day keynote address to graduating students. The event is part of a student-led ceremony traditionally held the day before Harvard University’s Commencement exercises and the HBS diploma ceremony. Sandberg, who graduated in the top 5% of her HBS class, gave an inspiring, often humorous and sometimes provocative speech. She dispensed plenty of career advice, disclosed details of how she paved her own way to success in Silicon Valley, and addressed gender issues at work. And she noted that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was all of 11 years old when she graduated with her MBA degree in 1995. It’s an honor to be here today to address HBS’s distinguished faculty, proud parents, patient guests, and most importantly, the class of 2012. Today was supposed to be a day of unbridled celebration and I know that’s no longer true. I join all of you in grieving for your classmate Nate. There are no words which can make this better. Though laden with sadness, today still marks a distinct and impressive achievement for this class. So please join me in giving our warmest congratulations to this class. When Dean Nohria asked me to speak here today, I thought, come talk to a group of people way younger and cooler than I am? I can do that. I do that every day at Facebook. I like being surrounded by young people, except when they say to me, “What was it like being in college without the internet?” or worse, “Sheryl, can you come here? We need to see what old people think of this feature”. When I was a student here 17 years ago, I studied social marketing with Professor Kash Rangan. One of the many examples Kash used to explain the concept of social marketing was the lack of organ donors in this country, which kills 18 people every single day. Earlier this month, Facebook launched a tool to support organ donations, something that stems directly from Kash’s work. Kash, we are all grateful for your dedication. It wasn’t really that long ago when I was sitting where you are, but the world has changed an awful lot. My section, section B, tried to have HBS’s first online class. We had to use an AOL chat room and dial up service. (Your parents can explain to you later what dial-up service is.) We had to pass out a list of screen names because it was unthinkable to put your real name on the internet. And it never worked. It kept crashing. The world just wasn’t set up for 90 people to communicate at once online. But for a few brief moments, we glimpsed the future – a future where technology would power who we are and connect us to our real colleagues, our real family, our real friends. It used to be that in order to reach more people than you could talk to in a day, you had to be rich and famous and powerful. You had to be a celebrity, a politician, a CEO. But that’s not true today. Now ordinary people have voice, not just those of us lucky to go to HBS, but �Содержание anyone with access to Facebook, Twitter, a mobile phone. This is disrupting traditional power structures and leveling traditional hierarchy. Control and power are shifting from institutions to individuals, from the historically powerful to the historically powerless. And all of this is happening so much faster than I could have imagined when I was sitting where you are today – and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old. As the world becomes more connected and less hierarchical, traditional career paths are shifting as well. In 2001, after working in the government, I moved out to Silicon Valley to try to find a job. My timing wasn’t really that good. The bubble had crashed. Small companies were closing. Big companies were laying people off. One CEO looked at me and said, “we wouldn’t even think about hiring someone like you”. After a while I had a few offers and I had to make a decision, so what did I do? I am MBA trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows. One of the jobs on that sheet was to become Google’s first Business Unit general manager, which sounds good now, but at the time no one thought consumer internet companies could ever make money. I was not sure there was actually a job there at all; Google had no business units, so what was there to generally manage? And the job was several levels lower than jobs I was being offered at other companies. So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO, and I showed him the spreadsheet and I said, this job meets none of my criteria. He put his hand on my spreadsheet and he looked at me and said, “Don’t be an idiot”. Excellent career advice. And then he said, “Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” About six and one-half years later, when I was leaving Google, I took that advice to heart. I was offered CEO jobs at a bunch of companies, but I went to Facebook as COO. At the time people said, why are you going to work for a 23-year-old? The traditional metaphor for careers is a ladder, but I no longer think that metaphor holds. It just doesn’t make sense in a less hierarchical world. When I was first at Facebook, a woman named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her a bit socially. She called me and said, “I want to talk with you about coming to work with you at Facebook. So I thought about calling you and telling you all the things I’m good at and all the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it?” My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always about the job searcher, but not in Lori’s case. I said, “You’re hired. My biggest problem is recruiting and you can solve it”. So Lori changed fields into something she never thought she’d do, went down a level to start in a new field. She has since been promoted and runs all of People Operations at Facebook and is doing an extraordinary job. �Содержание Lori has a great metaphor for careers. She says they’re not a ladder, they’re a jungle gym. As you start your post-HBS career, look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they’re going to give you. Do real work. Take a sales quota, a line role, an ops job. Don’t plan too much, and don’t expect a direct climb. If I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed my career. You are entering a different business world than I entered. Mine was just starting to get connected. Yours is hyper-connected. Mine was competitive. Yours is way more competitive. Mine moved quickly, yours moves even more quickly. As traditional structures are breaking down, leadership has to evolve as well – from hierarchy to shared responsibility, from command and control to listening and guiding. You’ve been trained by this great institution not just to be part of these trends, but to lead. As you lead in this new world, you will not be able to rely on who you are or the degree you hold. You’ll have to rely on what you know. Your strength will not come from your place on some org chart, but from building trust and earning respect. You’re going to need talent, skill, and imagination and vision. But more than anything else, you’re going to need the ability to communicate authentically, to speak so that you inspire the people around you and to listen so that you continue to learn each and every day on the job. If you watch young children, you’ll immediately notice how honest they are. My friend Betsy from my section a few years after business school was pregnant with her second child. Her first child was about five and said, “Mommy, where is the baby?” She said, “The baby is in my tummy”. He said, “Aren’t the baby’s arms in your arms?” She said, “No, the baby’s in my tummy”. “Are the baby’s legs in your legs?” “No, the whole baby is in my tummy.” Then he said, “Then Mommy, what is growing in your butt?” As adults, we are never this honest. And that’s not a bad thing. I have borne two children and the last thing I needed were those comments. But it’s not always a good thing either. Because all of us, and especially leaders, need to speak and hear the truth. The workplace is an especially difficult place for anyone to tell the truth, because no matter how flat we want our organizations to be, all organizations have some form of hierarchy. This means that one person’s performance is assessed by someone else’s perception. This is not a setup for honesty. Think about how people speak in a typical workforce. Rather than say, “I disagree with our expansion strategy” or better yet, “this seems truly stupid”. They say, “I think there are many good reasons why we’re entering this new line of business, and I’m certain the management team has done a thorough ROI analysis, but I’m not sure we have fully considered the downstream effects of taking this step forward at this time”. As we would say at Facebook, three letters: WTF. Truth is better used by using simple language. Last year, Mark decided to learn Chinese and as part of studying, he would spend an hour or so each week with some of our employees who were native Chinese speakers. One day, one of them was trying to tell him something about her manager. She said this long sentence and he said, “simpler please”. And then she said it �Содержание again and he said, “no, I still don’t understand, simpler please”…and so on and so on. Finally, in sheer exasperation, she burst out, “my manager is bad”. Simple and clear and very important for him to know. People rarely speak this clearly in the workforce or in life. And as you get more senior, not only will people speak less clearly to you but they will overreact to the small things you say. When I joined Facebook, one of the things I had to do was build the business side of the company and put some systems into place. But I wanted to do it without destroying the culture that made Facebook great. So one of the things I tried to do was encourage people not to do formal PowerPoint presentations for meetings with me. I would say things like, “Don’t do PowerPoint presentations for meetings with me. Instead, come in with a list of what you want to discuss”. But everyone ignored me and they kept doing their presentations meeting after meeting, month after month. So about two years in, I said, “OK, I hate rules but I have a rule: no more PowerPoint in my meetings”. About a month later I was about to speak to our global sales team on a big stage and someone came up to me and said, “Before you get on that stage, you really should know everyone’s pretty upset about the no PowerPoint with clients thing”. So I got on the stage and said, “one, I meant no PowerPoint with me. But two, more importantly, next time you hear something that’s really stupid, don’t adhere to it. Fight it or ignore it, even if it’s coming from me or Mark”. A good leader recognizes that most people won’t feel comfortable challenging authority, so it falls upon authority to encourage them to question. It’s easy to say that you’re going to encourage feedback but it’s hard to do, because unfortunately it doesn’t always come in a format we want to hear. When I first started at Google, I had a team of four people and it was really important to me that I interview everyone. For me, being part of my team meant I had to know you. When the team had grown to about 100 people, I realized it was taking longer to schedule my interviews. So one day at my meeting of just my direct reports, I said “maybe I should stop interviewing,” fully expecting them to jump in and say “no, your interviews are a critical part of the process.” They applauded. Then they fell over themselves explaining that I was the bottleneck of all time. I was embarrassed. Then I was angry and I spent a few hours just quietly fuming. Why didn’t they tell me I was a bottleneck? Why did they let me go on slowing them down? Then I realized that if they hadn’t told me, it was my fault. I hadn’t convinced them that I wanted that feedback and I would have to change that going forward. When you’re the leader, it is really hard to get good and honest feedback, no many how many times you ask for it. One trick I’ve discovered is that I try to speak really openly about the things I’m bad at, because that gives people permission to agree with me, which is a lot easier than pointing it out in the first place. To take one of many possible examples, when things are unresolved I can get a tad anxious. Really, when anything’s unresolved, I get anxious. I’m quite certain no one has accused me of being too calm. So I speak about it openly and that gives people permission to tell me when it’s happening. But if I never said anything, would anyone who works at Facebook walk up to me and say, “Hey Sheryl, calm down. You’re driving us all nuts!” I don’t think so. �Содержание As you graduate today, ask yourself, how will you lead. Will you use simple and clear language? Will you seek out honesty? When you get honesty back, will you react with anger or with gratitude? As we strive to be more authentic in our communication, we should also strive to be more authentic in a broader sense. I talk a lot about bringing your whole self to work – something I believe in deeply. Motivation comes from working on things we care about. But it also comes from working with people we care about. And in order to care about someone, you have to know them. You have to know what they love and hate, what they feel, not just what they think. If you want to win hearts and minds, you have to lead with your heart as well as your mind. I don’t believe we have a professional self from Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. That kind of division probably never worked, but in today’s world, with real and authentic voice, it makes even less sense. I’ve cried at work. I’ve told people I’ve cried at work. And it’s been reported in the press that “Sheryl Sandberg cried on Mark Zuckerberg’s shoulder”, which is not exactly what happened. I talk about my hopes and fears and ask people about theirs. I try to be myself – honest about my strengths and weaknesses – and I encourage others to do the same. It is all professional and it is all personal, all at the very same time. I recently started speaking up about the challenges women face in the workforce, something I only had the courage to do in the last few years. Before this, I did my career like everyone else does it. I never told anyone I was a girl. Don’t tell. I left the lights on when I went home to do something for my kids. I locked my office door and pumped milk for my babies while I was on conference calls. People would ask, “what’s that sound?” I would say, “What sound?” “I hear a beep.” “Oh, there’s a fire truck outside my office.” But the lack of progress over the past decade has convinced me we need to start talking about this. I graduated from HBS in 1995 and I thought it was completely clear that by the time someone from my year was invited to speak at this podium, we would have achieved equality in the workforce. But women at the top – C-level jobs – are stuck at 15–16 percent and have not moved in a decade. Not even close to 50 % and no longer growing. We need to acknowledge openly that gender remains an issue at the highest levels of leadership. The promise of equality is not equality. We need to start talking about this. We need to start talking about how women underestimate their abilities compared to men and how for women, but not men, success and likeability are negatively correlated. That means that as a woman is more successful in your workplaces, she will be less liked. This means that women need a different form of management and mentorship, a different form of sponsorship and encouragement than men. There aren’t enough senior women out there to do it, so it falls upon the men who are graduating today just as much or more as the women, not just to talk about gender but to help these women succeed. When they hear a woman is really great at her job but not liked, take a deep breath and ask why. We need to start talking openly about the flexibility all of us need to have both a job and a life. �Содержание A couple of weeks ago in an interview I said that I leave the office at 5:30 p.m. to have dinner with my children. I was shocked at the press coverage. One of my friends said I couldn’t get more headlines if I had murdered someone with an ax. This showed me this is an unresolved issue for all of us, men and women alike. Otherwise, everyone would not write so much about it. And maybe, most importantly, we need to start talking about how fewer women than men, even from places like HBS, even likely in this class, aspire to the very top jobs. We will not close the leadership gap until we close the professional ambition gap. We need more women not just to sit at the table, but as President Obama said a few weeks ago at Barnard, to take their rightful seats at the head of the table. One of the reasons I was so excited to be here today is that this is the 50th anniversary of letting women into this school. Dean Noria, who is so passionate about getting more women into leadership positions, told me that he wanted me to speak this year for that reason. I met a woman from that first class once. She told me that when they first came in, they took a men’s room and converted it to a woman’s room. But they left the urinals in. She thought the message was clear – “we are not sure this whole woman thing is going to work out and if not, we don’t want to have to reinstall the urinals”. The urinals are long gone. Let’s make sure that no one ever misses them. As you and your classmates spread out across the globe and walk across this stage tomorrow, I wish for you four things First, keep in touch via Facebook. This is critical to your future success! And since we’re public now, why you are there, click on an ad or two. Two, that you make the effort to speak as well as seek the truth. Three, that you remain true to and open about your authentic self. And four, that your generation accomplishes what mine has failed to do. Give us a world where half our homes are run by men and half our institutions are run by women. I’m pretty sure that would be a better world. I join everyone here in offering my most sincere congratulations to the HBS Class of 2012. Give yourselves a huge round of applause. �Содержание PART III. THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE The Main Features of Scientific Style Anna Wierzbicka. English: Meaning and Culture. English as a Cultural Universe Steven Arthur Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language Scientific Texts for Self-Guided Analysis Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say �Содержание The Main Features of Scienti ic Style The language of science is governed by the aim of the functional style of scientific prose, which is to prove a hypothesis, to create new concepts, to disclose the internal laws of existence, development, relations between different phenomena, etc. The anguage means used, therefore, tend to be objective, precise, unemotional, devoid of any individuality; there is a striving for the most generalized form of expression. 1. The first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of utterances with clear indication of their interrelations and interdependence. It will not be an exaggeration to say that in no other functional style we find such a developed and varied system of connectives as in scientific prose. 2. The second equally important feature of this style is the use of terms specific to each given branch of science. Due to the rapid dissemination of scientific and technical ideas, we may observe the process of “de-terminization”, that is, some scientific and technical terms begin to circulate outside the narrow field they belong to and eventually begin to develop new meanings. But the overwhelming majority of terms do not undergo this process and remain the property of scientific prose. There they are born, may develop new terminological meanings, and there they die. No other field of human activity is so prolific in coining new words as science is. The necessity to penetrate deeper into the essence of things and phenomena gives rise to new concepts, which require new words to name them. Further, the general vocabulary employed in scientific prose bears its direct referential meaning, that is, words used in scientific prose will always tend to be used in their primary logical meaning. Nor will there be any words with contextual meaning. Even the possibility of ambiguity is avoided. Furthermore, terms are coined so as to be self-explanatory to the greatest possible degree. But neutral and common literary words used in scientific prose will be explained, even if their meaning is only slightly modified. In modern scientific prose an interesting phenomenon arises – the exchange of terms between various branches of science. Self-sufficiency in any branch of science is now a thing of the past. The exchange of terminology may be regarded as a neutral outcome of collaboration of specialists. Mathematics has priority in this respect. Mathematical terms have left their own domain and travel freely in other sciences, including linguistics. 3. A third characteristic feature of scientific style is sentence patterns. They are of 3 types: postulatory, argumentative and formulative. A hypothesis must be based on facts already known. Therefore, every piece of scientific prose will begin with postulatory pronouncements which are taken as self-evident and needing no proof. The writer’s own ideas are shaped in formulae, arguments, etc., that is, in sentences giving reasons for further conclusions. 4. A fourth observable feature of the style of modern scientific prose is the use of quotations and references. They sometimes occupy as much as half a page. They also have a definite compositional pattern, namely, the name of the writer referred to, the title of the work quoted, the publishing house, the place and year it was published, and the page of the excerpt quoted or referred to. �Содержание 5. A fifth feature of the style under discussion is the frequent use of foot-notes, not of the reference kind, but digressive in character. This is in full accord with the requirement of the style, which is logical coherence of ideas expressed. 6. The impersonality of scientific writings can also be considered a typical feature of this style. It is mainly revealed in the frequent use of passive constructions and impersonal scientific “we” followed by the verbs suppose, assume, conclude, infer, point out, etc. �Содержание Anna Wierzbicka (born 1938) Professor Anna Wierzbicka is a Professor in the Linguistics Program, School of Language Studies, Arts. In her 1972 book “Semantic Primitives” she launched a theory now known under the acronym “NSM” (Natural Semantic Metalanguage), which is now internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading theories of language and meaning. This approach has been used in hundreads of semantic studies across many languages and cultures. She has published over twenty books and edited or coedited several others. Her work spans a number of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as well as linguistics, and has been published in many journals across all these disciplines (e.g., Language, American Anthropologist, Man, Anthropological Linguistics, Cognition and Emotion, Culture and Psychology, Ethos, Philosophica, Brain and Behaviourial Sciences, The Journal of Cognition and Culture etc.). Professor Wierzbicka is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has two Honorary Doctorates, one from Marie CurieSklodowska University, Poland (2004) and one from Warsaw University, Poland (2006). She is the winner of the Dobrushin Prize for 2010 (established in Russia in honour of the Russian mathematician Roland Lvovich Dobrushin) and of the Polish Science Foundation’s 2010 prize for the humanities and social sciences. English: Meaning and Culture Chapter 1 English as a Cultural Universe 1.1. English – the Most Widely Used Language in the World Few would now disagree with the view expressed in Quirk et al.’s (1985, 2) Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language that “English is the world’s most important language”. It is certainly the world’s most widely used language. As David Crystal noted more than a decade ago in his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages (1992, 121), it is spoken “by a large and ever-increasing number of people – 800,000,000 by a conservative estimate, 1,500,000,000 by a liberal estimate... It has official status in over 60 countries. Estimates also suggest that at least 150 million people use English fluently as a foreign language, and three or four times this number with some degree of competence... English is also the language of international air traffic control, and the chief language of world publishing, science and technology”. Crystal’s more recent estimates are even higher (Crystal 2001, 2003a, 2003b). In the words of the Indian American linguist Braj Kachru (1997, 69), “the hunger for learning the �Содержание language – with whatever degree of competence – is simply insatiable”. Given the rapidly expanding role of English in the contemporary world, it is hardly surprising that numerous books concerned with different aspects of English, both scholarly and pedagogical, are published every year. And yet there is one striking gap in this literature: although many books have been and are being published that link the Japanese language with Japanese culture or Chinese language with Chinese culture, hardly any recent books explore the links between the English language and Anglo culture. There are, no doubt, many reasons for this weakness within the huge literature dealing with English. I believe one of them is that in recent times considerable opposition has developed in the English-speaking world to the notion of “a culture”, that is, “culture in the singular”, an opposition linked with fears of “essentialism” and “stereotyping”. Although the notion of “Japanese culture’ may be frowned on, it does not usually evoke a reaction as suspicious, or even hostile, as the notion of “Anglo culture”. No doubt this is partly because the Japanese language is spoken mostly in one region, whereas English is widely spoken in many different parts of the world. The question “to whom does this language belong?” posed recently (with respect to German) by the German Arab writer of Moroccan origin, Abdellatif Belfellah (1996), raises more problems in the case of English than, for example, in the case of Japanese (or indeed German), and it reverberates throughout the literature on English and “Englishes” (e.g., Hayhow and Parker 1994; Widdowson 1994). The very fact that the use of English is so widespread, and that its role in the modern world is so all-embracing, means that trying to link it with any particular culture or way of living, thinking, or feeling seems all the more problematic. From the point of view of people in the postcolonial world, for whom the local variety of English is often their native language or the main language used outside the domestic sphere, discussions of the links between English and Anglo culture may even seem offensive or at least insensitive. From the point of view of “Anglo Celtic” speakers of English – in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere – discussions of possible links between English and Anglo culture may also seem to be best avoided. Quirk et al. (1985, 16), for example, emphasize the “cultural neutrality” of English: English, which we have referred to as a lingua franca, is pre-eminently the most international of languages. Though the mention of the language may at once remind us of England, on the one hand, or cause association with the might of the United States on the other, it carries less implication of political or cultural specificity than any other living tongue. The authors do not deny the English language any cultural underpinning altogether: But the cultural neutrality of English must not be pressed too far. The literal or metaphorical use of such expressions as case law throughout the English-speaking world reflects a common heritage in our legal system; and allusions to or quotations from Shakespeare, the Authorized Version, Gray’s Elegy, Mark Twain, a sea shanty, a Negro spiritual or a Beatles song – wittingly or not – testify similarly to a shared culture. The Continent means “continental Europe” as readily in America and even Australia and New Zealand as it does in Britain. At other times, English equally reflects the independent and distinct culture of one or the other of �Содержание the English-speaking communities. (Quirk et al. 1985, 16) If English, which “may remind us of England”, nonetheless “equally reflects” the culture of numerous other communities, then the notion of a “shared culture” would seem to require some further discussion. But the subject is not mentioned again in that book. Crystal’s (2003b) influential recent books on the subject do not dwell on the issue of language and culture either. For example, his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2003a), after noting that “English is now the dominant or official language in over 75 territories” (rather than 60, as in Crystal 1992), goes on to comment: “With over 60 political and cultural histories to consider, it is difficult to find safe generalizations about the range of social functions with which English has come to be identified. General statements about the structure of the language are somewhat easier to make”. (Crystal 2003a, 106) Clearly, if it is difficult to find “safe generalizations” about the social functions of English, the same applies to its cultural underpinnings, which are not discussed in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language any further. It is understandable that more than sixty cultural histories can’t be all discussed at length in a one-volume encyclopedia. But the question still suggests itself: what about the “shared culture” mentioned, for example, by Quirk et al.’s A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985)? The founder of modern general linguistics, Wilhelm von Humboldt, affirmed that “there resides in every language a characteristic world-view... every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind” (1988, 60). Although Humboldt’s language may now seem dated, twentieth-century “language-and-culture” studies have not undermined this view – quite the contrary. Should we now modify Humboldt to say “every language but English”? Because English, unlike other languages, is “neutral” – a purely functional international language free from the baggage of any particular history and tradition? Or perhaps because English is so diversified that while sixty or more different traditions may be reflected in it there isn’t any one tradition that provides some sort of shared “conceptual fabric” (in Humboldt’s sense)? With the growing importance of English in the contemporary world, there is an increasing urgency to the question of whether there is an irreconcilable conflict between, on the one hand, the view that English is shared by people belonging to many different cultural traditions and, on the other, the notion that English itself – like any other language – is likely to have certain cultural assumptions and values embedded in it. The position taken in this book is that while there are many “Englishes” around the world (all of them worthy of recognition, appreciation, and study), there is also an “Anglo” English – an English of the “inner circle” (Kachru 1985, 1992), including “the traditional bases of English, where it is the primary language: ... the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand” (Crystal 2003b, 60) and that this Anglo English is not a cultural tabula rasa. 1.2. English and Englishes As the provocative title of Tom McArthur’s The English Languages (1998) indicates, the word English (in the singular) and the phrase the English language have for many commentators become problematic. With the expansion of English worldwide came its diversification, and so �Содержание many different varieties of English are now used in the world that the propriety of the term English itself is increasingly called into question. For millions of “ordinary people”, however, especially those who have their hearts set on learning “English” or having their children learn “English”, the news that according to some language professionals “English” does not exist any more is unlikely to be of much interest. On the other hand, the notion that there are many varieties of English and that in some contexts it may be appropriate to use the term “English” with a modifier can be relevant outside academic circles. The distinction between, for example, “British English” and “American English” is widely accepted as useful. It is also recognized that some other language varieties are sufficiently close to British English and American English to be perceived as “varieties of English” and yet are more different from British English and American English than these two are from one another – for example, Indian English, Nigerian English, and Singapore English. Braj Kachru’s (1985) proposed distinction between the “inner circle” and the “outer circle” of English has been widely accepted in the literature as pertinent and helpful. In accordance with this distinction, we can say that, for example, Australian English – different as it is in many ways from both British and American English – belongs nonetheless to the inner circle, whereas, for example, Singapore English belongs to the outer one. Differences between different “varieties of English” have often been adduced in the literature as an argument against linking the concept of “English” with that “culture”: how can English be an expression of culture (so the argument goes) if it is used in so many different societies and if there are so many different “Englishes”? As I have argued for decades, however, the fact that there are many varieties of English, linked with different societies and different cultural traditions, supports rather than undermines the Humboldtian view of language as an expression of culture. For example, the unique character of Australian English, consistent with the unique aspects of Australian culture, illustrates the closeness of the links that exist between the language spoken by a given community and its distinctive way of living and thinking (i.e., its culture). At the same time, the fact that Australian English shares a great deal with British English – more so than it does, for example, with Singapore English – reflects the common cultural heritage of Britain and Australia. I have been studying Australian English as an expression of Australian culture for more than two decades (Wierzbicka 1984, 1986a, 1991, 1992, 1997, 2002a, 2003a, 2003b). I have also studied (on a much more modest scale) Singapore English as an expression of Singapore culture (Wierzbicka 2003c; Besemeres and Wierzbicka 2003; for a much more extensive study, see Wong 2004a, 2004b, 2005). In both cases, a contrastive perspective is of paramount importance: it is illuminating to compare Australian English with British English and to compare Singapore English with Anglo English. Kachru’s concept of the inner circle reflects his interest in distinguishing the “new Englishes” (such as Indian English and Singapore English) from the older varieties. My own interest in identifying aspects of the shared cultural core of the older varieties makes the term �Содержание “Anglo English” more appropriate than the contrastive term “English(es) of the inner circle” (not to mention cryptonyms like ENL, from “English as a native language”, which are problematic for a variety of reasons, as well as technical and cryptic). In essence, however, “Anglo English” studied in this book corresponds to Kachru’s “English of the inner circle”. Although Anglo English, too, is an abstraction, it is in my view a concept that captures an important historical and cultural reality. It goes without saying that Anglo English is neither homogeneous nor unchanging, and the fact that, for example, Australian English differs in many ways from British English makes this abundantly clear. At the same time, to adequately characterize Englishes of the outer circle such as Singapore English and to fully understand them as expressions of local cultures, it is eminently useful to be able to compare and contrast them with Anglo English. In a sense, this book is, primarily, about Anglo English, both as an expression and as a vital aspect of Anglo culture. The phrase “Anglo culture” is even more controversial these days than “the English language” (not to mention “Anglo English”, which is hardly used at all): to speak of Anglo culture is to run the risk of being accused of essentialism, imperialism, even racism. But the attacks on the notion of culture in general, and Anglo culture in particular, are little more than academic Schongeisterei. As I wrote a decade ago, arguing against anthropologists Wolf and Wallerstein, “while cultures are not immutable essences, with clearly drawn boundaries, to reduce us all as cultural beings to members of myriad groups – crosscutting, overlapping, and ever evolving, means to overlook the central reality... no one is more acutely aware of this reality than a bilingual who lives his or her life in two languages and cultures” (Wierzbicka 1997, 18; see also 2005a, 2005b). The concept of Anglo culture is potentially particularly useful to millions of immigrants to Anglophone countries like Britain, the United States, and Australia. To deny the validity of this concept means to deny the immigrants culture training, which is essential to their social advancement. The same applies to Anglo English, which is an essential part of Anglo culture. Western scholars who are more focused on ideology than on the realities of the immigrant condition have sometimes claimed that immigrants to English-speaking countries do not need (Anglo) English and are not interested in acquiring it. For example, Claire Kramsch (1998, 26) asserts that “immigrant language learners are increasingly disinclined to ... buy into the values and beliefs that underpin native speaker language use in their respective communities”. Kramsch supports her view on this point with a quote from the French semiotician Julia Kristeva (1988, 10): “The absorption of foreignness proposed by our societies turns out to be inacceptable [sic] for modern day individuals, who cherish their national and ethnic identity and their intrinsically subjective, irreducible difference.” As an immigrant myself, I can testify that such high-minded theoretical views do not match the reality of my own life. Much as I cherish my national and ethnic identity (not to mention my personal “irreducible difference”), during my thirty odd years of living in Australia I have had to absorb a good deal of “foreignness” (that is, in my case, “Angloness” and also “AngloAustralianness”) into my ways of speaking, thinking, and acting. In particular, I have had to learn to use words like fair, reasonable, and presumably (not to mention privacy) – and not just �Содержание words, but the ideas and the cultural scripts associated with them. Autobiographical testimonies by other immigrants to English-speaking countries are more consistent with my experience than with Kristeva’s theorizing (e.g., Chow 1999; Danquah 2000; Besemeres and Wierzbicka, to appear). 1.3. An Illustration: Words, Scripts, and Human Lives I will illustrate both the shared cultural content of Anglo English and its heterogeneity with two examples from Australian English. In a book-length essay entitled “Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance”, the eminent Australian writer David Malouf (2003) emphasizes distinct features of Australian English such as “boldness and colour”, which “arise for the most part from a strong sense of humour and larrikin sense of play, qualities we might trace back to the cockney and criminal world of the convicts” (p. 49). At the same time, Malouf (who is himself of part-English, part-Lebanese background) stresses “ ‘kindred’ ties and feelings” linking Australians with all those who share the same habits of mind fostered and transmitted by the English language and often alien to people “outside the magic circle of Anglo-Saxon thinking” (p. 61). It is a circle characterized by “an ethos in which terms like ‘fair play’, ‘sportsmanship’, ‘team spirit’ are meant to be translated out of the narrow world of schoolboy rivalry and endeavour into the world of action and affairs; not as metaphors but as practical forms of behaviour” (p. 60). It is fascinating to see how often the untranslatable English word fair (see chapter 5) recurs in Malouf’s discussions of “Australia’s British inheritance” (as when he talks, for example, about Australia’s bonds “with people with whom we have a special relationship in which we are trusted to ‘play fair’, and to speak fair too”, p. 61). The concept of “fairness”, “made in England” but elaborated in Australia and given a special role in expressions like fair dinkum and a fair go (see OED 1989; AND 1988), is a good example of both the cultural continuity and cultural change evidenced by Australian English. A concept that illustrates innovation rather than continuity in Australian English and culture is that of “dobbing”. Dob, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) as “to betray, to inform against”, is described by it as “Australian slang”, but as I argued in earlier work, this description is misleading: “in Australia, dob in is not slang …, it is simply part of common everyday language, a word which is (still) in general use and which is clearly one of the key words in Australian English” (Wierzbicka 1997, 212). I have examined the meaning and the cultural significance of the verb dob and the noun dobber in a number of earlier publications (see Wierzbicka 1984, 1986a, 1991, 1992, 1997). Here, I will restrict myself to pointing out that the salient presence of these words in Australian English is linked with a powerful “cultural script”: “it is bad to dob, it is bad to be a dobber” (i.e., to “dob” on one’s “mates”) – a script that probably has its roots, at least partly, in the solidarity of convicts vis-a-vis the authorities in the early period of Australia’s history. The value of the traditional taboo against dobbing is now contested in public discussion in Australia, but the concept remains salient in everyday thinking and continues to influence people’s behavior, as the following recent quotes illustrate: A lot of kids who are bullied to say that “you just don’t dob”. (Queensland Government 2002) �Содержание The Australian attitude of “don’t dob in a mate” prevails within the adolescent subculture thus reducing the possibility that older teens will disclose those that bully. (Betlem 2001) Dob in a dumper. (Butler 2003) The continued relevance of the concept of “dobbing” in people’s (including immigrants’) lives is illustrated by the following testimony of a Chinese immigrant in Australia: The other day at the dinner table, I asked my 6 year-old boy, who is attending kindergarten, what he had learned in school. He happily told me that they learned how to deal with bullies. My son used his five fingers of his right hand and said: “First, talk friendly, second, talk firmly, third, ignore, fourth, walk away, and ...” Before he finished, my nephew, who is a 18 year-old Chinese boy, said: “Report to the teacher”. My son burst into tears and said: “No, not report to the teacher. I don’t like the word ‘report’. It doesn’t sound nice.” From my son’s reaction to the word “report” I can see that the concept of “report” is different from my Chinese nephew to my half-Chinese half-Australian Australian-born son. For a Chinese the word “report” is just to tell something to somebody, but “report” to an Australian kid in this context is not just to tell somebody something. It is “dobbing in”, which is a big offence, not at all encouraged in Australian culture. This incident reminds me of another situation in China. If you ask a primary school student the question “What do you do if someone in school bullies you or does a bad thing to you?” 90 % of the answers will be “Go to report to the teacher”. “Talk friendly, but firmly, ignore and walk away” are not part of the main attitude in dealing with bullies in China. “Dobbing in” in China is not as offensive as in Australia. (Wang 2005) Neither language nor culture stands still, but in every period there are certain shared understandings and shared cultural norms that find their expression in a community’s ways of speaking. Words, with their meanings, provide evidence of the reality of such shared understandings. Anglo English words like fair and fairness are constitutive of Anglo culture, and distinctively Australian words like dob and dobber, of Australian culture. Neither expressions like English, Anglo English, and Australian English nor those like Anglo culture and Australian culture stand for any unchanging monolithic realities with sharp boundaries. They stand for certain constructs, but these constructs are not fictions, and they have an impact on people’s lives. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. Give a short summary of the text. What are the problems addressed in the chapter? How topical are they? What accounts for their topicality? 2. What means of argumentation does the author employ to support her statements? E.g., how does she support her thesis about the dominant place of the English language in the world? How does the author explain the fact that the notion of the Japanese language and culture is never frowned upon whereas the notion of the English language and culture is? How do you understand the term “cultural neutrality of English”? What stands behind this term? 3. Does she support the idea of the “cultural neutrality” of English or does she argue against the idea of cultural neutrality? What arguments does the author use to support her opinion that “Anglo English is not a cultural tabula rasa”? How does the fact of the author being an �Содержание immigrant help her in her argumentation? Whose opinion seems more plausible to you? Is English culture-specific like all languages or should it be treated as an exception? 4. What is the essence of the “inner” and “outer circle division” of Englishes? How does this idea help in solving the problem of cultural specificity of English? 5. What does her example of a Chinese immigrant in Australia illustrate? Can you give similar examples from your own experience. 6. The first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of utterances with clear indication of their interrelations and interdependence As we read in the short characteristic of scientific style, the first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of utterances with clear indication of their interrelations and interdependence. How is the logical sequence of the sentences in the text achieved? Analyze the connectives used by the author and comment on their role in achieving the semantic and structural cohesion of the text. 7. Another characteristic feature of scientific style is the abundant use of terms. Point out the linguistic terms used in the text. Scientific language is also characterized by the use of the words in their direct, context independent meanings. Yet it does not absolutely exclude the use of metaphors, does it? Try to find cases of metaphors in the text and define their type (trite or original). 8. Still another characteristic feature of scientific style is the use of special sentence – patterns. The most frequent of them are: postulatory, argumentative and formulative. Find examples of these types in the text and comment on their functions. 9. Scientific texts are also characterized by the abundant use of quotations and references, which the authors use to argue for or against the points under discussion. Comments on the quotations Anna Wierzbicka uses and their function in the text. 10. The morphology of the scientific texts is characterized by the frequent use of passive constructions. Find the cases of passive constructions and account for their use. 11. Describing scientific texts some authors consider impersonality as a typical feature of this style. The effect of impersonality is achieved by the use of passive constructions and the use of the impersonal scientific “we”. Does Anna Wierzbicka follow the norms of scientific style very strictly or can we trace personal notes in her style? Give examples to support your opinion. 12. Summarize your observations for the final analysis of the text. �Содержание Steven Arthur Pinker (born 1954) Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children’s language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children’s learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding “-ed” to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is the author of seven books for a general audience. Five of these, The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007), describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research. In the sixth book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Pinker makes the case that violence in human societies has, in general, steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. His seventh book, The Sense of Style (2014), is intended as a general style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, offering advice on how to produce more comprehensible and unambiguous writing in nonfiction contexts and explaining why so much of today’s academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand. The Language Instinct (1994) is one of his most widely read books. As the title suggests, Pinker’s The Language Instinct supports the theory that language is innate and that humans have a common “universal grammar”. This is the major theme of his book. He also considers the relationship between language and thought, arguing against claims for a strong dependence of the latter on language. One of the most important concepts introduced in the book is one of “mentalese”. Mentalese is a universal, underlying language of the mind, related to, but different from, all natural spoken languages. It is used for thinking and �Содержание it is from mentalese that the thoughts get translated into the words and phrases of natural languages. Pinker uses this concept to put to rest the hypothesis of linguistic determinism: language shaping the thought along the lines of “what cannot be said cannot be thought about”. As critics say, in this book Steven Pinker explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. Noam Chomsky characterized it as “an extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written”. Pinker has been named as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals by various magazines. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society and is a regular contributor to the online science and culture digest from The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language Chapter 3. Mentalese The year 1984 has come and gone, and it is losing its connotation of the totalitarian nightmare of George Orwell’s 1949 novel. But relief may be premature. In an appendix to “Nineteen Eighty-four”, Orwell wrote of an even more ominous date. In 1984, the infidel Winston Smith had to be converted with imprisonment, degradation, drugs, and torture; by 2050, there would be no Winston Smiths. For in that year the ultimate technology for thought control would be in place: the language Newspeak. The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds”. It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free”, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had �Содержание once had the secondary meaning of “politically equal”, or that free had once meant “intellectually free”, than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. But there is a straw of hope for human freedom: Orwell’s caveat “at least so far as thought is dependent on words”. Note his equivocation: at the end of the first paragraph, a concept is unimaginable and therefore nameless; at the end of the second, a concept is nameless and therefore unimaginable. Is thought dependent on words? Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak? Or are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of the brain – a language of thought, or “mentalese” – and merely clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener? No question could be more central to understanding the language instinct. In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine thoughts. Inspired by Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”, pundits accuse governments of manipulating our minds with euphemisms like pacification (bombing), revenue enhancement (taxes), and nonretention (firing). Philosophers argue that since animals lack language, they must also lack consciousness – Wittgenstein wrote, “A dog could not have the thought ‘perhaps it will rain tomorrow’ ” – and therefore they do not possess the rights of conscious beings. Some feminists blame sexist thinking on sexist language, like the use of he to refer to a generic person. Inevitably, reform movements have sprung up <…>. And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not “in” the world but are imposed by one’s culture (and hence can be challenged, perhaps accounting for the perennial appeal of the hypothesis to undergraduate sensibilities). But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications. (The “fact” that we use only five percent of our brains, that lemmings commit mass suicide, that the Boy Scout Manual annually outsells all other books, and that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages are other examples.) Think about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn’t exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a “what we meant to say” that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a �Содержание gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a word to begin with? How could translation from one language to another be possible? <…> As we shall see in this chapter, there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking. But I want to do more than review the unintentionally comical history of attempts to prove that they do. The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts. By understanding why linguistic determinism is wrong, we will be in a better position to understand how language itself works when we turn to it in the next chapters. The linguistic determinism hypothesis is closely linked to the names Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir, a brilliant linguist, was a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas and his students (who also include Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead) were important intellectual figures in this century, because they argued that nonindustrial peoples were not primitive savages but had systems of language, knowledge, and culture as complex and valid in their world view as our own. In his study of Native American languages Sapir noted that speakers of different languages have to pay attention to different aspects of reality simply to put words together into grammatical sentences. For example, when English speakers decide whether or not to put -ed onto the end of a verb, they must pay attention to tense, the relative time of occurrence of the event they are referring to and the moment of speaking. Wintu speakers need not bother with tense, but when they decide which suffix to put on their verbs, they must pay attention to whether the knowledge they are conveying was learned through direct observation or by hearsay. Sapir’s interesting observation was soon taken much farther. Whorf was an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and an amateur scholar of Native American languages, which led him to take courses from Sapir at Yale. In a much-quoted passage, he wrote: “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees”. What led Whorf to this radical position? He wrote that the idea first occurred to him in his work as a fire prevention engineer when he was struck by how language led workers to misconstrue dangerous situations. For example, one worker caused a serious explosion by tossing a cigarette into an “empty” drum that in fact was full of gasoline vapor. Another lit a blowtorch near a “pool of water” that was really a basin of decomposing tannery waste, which, �Содержание far from being “watery”, was releasing inflammable gases. Whorf s studies of American languages strengthened his conviction. For example, in Apache, It is a dripping spring must be expressed “As water, or springs, whiteness moves downward”. “How utterly unlike our way of thinking!” he wrote. But the more you examine Whorf’s arguments, the less sense they make. Take the story about the worker and the “empty” drum. The seeds of disaster supposedly lay in the semantics of empty, which, Whorf claimed, means both “without its usual contents” and “null and void, empty, inert”. The hapless worker, his conception of reality molded by his linguistic categories, did not distinguish between the “drained” and “inert” senses, hence, flick ... boom! But wait. Gasoline vapor is invisible. A drum with nothing but vapor in it looks just like a drum with nothing in it at all. Surely this walking catastrophe was fooled by his eyes, not by the English language. The example of whiteness moving downward is supposed to show that the Apache mind does not cut up events into distinct objects and actions. Whorf presented many such examples from Native American languages. The Apache equivalent of The boat is grounded on the beach is “It is on the beach pointwise as an event of canoe motion”. He invites people to a feast becomes “He, or somebody, goes for eaters of cooked food”. He cleans a gun with a ramrod is translated as “He directs a hollow moving dry spot by movement of tool”. All this, to be sure, is utterly unlike our way of talking. But do we know that it is utterly unlike our way of thinking? As soon as Whorf s articles appeared, the psycholinguists Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown pointed out two non sequiturs in his argument. First, Whorf did not actually study any Apaches; it is not clear that he ever met one. His assertions about Apache psychology are based entirely on Apache grammar – making his argument circular. Apaches speak differently, so they must think differently. How do we know that they think differently? Just listen to the way they speak! <…> The fundamentally different Hopi concept of time is one of the more startling claims about how minds can vary. Whorf wrote that the Hopi language contains “no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time / or to past, or future, or to enduring or lasting/’ ” He suggested, too, that the Hopi had “no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past”. According to Whorf, they did not conceptualize events as being like points, or lengths of time like days as countable things. Rather, they seemed to focus on change and process itself, and on psychological distinctions between presently known, mythical, and conjecturally distant. The Hopi also had little interest in “exact sequences, dating, calendars, chronology.” What, then, are we to make of the following sentence translated from Hopi? Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again. Perhaps the Hopi are not as oblivious to time as Whorf made them out to be. In his extensive study of the Hopi, the anthropologist Ekkehart Malotki, who reported this sentence, also �Содержание showed that Hopi speech contains tense, metaphors for time, units of time (including days, numbers of days, parts of the day, yesterday and tomorrow, days of the week, weeks, months, lunar phases, seasons, and the year), ways to quantify units of time, and words like “ancient”, “quick”, “long time”, and “finished”. Their culture keeps records with sophisticated methods of dating, including a horizon-based sun calendar, exact ceremonial day sequences, knotted calendar strings, notched calendar sticks, and several devices for timekeeping using the principle of the sundial. No one is really sure how Whorf came up with his outlandish claims, but his limited, badly analyzed sample of Hopi speech and his long-time leanings toward mysticism must have contributed. <…> People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise, or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, or to talk to each other about the nature of thinking, we have to use – what else, words! It is no wonder that many commentators have trouble even conceiving of thought without words – or is it that they just don’t have the language to talk about it? As a cognitive scientist I can afford to be smug about common sense being true (thought is different from language) and linguistic determinism being a conventional absurdity. For two sets of tools now make it easier to think clearly about the whole problem. One is a body of experimental studies that break the word barrier and assess many kinds of nonverbal thought. The other is a theory of how thinking might work that formulates the questions in a satisfyingly precise way. We have already seen an example of thinking without language: Mr. Ford, the fully intelligent aphasic discussed in Chapter 2. (One could, however, argue that his thinking abilities had been constructed before his stroke on the scaffolding of the language he then possessed.) We have also met deaf children who lack a language and soon invent one. Even more pertinent are the deaf adults occasionally discovered who lack any form of language whatsoever – no sign language, no writing, no lip reading, no speech. In her recent book A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers. In an epiphany reminiscent of the story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach him the sign for “cat”. A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the signs for all the objects he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a child he had begged his desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops he had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities. He led Schaller to other languageless adults in forgotten corners of society. Despite their isolation from the verbal world, they displayed many abstract forms of thinking, like rebuilding broken locks, handling money, playing card games, and entertaining each other with long pantomimed narratives. Our knowledge of the mental life of Ildefonso and other languageless adults must remain �Содержание impressionistic for ethical reasons: when they surface, the first priority is to teach them language, not to study how they manage without it. But there are other languageless beings who have been studied experimentally, and volumes have been written about how they reason about space, time, objects, number, rate, causality, and categories. Let me recount three ingenious examples. One involves babies, who cannot think in words because they have not yet learned any. One involves monkeys, who cannot think in words because they are incapable of learning them. The third involves human adults, who, whether or not they think in words, claim their best thinking is done without them. The developmental psychologist Karen Wynn has recently shown that five-month-old babies can do a simple form of mental arithmetic. She used a technique common in infant perception research. Show a baby a bunch of objects long enough, and the baby gets bored and looks away; change the scene, and if the baby notices the difference, he or she will regain interest. The methodology has shown that babies as young as five days old are sensitive to number. In one experiment, an experimenter bores a baby with an object, then occludes the object with an opaque screen. When the screen is removed, if the same object is present, the babies look for a little while, then get bored again. But if, through invisible subterfuge, two or three objects have ended up there, the surprised babies stare longer. In Wynn’s experiment, the babies were shown a rubber Mickey Mouse doll on a stage until their little eyes wandered. Then a screen came up, and a prancing hand visibly reached out from behind a curtain and placed a second Mickey Mouse behind the screen. When the screen was removed, if there were two Mickey Mouses visible (something the babies had never actually seen), the babies looked for only a few moments. But if there was only one doll, the babies were captivated – even though this was exactly the scene that had bored them before the screen was put in place. Wynn also tested a second group of babies, and this time, after the screen came up to obscure a pair of dolls, a hand visibly reached behind the screen and removed one of them. If the screen fell to reveal a single Mickey, the babies looked briefly; if it revealed the old scene with two, the babies had more trouble tearing themselves away. The babies must have been keeping track of how many dolls were behind the screen, updating their counts as dolls were added or subtracted. If the number inexplicably departed from what they expected, they scrutinized the scene, as if searching for some explanation. Vervet monkeys live in stable groups of adult males and females and their offspring. The primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have noticed that extended families form alliances like the Montagues and Capulets. In a typical interaction they observed in Kenya, one juvenile monkey wrestled another to the ground screaming. Twenty minutes later the victim’s sister approached the perpetrator’s sister and without provocation bit her on the tail. For the retaliator to have identified the proper target, she would have had to solve the following analogy problem: A (victim) is to B (myself) as C (perpetrator) is to X, using the correct relationship “sister of” (or perhaps merely “relative of”; there were not enough vervets in the park for Cheney and Seyfarth to tell). But do monkeys really know how their groupmates are related to each other, and, more impressively, do they realize that different pairs of individuals like brothers and sisters can be related in the same way? Cheney and Seyfarth hid a loudspeaker behind a bush and played �Содержание tapes of a two-year-old monkey screaming. The females in the area reacted by looking at the mother of the infant who had been recorded – showing that they not only recognized the infant by its scream but recalled who its mother was. Similar abilities have been shown in the longtailed macaques that Verena Dasser coaxed into a laboratory adjoining a large outdoor enclosure. Three slides were projected: a mother at the center, one of her offspring on one side, and an unrelated juvenile of the same age and sex on the other. Each screen had a button under it. After the monkey had been trained to press a button under the offspring slide, it was tested on pictures of other mothers in the group, each one flanked by a picture of that mother’s offspring and a picture of another juvenile. More than ninety percent of the time the monkey picked the offspring. In another test, the monkey was shown two slides, each showing a pair of monkeys, and was trained to press a button beneath the slide showing a particular mother and her juvenile daughter. When presented with slides of new monkeys in the group, the subject monkey always picked the mother-and-offspring pair, whether the offspring was male, female, infant, juvenile, or adult. Moreover, the monkeys appeared to be relying not only on physical resemblance between a given pair of monkeys, or on the sheer number of hours they had previously spent together, as the basis for recognizing they were kin, but on something more subtle in the history of their interaction. Cheney and Seyfarth, who work hard at keeping track of who is related to whom in what way in the groups of animals they study, note that monkeys would make excellent primatologists. Many creative people insist that in their most inspired moments they think not in words but in mental images. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that visual images of scenes and words once appeared involuntarily before him in a dreamlike state (perhaps opium-induced). He managed to copy the first forty lines onto paper, resulting in the poem we know as “Kubla Khan”, before a knock on the door shattered the images and obliterated forever what would have been the rest of the poem. Many contemporary novelists, like Joan Didion, report that their acts of creation begin not with any notion of a character or a plot but with vivid mental pictures that dictate their choice of words. The modern sculptor James Surls plans his projects lying on a couch listening to music; he manipulates the sculptures in his mind’s eye, he says, putting an arm on, taking an arm off, watching the images roll and tumble. Physical scientists are even more adamant that their thinking is geometrical, not verbal. Michael Faraday, the originator of our modern conception of electric and magnetic fields, had no training in mathematics but arrived at his insights by visualizing lines of force as narrow tubes curving through space. James Clerk Maxwell formalized the concepts of electromagnetic fields in a set of mathematical equations and is considered the prime example of an abstract theoretician, but he set down the equations only after mentally playing with elaborate imaginary models of sheets and fluids. Nikola Tesla’s idea for the electrical motor and generator, Friedrich Kekule’s discovery of the benzene ring that kicked off modern organic chemistry, Ernest Lawrence’s conception of the cyclotron, James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix – all came to them in images. The most famous self-described visual thinker is Albert Einstein, who arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding a beam of light and looking back at a clock, or dropping a coin while standing in a plummeting elevator. He wrote: �Содержание “The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined. ... This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought – before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary state, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.” <…> What sense, then, can we make of the suggestion that images, numbers, kinship relations, or logic can be represented in the brain without being couched in words? In the first half of this century, philosophers had an answer: none. Reifying thoughts as things in the head was a logical error, they said. A picture or family tree or number in the head would require a little man, a homunculus, to look at it. And what would be inside his head – even smaller pictures, with an even smaller man looking at them? But the argument was unsound. It took Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician and philosopher, to make the idea of a mental representation scientifically respectable. Turing described a hypothetical machine that could be said to engage in reasoning. In fact this simple device, named a Turing Machine in his honor, is powerful enough to solve any problem that any computer, past, present, or future, can solve. And it clearly uses an internal symbolic representation – a kind of mentalese – without requiring a little man or any occult processes. By looking at how a Turing machine works, we can get a grasp of what it would mean for a human mind to think in mentalese as opposed to English. <…> We end up with the following picture. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages; presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols that correspond to who did what to whom, as in the paint-spraying representation shown above. But compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. It must be richer, for example, in that several concept symbols must correspond to a given English word like stool or stud. There must be extra paraphernalia that differentiate logically distinct kinds of concepts, like Ralph’s tusks versus tusks in general, and that link different symbols that refer to the same thing, like the tall blond man with one black shoe and the man. On the other hand, mentalese must be simpler than spoken languages; conversationspecific words and constructions (like a and the) are absent, and information about pronouncing words, or even ordering them, is unnecessary. Now, it could be that English speakers think in some kind of simplified and annotated quasi-English, with the design I have just described, and that Apache speakers think in a simplified and annotated quasi- Apache. But to get these languages of thought to subserve reasoning properly, they would have to look much more like each other than either one does to its spoken counterpart, and it is likely that they are the same: a universal mentalese. Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what �Содержание learning English would mean. So where does all this leave Newspeak? Here are my predictions for the year 2050. First, since mental life goes on independently of particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more concepts than there are words, and listeners must always charitably fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid, existing words will quickly gain new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third, since children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but create a complex grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize Newspeak into a natural language, possibly in a single generation. The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith’s revenge. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text 1. Give a short summary of the chapter under analysis. What is the main idea discussed in the chapter? Comment on the title of the chapter. How is it related to the topic under discussion? How topical are the ideas discussed in the chapter? 2. Steven Pinker opens the chapter by a reference to the Newspeak introduced by George Orwell in his famous novel “1984”. And he returns to this reference in the end of the chapter which suggests that it carries out an important function in the text. What role does this reference play in the text? How is the concept NEWSPEAK related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism? What is the essence of this hypothesis? In discussing the hypothesis of linguistic determinism Steven Pinker resorts to the much-quoted passage from Benjamin Whorf. Does he quote Whorf to support his idea or to argue against it? What facts does Steven Pinker use to prove his point of view? How convincing do they sound? Comment on the manner of his argumentation. Does it sound emotion-free which is typical of scientific style or do you find it rather emotional? Prove your opinion by quoting the text. Find examples of language means that contribute to the tonality of the text (epithets, metaphors, intensifiers, rhetorical questions etc.). 3. Comment on the way he presents the central idea of the chapter – the existence of mentalese. What facts does he resort to make his idea very convincing and very understandable at the same time? Do you share his opinion or do you differ from the author? Give facts from your own linguistic experience to support your opinion. 4. Compare the style of Steven Pinker with that of Anna Wierzbicka. Do you find them similar or different? If you find them different point out the main points of difference. Many critics consider Steven Pinker’s books as examples of popular science. Though science and society are considered as two worlds lying far from each other, in order to bridge the gap, scientists write popular articles which strive to inform non-specialists about new scientific insights and discoveries. As Steven Pinker writes in the preface to his book his book is intended for a very wide audience: for language lovers, for readers of popular science, for students unaware of the science of language and mind and for professional colleagues scattered across many disciplines. Numerous manual for popular science writings give the following tips for the writers: a) structure your article well; b) use a catchy title; c) simplify the content; d) use the active voice; e) make sure that the contents and language of the popular article are suited to a wider circle of readers; f) use as few special terms as possible, and avoid excessively long sentences. Analyze the chapter from this angle to see if the characterization of Pinker’s writing �Содержание as popular science is true. 5. Summarize your observations for the final analysis of the text. Scientific Texts for Self-Guided Analysis Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say �Содержание Scienti ic Texts for Self-Guided Analysis Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say �Содержание Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language Chapter 5. Words, Words, Words (abridged) The word glamour comes from the word grammar, and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules? There has been a book on mind and matter called Grammatical Man, and a Nobel Prize lecture comparing the machinery of life to a generative grammar. Chomsky has been interviewed in Rolling Stone and alluded to on Saturday Night Live. In Woody Allen’s story “The Whore of Mensa,” the patron asks, “Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?” “It’d cost you,” she replies. Unlike the mental grammar, the mental dictionary has had no cachet. It seems like nothing more than a humdrum list of words, each transcribed into the head by dull-witted rote memorization. In the preface to his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson wrote: “It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries. Johnson’s own dictionary defines lexicographer as “a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words”. In this chapter we will see that the stereotype is unfair. The world of words is just as wondrous as the world of syntax, or even more so. For not only are people as infinitely creative with words as they are with phrases and sentences, but memorizing individual words demands its own special virtuosity. Recall the uwg-test, passed by any preschooler: “Here is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two”. Before being sochallenged, the child has neither heard anyone say, nor been rewarded for saying, the word wugs. Therefore words are not simply retrieved from a mental archive. People must have a mental rule for generating new words from old ones, something like “To form the plural of a noun, add the suffix -s” The engineering trick behind human language – its being a discrete combinatorial system – is used in at least two different places: sentences and phrases are built out of words by the rules of syntax, and the words themselves are built out of smaller bits by another set of rules, the rules of “morphology”. The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages. The English noun comes in exactly two forms (duck and ducks), the verb in four (quack, quacks, quacked, quacking). In modern Italian and Spanish every verb has about fifty forms; in classical Greek, three hundred and fifty; in Turkish, two million! Many of the languages I have brought up, such as Eskimo, Apache, Hopi, Kivunjo, and American Sign Language, are known for this prodigious ability. How do they do it? Here is an example from Kivunjo, the Bantu language that was said to make English look like checkers compared to chess. The verb “Naiklmlyiia”, meaning “He is eating it for her”, is composed of eight parts: �Содержание • N-: A marker indicating that the word is the “focus” of that point in the conversation. • -a-: A subject agreement marker. It identifies the eater as falling into Class 1 of the sixteen gender classes, “human singular”. (Remember that to a linguist “gender” means kind, not sex.) Other genders embrace nouns that pertain to several humans, thin or extended objects, objects that come in pairs or clusters, the pairs or clusters themselves, instruments, animals, body parts, diminutives (small or cute versions of things), abstract qualities, precise locations, and general locales. • Present tense. Other tenses in Bantu can refer to today, earlier today, yesterday, no earlier than yesterday, yesterday or earlier, in the remote past, habitually, ongoing, consecutively, hypothetically, in the future, at an indeterminate time, not yet, and sometimes. • -ki-: An object agreement marker, in this case indicating that the thing eaten falls into gender Class 7. • -m-: A benefactive marker, indicating for whose benefit the action is taking place, in this case a member of gender Class 1. • -lyi-: The verb, “to eat”. • -1-: An “applicative” marker, indicating that the verb’s cast of players has been augmented by one additional role, in this case the benefactive. (As an analogy, imagine that in English we had to add a suffix to the verb bake when it is used in 1 baked her a cake as opposed to the usual I baked a cake.) • -a : A final vowel, which can indicate indicative versus subjunctive mood. If you multiply out the number of possible combinations of the seven prefixes and suffixes, the product is about half a million, and that is the number of possible forms per verb in the language. In effect, Kivunjo and languages like it are building an entire sentence inside a single complex word, the verb. But I have been a bit unfair to English. English is genuinely crude in its “inflectional” morphology, where one modifies a word to fit the sentence, like marking a noun for the plural with -s or a verb for past tense with -ed. But English holds its own in “derivational” morphology, where one creates a new word out of an old one. For example, the suffix -able, as in learnable, teachable, and huggable, converts a verb meaning “to do X” into an adjective meaning “capable of having X done to it”. Most people are surprised to learn how many derivational suffixes there are in English. Here are the more common ones: -able -ate -ify -ize -age -ed -ion -ly -al -en -ish -ment �Содержание In addition, English is free and easy with “compounding”, which glues two words together to form a new one, like toothbrush and mouse-eater. Thanks to these processes, the number of possible words, even in morphologically impoverished English, is immense. The computational linguist Richard Sproat compiled all the distinct words used in the forty-four million words of text from Associated Press news stories beginning in mid-February 1988. Up through December 30, the list contained three hundred thousand distinct word forms, about as many as in a good unabridged dictionary. You might guess that this would exhaust the English words that would ever appear in such stories. But when Sproat looked at what came over the wire on December 31, he found no fewer than thirty-five new forms, including instrumenting, counterprograms, armhole, part-Vul- can, fuzzier, groveled, houlderlike, mega-lizard, traumatological, and ex-critters. Even more impressive, the output of one morphological rule can be the input to another, or to itself: one can talk about the unmicro-waveability of some French fries or a toothbrush-holder fastener box in which to keep one’s toothbrush-holder fasteners. This makes the number of possible words in a language bigger than immense; like the number of sentences, it is infinite. Putting aside fanciful coinages concocted for immortality in Guinness, a candidate for the longest word to date in English might be floccinaucinihilipilification, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial”. But that is a record meant to be broken:floccinaucinihilipilificational. pertaining to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalize: to cause something to pertain to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalization: the act of causing something to pertain to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial -an -er -ism -ness -ant -ful -ist -ory -ance -hood -ity -ous -ary -ive -y -ic floccinaucinihilipilificationalizationah pertaining to the act of causing something to pertain to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalizationalize\ to cause something to pertain to the act of causing something to pertain ... Or, if you suffer from sesquipedaliaphobia, you can think of your great-grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, your great-great- great-grandmother, and so on, limited only in practice by the number of generations since Eve. What’s more, words, like sentences, are too delicately layered to be generated by a chaining device (a system that selects an item from one list, then moves on to some other list, then to another). When Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as �Содержание Star Wars, he imagined a future in which an incoming Soviet missile would be shot down by an anti-missile missile. But critics pointed out that the Soviet Union could counterattack with an anti-anti-missile-missile missile. No problem, said his MIT-educated engineers; we’ll just build an anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile missile. These high-tech weapons need a high-tech grammar – something that can keep track of all the anti’s at the beginning of the word so that it can complete the word with an equal number of missile’s, plus one, at the end. A word structure grammar (a phrase structure grammar for words) that can embed a word in between an anti- and its missile can achieve these objectives; a chaining device cannot, because it has forgotten the pieces that it laid down at the beginning of the long word by the time it gets to the end. (TSsssS) Like syntax, morphology is a cleverly designed system, and many of the seeming oddities of words are predictable products of its internal logic. Words have a delicate anatomy consisting of pieces, called morphemes, that fit together in certain ways. The word structure system is an extension of the X-bar phase structure system, in which big nounish things are built out of smaller nounish things, smaller nounish things are built out of still smaller nounish things, and so on. The biggest phrase involving nouns is the noun phrase; a noun phrase contains an Nbar; an N-bar contains a noun – the word. Jumping from syntax to morphology, we simply continue the dissection, analyzing the word into smaller and smaller nounish pieces. <…> Our ability to appreciate a pattern inside a word, while knowing that the pattern is not the product of some potent rule, is the inspiration for a whole genre of wordplay. Self-conscious writers and speakers often extend Latinate root suffixes to new forms by analogy, such as religiosity, criticality, systematicity, randomicity, insipidify, calumniate, conciliate, stereotypy, disaffiliate, gallonage, and Shavian. The words have an air of heaviosity and seriosity about them, making the style an easy target for parody. A 1982 editorial cartoon by Jeff MacNelly put the following resignation speech into the mouth of Alexander Haig, the malaprop-prone Secretary of State: I decisioned the necessifaction of the resignatory action/option due to the dangerosity of the trendflowing of foreign policy away from our originatious careful coursing towards consistensivity, purposity, steadfastnitude, and above all, clarity. <…> A word, in a word, is complicated. But then what in the world is a word? We have just seen that “words” can be built out of parts by morphological rules. But then what makes them different from phrases or sentences? Shouldn’t we reserve the word “word” for a thing that has to be rote-memorized, the arbitrary Saussurean sign that exemplifies the first of the two principles of how language works (the other being the discrete combinatorial system)? The puzzlement comes from the fact that the everyday word “word” is not scientifically precise. It can refer to two things. The concept of a word that I have used so far in this chapter is a linguistic object that, even if built out of parts by the rules of morphology, behaves as the indivisible, smallest unit with �Содержание respect to the rules of syntax – a “syntactic atom”, in atom s original sense of something that cannot be split. The rules of syntax can look inside a sentence or phrase and cut and paste the smaller phrases inside it. For example, the rule for producing questions can look inside the sentence This monster eats mice and move the phrase corresponding to mice to the front, yielding What did this monster eat? But the rules of syntax halt at the boundary between a phrase and a word; even if the word is built out of parts, the rules cannot look “inside” the word and fiddle with those parts. For example, the question rule cannot look inside the word mice-eater in the sentence This monster is a mice-eater and move the morpheme corresponding to mice to the front; the resulting question is virtually unintelligible: What is this monster an eater? (Answer: mice.) Similarly, the rules of syntax can stick an adverb inside a phrase, as in This monster eats mice quickly. But they cannot stick an adverb inside a word, as in This monster is a mice-quickly- eater. For these reasons, we say that words, even if they are generated out of parts by one set of rules, are not the same thing as phrases, which are generated out of parts by a different set of rules. Thus one precise sense of our everyday term “word” refers to the units of language that are the products of morphological rules, and which are unsplittable by syntactic rules. The second, very different sense of “word” refers to a rote-memorized chunk: a string of linguistic stuff that is arbitrarily associated with a particular meaning, one item from the long list we call the mental dictionary. The grammarians Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin Williams coined the term “listeme”, the unit of a memorized list, to refer to this sense of “word” (their term is a play on “morpheme”, the unit of morphology, and “phoneme”, the unit of sound). Note that a listeme need not coincide with the first precise sense of “word”, a syntactic atom. A listeme can be a tree branch of any size, as long as it cannot be produced mechanically by rules and therefore has to be memorized. Take idioms. There is no way to predict the meaning of kick the bucket, buy the farm, spill the beans, bite the bullet, screw the pooch, give up the ghost, hit the fan, or go bananas from the meanings of their components using the usual rules of heads and role- players. Kicking the bucket is not a kind of kicking, and buckets have nothing to do with it. The meanings of these phrase-sized units have to be memorized as listemes, just as if they were simple word-sized units, and so they are really “words” in this second sense. Di Sciullo and Williams, speaking as grammatical chauvinists, describe the mental dictionary (lexicon) as follows: “If conceived of as the set of listemes, the lexicon is incredibly boring by its very nature. ... The lexicon is like a prison – it contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in common is their lawlessness”. In the rest of this chapter I turn to the second sense of “word”, the listeme. It will be a kind of prison reform: I want to show that the lexicon, though a repository of lawless listemes, is deserving of respect and appreciation. What seems to a grammarian like an act of brute force incarceration – a child hears a parent use a word and thenceforth retains that word in memory – is actually an inspiring feat. One extraordinary feature of the lexicon is the sheer capacity for memorization that goes into building it. How many words do you think an average person knows? If you are like most writers who have offered an opinion based on the number of words they hear or read, you �Содержание might guess a few hundred for the uneducated, a few thousand for the literate, and as many as 15,000 for gifted wordsmiths like Shakespeare (that is how many distinct words are found in his collected plays and sonnets). The real answer is very different. People can recognize vastly more words than they have occasion to use in some fixed period of time or space. To estimate the size of a person’s vocabulary – in the sense of memorized listemes, not morphological products, of course, because the latter are infinite – psychologists use the following method. Start with the largest unabridged dictionary available; the smaller the dictionary, the more words a person might know but not get credit for. Funk & Wagnal’s New Standard Unabridged Dictionary, to take an example, has 450,000 entries, a healthy number, but too many to test exhaustively. (At thirty seconds a word, eight hours a day, it would take more than a year to test a single person.) Instead, draw a sample – say, the third entry from the top of the first column on every eighth left-hand page. Entries often have many meanings, such as “hard: (1) firm; (2) difficult; (3) harsh; (4) toilsome ...” and so on, but counting them would require making arbitrary decisions about how to lump or split the meanings. Thus it is practical only to estimate how many words a person has learned at least one meaning for, not how many meanings a person has learned altogether. The testee is presented with each word in the sample, and asked to choose the closest synonym from a set of alternatives. After a correction for guessing, the proportion correct is multiplied by the size of the dictionary, and that is an estimate of the person’s vocabulary size. Actually, another correction must be applied first. Dictionaries are consumer products, not scientific instruments, and for advertising purposes their editors often inflate the number of entries. (“Authoritative. Comprehensive. Over 1.7 million words of text and 160,000 definitions. Includes a 16-page full-color atlas.”) They do it by including compounds and affixed forms whose meanings are predictable from the meanings of their roots and the rules of morphology, and thus are not true listemes. For example, my desk dictionary includes, together with sail, the derivatives sailplane, sailer, sailless, sailing-boat, and sailcloth, whose meanings I could deduce even if I had never heard them before. The most sophisticated estimate comes from the psychologists William Nagy and Richard Anderson. They began with a list of 227,553 different words. Of these, 45,453 were simple roots and stems. Of the remaining 182,100 derivatives and compounds, they estimated that all but 42,080 could be understood in context by someone who knew their components. Thus there were a total of 44,453 + 42,080 = 88,533 listeme words. By sampling from this list and testing the sample, Nagy and Anderson estimated that an average American high school graduate knows 45,000 words – three times as many as Shakespeare managed to use! Actually, this is an underestimate, because proper names, numbers, foreign words, acronyms, and many common undecomposable compounds were excluded. There is no need to follow the rules of Scrabble in estimating vocabulary size; these forms are all listemes, and a person should be given credit for them. If they had been included, the average high school graduate would probably be credited with something like 60,000 words (a tetrabard?), and superior students, because they read more, would probably merit a figure twice as high, an octobard. �Содержание Is 60,000 words a lot or a little? It helps to think of how quickly they must have been learned. Word learning generally begins around the age of twelve months. Therefore, high school graduates, who have been at it for about seventeen years, must have been learning an average of ten new words a day continuously since their first birthdays, or about a new word every ninety waking minutes. Using similar techniques, we can estimate that an average six-year-old commands about 13,000 words (notwithstanding those dull, dull Dick and Jane reading primers, which were based on ridiculously lowball estimates). A bit of arithmetic shows that preliterate children, who are limited to ambient speech, must be lexical vacuum cleaners, inhaling a new word every two waking hours, day in, day out. Remember that we are talking about listemes, each involving an arbitrary pairing. Think about having to memorize a new batting average or treaty date or phone number every ninety minutes of your waking life since you took your first steps. The brain seems to be reserving an especially capacious storage space and an especially rapid transcribing mechanism for the mental dictionary. Indeed, naturalistic studies by the psychologist Susan Carey have shown that if you casually slip a new color word like olive into a conversation with a three-year-old, the child will probably remember something about it five weeks later. Now think of what goes into each act of memorization. A word is the quintessential symbol. Its power comes from the fact that every member of a linguistic community uses it interchangeably in speaking and understanding. If you use a word, then as long as it is not too obscure I can take it for granted that if I later utter it to a third party, he will understand my use of it the same way I understood yours. I do not have to try the word back on you to see how you react, or test it out on every third party and see how they react, or wait for you to use it with third parties. This sounds more obvious than it is. After all, if I observe that a bear snarls before it attacks, I cannot expect to scare a mosquito by snarling at it; if I bang a pot and the bear flees, I cannot expect the bear to bang a pot to scare hunters. Even within our species, learning a word from another person is not just a case of imitating that person’s behavior. Actions are tied to particular kinds of actors and targets of the action in ways that words are not. If a girl learns to flirt by watching her older sister, she does not flirt with the sister or with their parents but only with the kind of person that she observes to be directly affected by the sister’s behavior. Words, in contrast, are a universal currency within a community. In order to learn to use a word upon merely hearing it used by others, babies must tacitly assume that a word is not merely a person’s characteristic behavior in affecting the behavior of others, but a shared bidirectional symbol, available to convert meaning to sound by any person when the person speaks, and sound to meaning by any person when the person listens, according to the same code. Since a word is a pure symbol, the relation between its sound and its meaning is utterly arbitrary. As Shakespeare (using a mere tenth of a percent of his written lexicon and a far tinier fraction of his mental one) put it, What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. Because of that arbitrariness, there is no hope that mnemonic tricks might lighten the �Содержание memorization burden, at least for words that are not built out of other words. Babies should not, and apparently do not, expect cattle to mean something similar to battle, or singing to be like stinging, or coats to resemble goats. Onomatopoeia, where it is found, is of no help, because it is almost as conventional as any other word sound. In English, pigs go “oink”; in Japanese, they go “boo-boo”. Even in sign languages the mimetic abilities of the hands are put aside and their configurations are treated as arbitrary symbols. Residues of resemblance between a sign and its referent can occasionally be discerned, but like onomatopoeia they are so much in the eye or ear of the beholder that they are of little use in learning. In American Sign Language the sign for “tree” is a motion of a hand as if it was a branch waving in the wind; in Chinese Sign Language “tree” is indicated by the motion of sketching a tree trunk. The psychologist Laura Ann Petitto has a startling demonstration that the arbitrariness of the relation between a symbol and its meaning is deeply entrenched in the child’s mind. Shortly before they turn two, English-speaking children learn the pronouns you and me. Often they reverse them, using you to refer to themselves. The error is forgivable. You and me are “deictic” pronouns, whose referent shifts with the speaker: you refers to you when I use it but to me when you use it. So children may need some time to get that down. After all, Jessica hears her mother refer to her, Jessica, using you why should she not think that you means “Jessica”? Now, in ASL the sign for “me” is a point to one’s chest; the sign for “you” is a point to one’s partner. What could be more transparent? One would expect that using “you” and “me” in ASL would be as foolproof as knowing how to point, which all babies, deaf and hearing, do before their first birthday. But for the deaf children Petitto studied, pointing is not pointing. The children used the sign of pointing to their conversational partners to mean “me” at exactly the age at which hearing children use the spoken sound you to mean “me”. The children were treating the gesture as a pure linguistic symbol; the fact that it pointed somewhere did not register as being relevant. This attitude is appropriate in learning sign languages; in ASL, the pointing hand-shape is like a meaningless consonant or vowel, found as a component of many other signs, like “candy” and “ugly”. There is one more reason we should stand in awe of the simple act of learning a word. The logician W.V.O. Quine asks us to imagine a linguist studying a newly discovered tribe. A rabbit scurries by, and a native shouts, “Gavagai!” What does gavagai mean? Logically speaking, it needn’t be “rabbit”. It could refer to that particular rabbit (Flopsy, for example). It could mean any furry thing, any mammal, or any member of that species of rabbit (say, Oryctolagus cuniculus), or any member of that variety of that species (say, chinchilla rabbit). It could mean scurrying rabbit, scurrying thing, rabbit plus the ground it scurries upon, or scurrying in general. It could mean footprint-maker, or habitat for rabbit-fleas. It could mean the top half of a rabbit, or rabbit-meat-on-the-hoof, or possessor of at least one rabbit’s foot. It could mean anything that is either a rabbit or a Buick. It could mean collection of undetached rabbit parts, or “Lo! Rabbithood again!,” or “It rabbiteth”, analogous to “It raineth”. The problem is the same when the child is the linguist and the parents are the natives. Somehow a baby must intuit the correct meaning of a word and avoid the mind-boggling �Содержание number of logically impeccable alternatives. It is an example of a more general problem that Quine calls “the scandal of induction,” which applies .to scientists and children alike: how can they be so successful at observing a finite set of events and making some correct generalization about all future events of that sort, rejecting an infinite number of false generalizations that are also consistent with the original observations? We all get away with induction because we are not open-minded logicians but happily blinkered humans, innately constrained to make only certain kinds of guesses – the probably correct kinds – about how the world and its occupants work. Let’s say the word-learning baby has a brain that carves the world into discrete, bounded, cohesive objects and into the actions they undergo, and that the baby forms mental categories that lump together objects that are of the same kind. Let’s also say that babies are designed to expect a language to contain words for kinds of objects and words for kinds of actions – nouns and verbs, more or less. Then the undetached rabbit parts, rabbit-trod ground, intermittent rabbiting, and other accurate descriptions of the scene will, fortunately, not occur to them as possible meanings of gavagai. But could there really be a preordained harmony between the child’s mind and the parent’s? Many thinkers, from the woolliest mystics to the sharpest logicians, united only in their assault on common sense, have claimed that the distinction between an object and an action is not in the world or even in our minds, initially, but is imposed on us by our language’s distinction between nouns and verbs. And if it is the word that delineates the thing and the act, it cannot be the concepts of thing and act that allow for the learning of the word. I think common sense wins this one. In an important sense, there really are things and kinds of things and actions out there in the world, and our mind is designed to find them and to label them with words. That important sense is Darwin’s. It’s a jungle out there, and the organism designed to make successful predictions about what is going to happen next will leave behind more babies designed just like it. Slicing space-time into objects and actions is an eminently sensible way to make predictions given the way the world is put together. Conceiving of an extent of solid matter as a thing – that is, giving a single mentalese name to all of its parts – invites the prediction that those parts will continue to occupy some region of space and will move as a unit. And for many portions of the world, that prediction is correct. Look away, and the rabbit still exists; lift the rabbit by the scruff of the neck, and the rabbit’s foot and the rabbit ears come along for the ride. What about kinds of things, or categories? Isn’t it true that no two individuals are exactly alike? Yes, but they are not arbitrary collections of properties, either. Things that have long furry ears and tails like pom-poms also tend to eat carrots, scurry into burrows, and breed like, well, rabbits. Lumping objects into categories – giving them a category label in mentalese – allows one, when viewing an entity, to infer some of the properties one cannot directly observe, using the properties one can observe. If Flopsy has long furry ears, he is a “rabbit”; if he is a rabbit, he might scurry into a burrow and quickly make more rabbits. Moreover, it pays to give objects several labels in mentalese, designating different-sized categories like “cottontail rabbit”, “rabbit”, “mammal”, “animal”, and “living thing”. There is a tradeoff involved in choosing one category over another. It takes less effort to determine that �Содержание Peter Cottontail is an animal than that he is a cottontail (for example, an animallike motion will suffice for us to recognize that he is an animal, leaving it open whether or not he is a cottontail). But we can predict more new things about Peter if we know he is a cottontail than if we merely know he is an animal. If he is a cottontail, he likes carrots and inhabits open country or woodland clearings; if he is merely an animal, he could eat anything and live anywhere, for all one knows. The middle-sized or “basic-level” category “rabbit” represents a compromise between how easy it is to label something and how much good the label does you. Finally, why separate the rabbit from the scurry? Presumably because there are predictable consequences of rabbithood that cut across whether it is scurrying, eating, or sleeping: make a loud sound, and in all cases it will be down a hole lickety-split. The consequences of making a loud noise in the presence of lionhood, whether eating or sleeping, are predictably different, and that is a difference that makes a difference. Likewise, scurrying has certain consequences regardless of who is doing it; whether it be rabbit or lion, a scurrier does not remain in the same place for long. With sleeping, a silent approach will generally work to keep a sleeper – rabbit or lion – motionless. Therefore a powerful prognosticator should have separate sets of mental labels for kinds of objects and kinds of actions. That way, it does not have to learn separately what happens when a rabbit scurries, what happens when a lion scurries, what happens when a rabbit sleeps, what happens when a lion sleeps, what happens when a gazelle scurries, what happens when a gazelle sleeps, and on and on; knowing about rabbits and lions and gazelles in general, and scurrying and sleeping in general, will suffice. With m objects and n actions, a knower needn’t go through m x n learning experiences; it can get away with m + n of them. So even a wordless thinker does well to chop continuously flowing experience into things, kinds of things, and actions (not to mention places, paths, events, states, kinds of stuff, properties, and other types of concepts). Indeed, experimental studies of baby cognition have shown that infants have the concept of an object before they learn any words for objects, just as we would expect. Well before their first birthday, when first words appear, babies seem to keep track of the bits of stuff that we would call objects: they show surprise if the parts of an object suddenly go their own ways, of if the object magically appears or disappears, passes through another solid object, or hovers in the air without visible means of support. Attaching words to these concepts, of course, allows one to share one’s hard-won discoveries and insights about the world with the less experienced or the less observant. Figuring out which word to attach to which concept is the gavagai problem, and if infants start out with concepts corresponding to the kinds of meanings that languages use, the problem is partly solved. Laboratory studies confirm that young children assume that certain kinds of concepts get certain types of words, and other kinds of concepts cannot be the meaning of a word at all. The developmental psychologists Ellen Markman and Jeanne Hutchinson gave two- and threeyear-old children a set of pictures, and for each picture asked them to “find another one that is the same as this”. Children are intrigued by objects that interact, and when faced with these instructions they tend to select pictures that make groups of role-players like a blue jay and a nest or a dog and a bone. But when Markman and Hutchinson told them to “find another dax �Содержание that is the same as this dax” the children’s criterion shifted. A word must label a kind of thing, they seemed to be reasoning, so they put together a bird with another type of bird, a dog with another type of dog. For a child, a dax simply cannot mean “a dog or its bone”, interesting though the combination may be. Of course, more than one word can be applied to a thing: Peter Cottontail is not only a rabbit but an animal and a cottontail. Children have a bias to interpret nouns as middle-level kinds of objects like “rabbit”, but they also must overcome that bias, to learn other types of words like animal. Children seem to manage this by being in sync with a striking feature of language. Though most common words have many meanings, few meanings have more than one word. That is, homonyms are plentiful, synonyms rare. (Virtually all supposed synonyms have some difference in meaning, however small. For example, skinny and slim differ in their connotation of desirability; policeman and cop differ in formality.) No one really knows why languages are so stingy with words and profligate with meanings, but children seem to expect it (or perhaps it is this expectation that causes it!), and that helps them further with the gavagai problem. If a child already knows a word for a kind of thing, then when another word is used for it, he or she does not take the easy but wrong way and treat it as a synonym. Instead, the child tries out some other possible concept. For example, Markman found that if you show a child a pair of pewter tongs and call it biff, the child interprets biff as meaning tongs in general, showing the usual bias for middle-level objects, so when asked for “more biffs,” the child picks out a pair of plastic tongs. But if you show the child a pewter cup and call it biff\ the child does not interpret biff as meaning “cup,” because most children already know a word that means “cup,” namely, cup. Loathing synonyms, the children guess that biff must mean something else, and the stuff the cup is made of is the next most readily available concept. When asked for more biffs, the child chooses a pewter spoon or pewter tongs. Many other ingenious studies have shown how children home in on the correct meanings for different kinds of words. Once children know some syntax, they can use it to sort out different kinds of meaning. For example, the psychologist Roger Brown showed children a picture of hands kneading a mass of little squares in a bowl. If he asked them, “Can you see any sibbing? ,” the children pointed to the hands. If instead he asked them, “Can you see a sib?,” they point to the bowl. And if he asked, “Can you see any sib?,” they point to the stuff inside the bowl. Other experiments have uncovered great sophistication in children’s understanding of how classes of words fit into sentence structures and how they relate to concepts and kinds. So what’s in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality. �Содержание Geoffrey Leech Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and semantics. from Semantics. The Study of Meaning (first published 1974) Chapter1. Meanings of Meaning Ogden and Richards and After The word “meaning” and its corresponding verb “to mean” are among the most eminently discussable terms in the English language, and sem- anticists have often seemed to spend an immoderate amount of time puzzling out the “meanings of meaning” as a supposedly necessary preliminary to the study of their subject. Perhaps the best-known book ever written on semantics, that which C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards published in 1923, had the very title The Meaning of Meaning, and contained, on pp. 186-7, a list of as many as twenty-two definitions of the word, taking different non-theoretical or theoretical starting points. Here, for interest’s sake, is a selection of the meanings given: an intrinsic property the other words annexed to a word in the dictionary the connotation of a word the place of anything in a system the practical consequences of a thing in our future experience that to which the user of a symbol actually refers that to which the user of a symbol ought to be referring that to which the user of a symbol believes himself to be referring that to which the interpreter of a symbol (a) refers (b) believes himself to be referring (c) believes the user to be referring. Ogden and Richards, presenting this list, tried to show how confusion and misunderstanding come about because of lack of agreement about such basic terms as meaning. But they lodiked forward to a day when (as a result of the education of the public through their book and by other channels) “the Influence of Language upon Thought is understood, and the Phantoms due to linguistic misconception have been removed”; from here, the way would be open, they �Содержание felt, “to more fruitful methods of Interpretation and to an Art of Conversation by which the communicants can enjoy something more than the customary stones and scorpions”. The fascinating glimpse of a utopia of pure, polite conversation given us by Ogden and Richards is in part their own peculiar view of things, but other semanticists (notably those of the General Semantics movement inaugurated by Korzybski’s Science and Sanity in 1933) have also seen the solution of problems of meaning, thought, and communication as a potential cure-all for the ills of modern society. Other investigators have also, like Ogden and Richards, looked towards science for the clarification of semantic concepts. Ogden and Richards, in 1923, felt confident enough in the progress of science to assert: During the last few years advances in biology, and the psychological investigation of memory and heredity, have placed the “meaning” of signs in general beyond doubt, and it is here shown that thought and language are to be treated in the same manner, (p. 249) Ten years later, Bloomfield, in Language (1933), the most influential book on language to be published between the wars, similarly hitched semantics to the onward march of science, but with a slightly different emphasis. It was not the scientific study of mental phenomena (thought and symbolization) that he saw as providing the semanticist’s answers, but the scientific definition of everything to which language may refer: We can define the meaning of a speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do with some matter of which we possess scientific knowledge. We can define the names of minerals, for example, in terms of chemistry and mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary meaning of the English word salt is “sodium chloride (NaCl)”, and we can define the names of plants or animals by means of the technical terms of botany or zoology, but we have no precise way of defining words like love or hate, which concern situations that have not been accurately classified – and these latter are in the great majority. (Language, p. 139) Bloomfield, then, was less sanguine about the wonders of science than Ogden and Richards. His conclusion, not surprisingly, sounded a pessimistic note, which turned out to be the virtual death-knell of semantics in the U.S.A. for the next twenty years: “The statement of meanings is therefore the weak point in language-study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state.” (p. 140). Taken to its logical terminus, Bloomfield’s argument implies a vision of an eventual period when everything would be capable of authoritative scientific definition, or in simpler words, when everything there was to be known would be known about everything – something even more illusory than Ogden’s and Richards’s idyll of a conversational paradise. Bloomfield was writing at a time when there was interest in the concept of “unified science” – that is, in the idea that all sciences, from physics to psychology, could be cemented together into one vast monolith of knowledge - but even allowing for this, his picture of the semanticist waiting patiently for the accumulation and solidification of the totality of human knowledge relies on what in hindsight is a naive view of the nature of science. Three flaws were latent in Bloomfield’s approach. Firstly, at any given time, there are usually competing scientific accounts of the same �Содержание phenomenon. Which of them do we choose for our definition? In the second place, science does not progress in the manner of a tub filling up with water – it progresses by a continuing process of revision and clarification, leading to greater clarity and depth of understanding. Since scientific statements are by nature provisional, it is difficult to foresee a time when everyone would be sufficiently confident that no further significant reformulations would be forthcoming to be able to start safely defining words like love and hate. Thirdly, a definition in terms of a scientific formula, such as salt = NaCl, simply exchanges one set of linguistic symbols for another, and so postpones the task of semantic explication one step further. Assuming that scientific language, like everyday language, has meaning, we are faced with the problem of defining the meaning of NaCP; and if we could replace this with a more precise or informative scientific formula, the same problem would arise with that, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, Bloomfield’s recipe for discovering meaning leads into a path of infinite regression; it turns out to be a dead end not only on practical but on logical grounds. The problems of Ogden’s and Richards’s and Bloomfield’s approaches to meaning arise mainly from the determination to explain semantics in terms of other scientific disciplines. One may argue that much of the apparent ambiguity of the term meaning, which bothered Ogden and Richards, has the same source. Certainly most of the twenty-two definitions given by them (as the examples on p. 1 above show) are the authors’ wording of technical definitions of philosophers, psychologists, philologists, literary critics, and other specialists; and much of the conflict between these definitions is explicable in terms of each specialist’s need or desire to tailor the study of meaning to the requirements of his own field. So a philosopher may define meaning, for his purposes, in terms of truth and falsehood; a behaviourist psychologist in terms of stimulus and response; a literary critic in terms of the reader’s response; and so on. Naturally enough, their definitions, springing from diverse frames of reference, will have little in common. While admitting that study in related fields could provide insight for the student of semantics, many people will wonder why semantics need be considered dependent, in this way, on extrinsic considerations. In fact, as soon as we start to treat semantics as deserving its own frame of reference instead of having to borrow one from elsewhere, we dispel many of the difficulties that have beset its development in the past fifty years. An autonomous discipline begins not with answers, but with questions. We might say that the whole point of setting up a theory of semantics is to provide a “definition” of meaning – that is, a systematic account of the nature of meaning. To demand a definition of meaning before we started discussing the subject would simply be to insist on treating certain other concepts, e.g. stimulus and response, as in some sense more basic and more important. A physicist does not have to define notions like “time”, “heat”, “colour”, “atom” before he starts investigating their properties. Rather, definitions, if they are needed, emerge from the study itself. Once this commonplace is accepted, the question of how to define meaning, which so preoccupied Ogden and Richards, is seen in its true colour as a red herring. �Содержание A Linguistic Starting Point for Semantics So far I have been trying to clear the ground, by arguing that the study of meaning should be free from subservience to other disciplines. This leads naturally to the challenge: “How then should meaning be studied? What sort of questions should we be trying to answer in setting up a theory of meaning? What principles should form its foundations?” One of the keynotes of a modern linguistic approach to semantics is that there is no escape from language: an equation such as cent – hundredth of a dollar or salt = NaCl is not a matching of a linguistic sign with something outside language; it is a correspondence between two linguistic expressions, supposedly having “the same meaning”. The search for an explanation of linguistic phenomena in terms of what is not language is as vain as the search for an exit from a room which has no doors or windows, for the word “explanation” itself implies a statement in language. Our remedy, then, is to be content with exploring what we have inside the room: to study relations within language, such as paraphrase or synonymy (both terms meaning roughly “sameness of meaning”). Paraphrase, and some other relations of meaning capable of systematic study, are illustrated below. Entailment and presupposition are types of meaning-dependence holding between one utterance and another; logical inconsistency is a type of semantic contrastiveness between utterances. 1. X: The defects of the plan were obvious is a paraphrase OF Y: The demerits of the scheme were evident. 2. X: The earth goes round the sun entails Y: The earth moves. 3. X: John’s son is called Marcus presupposes Y: John has a son. 4. X: The earth goes round the sun is inconsistent with Y: The earth is stationary. These are some of the relations of meaning between two utterances X and Y that a semantic theory may profitably try to explain; we shall look at these, and other, relations of meaning more carefully later on (pp. 73–82). A second principle underlying many present-day linguistic approaches to semantics is seeing the task of language study as the explication of the linguistic competence of the native speaker of a language; that is, the provision of rules and structures which specify the mental apparatus a person must possess if he is to “know” a given language. Applied to the semantic end of language, this leads to the question “What is it to know the meaning of a word, a sentence, etc.?” rather than just “What is meaning?”. And among the evidence for such knowledge one may include recognizing semantic relations such as 1–4 above. Another type of evidence that a person knows the semantics of a language is his recognition that certain utterances or expressions, although they obey the grammatical rules of the language �Содержание concerned, are “unsemantic” in the sense that they are aberrant or odd from the point of view of meaning. One such oddity isa tautology, ora statement which has to be true by virtue of its meaning alone, such as: Monday came before the day which followed it. We rarely have occasion to make such statements, because (except where we are explaining an unfamiliar linguistic usage) they tell a listener nothing that he did not know before, and so are communicatively empty. At the opposite side of acceptability are contradictions, or statements which are, by virtue of meaning, necessarily false: Everything I like I dislike. My brother had the toothache in his toe. These are more decidedly deviant than tautologies: they are not just informationally vacuous, but are downright nonsensical. Modern linguistics has concentrated, in defining what a given language is, on specifying which sentences are acceptable within that language, and which are not – that is, on marking the boundaries between what is possible and impossible within the rules of the language. This has naturally brought into focus the native speaker’s ability to discriminate between “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” sentences, and it is this ability in the area of meaning that we appeal to if we say that an ability to distinguish semantically odd sentences from meaningful sentences is a manifestation of his knowledge of rules of meaning in his language. Semantically odd or deviant sentences are not restricted to contradictions and tautologies. There are, for example, questions which logically permit only one answer (yes or no), and so do not need to be asked: Has your mother any sons or daughters? There are also sentences which are unanswerable, because they have absurd presuppositions: Do you know how the man who killed his widow was punished? This sort of whimsicality is a reminder of the “tangletalk” or nonsense rigmaroles which children indulge in*as a kind of verbal sport: I went to the pictures tomorrow I took a front seat at the back 1 fell from the pit to the gallery And broke a front bone in my back. A lady she gave me some chocolate, I ate it and gave it her back; I phoned for a taxi and walked it, And that’s why I never came back. (Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, p. 25) The natural fascination children find in beating the bounds otmeaning- fulness might be counted among the symptoms of that “intuitive grasp” of meaning, or semantic competence as the linguist would call it, shared by the speakers of a language. Language and the “Real World” �Содержание But for the linguist, as for the philosopher, a crucial difficulty lies in drawing a boundary not simply between sense and nonsense, but between the kind of nonsense which arises from contradipting what we know about language and meaning, and the kind of nonsense which comes from contradicting what we know about the ‘real world’. If a speaker of English is asked to comment on the utterance (1) My uncle always sleeps standing on one toe he might exclaim: “But that can’t be true! No one can sleep like that!” His response would be similar to what he might say if faced with the contradiction (2) My uncle always sleeps awake. But on reflection, he would probably explain the two absurdities differently. Sentence (1) would be unbelievable because of what he knows about the world we live in, more specifically about the posture in which sleep is possible. Sentence (2) would be more than unbelievable – it would point to the unimaginable, because of the contradiction between the two meanings of sleep and awake. But both statements would strike him as absurd in the same way, to the extent that they would both be necessarily false. An analogy can be drawn here between the rules of a language and the rules of a game. Events within a football match, for instance, may be impossible (a) because they are against the rules of the game, or (b) because they violate natural laws regarding physical strength of human beings, the inability of footballs to defy ordinary laws of motion (e.g. by moving in the air like boomerangs), etc. Thus a football report that The centre-forward scored a goal by heading a ball from his own goal-line’ would be disbelieved as physically impossible, while The centreforward scored a goal by punching the ball into the goal-mouth’ would be disbelieved on the grounds that if such a thing happened, the game could not have been football. The difference felt between (1) and (2) above is brought out in the different strategies we adopt in trying to make sense of them. It seems to be an incontrovertible principle of semantics that the human mind abhors a vafcuum of sense; so a speaker of English faced with absurd sentences will strain his interpretative faculty to the utmost to read them meaningfully. For (1), My uncle always sleeps standing on one toe, two strategies of interpretation seem possible. The first is to assume a transfer of meaning by which either sleeps or standing on one toe is understood in a new or unusual sense. Standing on one toe, for instance, might be taken as a hyperbole or exaggerated substitute for “topsy-turvy”, or ‘in a weird posture’. The second strategy is to imagine some miraculous, unprecedented situation (e.g. the uncle’s having subjected himself to training in a hitherto unpractised version of yoga) in which this statement might be true. For (2) My uncle always sleeps awake, however, only the first strategy of transfer of meaning can be applied: the solution here must be to resolve the semantic conflict between “sleeping” and “waking” by (for example) understanding sleeps in a metaphorical way as “behaves as if asleep”. A factual absurdity can be made sensible by extending one’s imagination to the conception of a possible world (perhaps a dream world or fictional world) in which it could be true. A logical contradiction is on the other hand a linguistic absurdity, which, if it is to be made meaningful, requires a linguistic remedy, a “tampering with the rules of the language game”, just as the impossible manoeuvre described under (b) above would require a �Содержание rewriting of the rules of football. The distinction between language (including “logic”) on the one hand, and factual or “real world” knowledge on the other, will be explored further in Chapter 2 (pp. 12–13), and in Chapter 11 we shall also investigate the notion of transfer of meaning, and see in what sense it amounts to a “tampering with language”. At this stage, let us simply note that such a distinction is felt to exist, but that it is not easy for a linguist or a philosopher to justify it, or to prescribe how to draw a line in individual cases. Nevertheless, practical considerations, if no others, compel us to make such a distinction, for to do otherwise would be to enlarge the domain of semantics (as Bloomfield by implication enlarged it) into the impossibly vast study of everything that is to be known about the universe in which we live. We shall look at this distinction more critically in Chapter 5 (pp. 82–86). Summary In this chapter I have tried to make three main points about the study of meaning: 1. That it is mistaken to try to define meaning by reducing it to the terms of Sciences other than the science of language: e.g. to the terms of psychology or chemistry. 2. That meaning can best be studied as a linguistic phenomenon in its own right, not as something “outside language”. This means we investigate what it is to “know a language” semantically, e.g. to know what is involved in recognizing relations of meaning between sentences, and in recognizing which sentences are meaningful and which are not. 3. That point (2) rests on a distinction between “knowledge of language” and “knowledge of the ‘real world’ ”. �Содержание Robin Lakoff Robin Lakoff (born 1942) is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She was educated at Radcliffe, the University of Indiana, and Harvard, and is the author of Language and Women’s Place (1975) and coauthor of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (1984).The essay included here comes from the July 1974 issue of Ms magazine. You Are What You Say “Women’s language” is that pleasant (dainty?), euphemistic, never – aggressive way of talking we learned as little girls. Сultural bias was built into the language we were allowed to speak, the subjects we were allowed to speak about, and the ways we were spoken of. Having learned our linguistic lesson well, we go out in the world, only to discover that we are communicative cripples – damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. If we refuse to talk “like a lady”, we are ridiculed and criticized for being unfeminine. (“She thinks like a man” is, at best, a left – handed compliment.) If we do learn all the fuzzy-headed, unassertive language of our sex, we are ridiculed for being unable to think clearly, unable to take part in a serious discussion, and therefore unfit to hold a position of power. It doesn’t take much of this for a woman to begin feeling she deserves such treatment because of inadequacies in her own intelligence and education. “Women’s language” shows up in all levels of English. For example, women are encouraged and allowed to make far more precise discriminations in naming colors than men do. Words like mauve, beige, ecru, aquamarine, lavender, and so on, are unremarkable in a woman’s active vocabulary, but largely absent from that of most men. I know of no evidence suggesting that women actually see a wider range of colors than men do. It is simply that fine discriminations of this sort are relevant to women’s vocabularies, but not to men’s; to men, who control most of the interesting affairs of the world, such distinctions are trivial-irrelevant. In the area of syntax, we find similar gender-related peculiarities of speech. There is one construction, in particular, that women use conversationally far more than men: the tagquestion. A tag is midway between an outright statement and a yes-no question; it is less assertive than the former, but more confident than the latter. A flat statement indicates confidence in the speaker’s knowledge and is fairly certain to be believed; a question indicates a lack of knowledge on some point and implies that the gap in the speaker’s knowledge can and will be remedied by an answer. For example, if, at a Little League game, I have had my glasses off, I can legitimately ask someone else: “Was the player out at third?” A tag question, being intermediate between statement and question, is used when the speaker is stating a claim, but lacks full confidence in the truth of that claim. So if I say, “Is Joan here?” I will probably not be surprised if my respondent answers “no”; but if I say, “Joan is here, isn’t she?” instead, chances are I am already biased in favor of a positive answer, wanting only confirmation. I still want a response, but I have enough knowledge (or think I have) to predict that response. A tag question, then, might be thought of as a statement that doesn’t demand to be believed by anyone but the speaker, a way of giving leeway, of not �Содержание forcing the addressee to go along with the views of the speaker. Another common use of the tag-question is in small talk when the speaker is trying to elicit conversation: “Sure is hot here, isn’t it?” But in discussing personal feelings or opinions, only the speaker normally has any way of knowing the correct answer. Sentences such as “I have a headache, don’t I?” are clearly ridiculous. But there are other examples where it is the speaker’s opinions, rather than perceptions, for which corroboration is sought, as in “The situation in Southeast Asia is terrible, isn’t it?” While there are, of course, other possible interpretations of a sentence like this, one possibility is that the speaker has a particular answer in mind – “yes” or “no” – but is reluctant to state it baldly. This sort of tag question is much more apt to be used by women than by men in conversation. Why is this the case? The tag question allows a speaker to avoid commitment, and thereby avoid conflict with the addressee. The problem is that, by so doing, speakers may also give the impression of not really being sure of themselves, or looking to the addressee for confirmation of their views. This uncertainly is reinforced in more subliminal ways, too. There is a peculiar sentence intonation – pattern, used almost exclusively by women, as far as I know, which changes a declarative answer into a question. The effect of using the rising inflection typical of a yes – no question is to imply that the speaker is seeking confirmation, even though the speaker is clearly the only one who has the requisite information, which is why the question was put to her in the first place: (Q) When will dinner be ready? (A) Oh … around six o’clock…? It is as though the second speaker were saying, “Six o’clock – if that’s okay with you, if you agree.” The person being addressed is put in the position of having to provide confirmation. One likely consequence of this sort of speech – pattern in a woman is that, often unbeknownst to herself, the speaker builds a reputation of tentativeness, and others will refrain from taking her seriously or trusting her with any real responsibilities, since she “can’t make up her mind,” and “isn’t sure of herself.” Such idiosyncrasies may explain why women’s language sounds much more “polite” than men’s. It is polite to leave a decision open, not impose your mind, or views, or claims, on anyone else. So a tag-question is a kind of polite statement, in that it does not force agreement or belief on the addressee. In the same way a request is a polite command, in that it does not force obedience on the addressee, but rather suggests something be done as a favor to the speaker. A clearly stated order implies a threat of certain consequences if it is not followed, and – and more impolite – implies that the speaker is in a superior position and able to enforce the order. By couching wishes in the form of a request, on the other hand, a speaker implies that if the request is not carried out, only the speaker will suffer; noncompliance cannot harm the addressee. So the decision is really left up to addressee. The distinction becomes clear in �Содержание these examples: Close the door. Please close the door. Will you close the door? Will you please close the door? Won’t you close the door? In the same ways as words and speech patterns used by women undermine her image, those used to describe women make matters even worse. Often a word may be used of both men and women (and perhaps of things as well); but when it is applied to women, it assumes a special meaning that, by implication rather than outright assertion, is derogatory to women as a group. The use of euphemisms has this effect. A euphemism is a substitute for a word that has acquired a bad connotation by association with something unpleasant or embarrassing. But almost as soon as the new word comes into common usage, it takes on the same old bad connotations, since feelings about the things or people referred to are not altered by a change of name; thus new euphemisms must be constantly found. There is one euphemism for woman still very much alive. The word, of course, is lady. Lady has a masculine counterpart, namely gentleman, occasionally shortened to gent. But for some reason lady is very much commoner than gent (leman). The decision to use lady rather than woman, or vice versa, may considerably alter the sense of a sentence, as the following examples show: (a) A woman (lady) I know is a dean at Berkeley. (b) A woman (lady) I know makes amazing things out of shoelaces and old boxes. The use of lady in (a) imparts a frivolous, or nonserious, tone to the sentence: the matter under discussion is not one of great moment. Similarly, in (b), using lady here would suggest that the speaker considered the “amazing things” not to be serious art, but merely a hobby or an aberration. If woman is used, she might be a serious sculptor. To say lady doctor is very condescending, since no one ever says gentleman doctor or even man doctor. For example, mention in the San Francisco Chronicle of January 31, 1972, of Madalyn Murray O’Hair as the lady atheist reduces her position to that of scatterbrained eccentric. Even woman atheist is scarcely defensible: sex is irrelevant to her philosophical position. Many women argue that, on the other hand, lady carries with it overtones recalling the age of chivalry: conferring exalted stature on the person so referred to. This makes the term seem polite at first, but we must also remember that these implications are perilous: they suggest that a “lady” is helpless, and cannot do things by herself. Lady can also be used to infer frivolousness, as in titles of organizations. Those that have a �Содержание serious purpose (not merely that of enabling “the ladies” to spend time with one another) cannot use the word lady in their titles, but less serious ones may. Compare the Ladies’ Auxiliary of a men’s group, or the Thursday Evening Ladies’ Browning and Garden Society with Ladies’ Liberation or Ladies’ Strike for Peace. What is curious about this split is that lady is in origin a euphemism – a substitute that puts a better face on something people find uncomfortable – for woman. What kind of euphemism is it that subtly denigrates the people to whom it refers? Perhaps lady functions as a euphemism for woman because it does not contain the sexual implications present in woman: it is not “embarrassing” in that way. If this is so, we may expect that, in the future, lady will replace woman as the primary word for the human female, since woman will have become too blatantly sexual. That this distinction is already made in some contexts at least is shown in the following examples, where you can try replacing woman with lady: (a) She’s only twelve, but she’s already a woman. (b) After ten years in jail, Harry wanted to find a woman. (c) She’s my woman, see, so don’t mess around with her. Another common substitute for woman is girl. One seldom hears a man past the age of adolescence referred to as a boy, save in expressions like “going out with the boys”, which are meant to suggest an air of adolescent frivolity and irresponsibility. But women of all ages are “girls”: one can have a man – not a boy – Friday, but only a girl – never a woman or even a lady – Friday; women have girlfriends, but men do not – in a nonsexual sense – have boyfriends. It may be that this use of girl is euphemistic in the same way the use of lady is: in stressing the idea of immaturity, it removes the sexual connotations lurking in woman. Girl brings to mind irresponsibility: you don’t send a girl to do a woman’s errand (or even, for that matter, a boy’s errand). She is a person who is both too immature and too far from real life to be entrusted with responsibilities or with decisions of any serious or important nature. Now let’s take a pair of words which, in terms of the possible relationships in an earlier society, were simple male-female equivalents, analogous to bull: cow. Suppose we find that, for independent reasons, society has changed in such a way that the original meanings now are irrelevant. Yet the words have not been discarded, but have acquired new meanings, metaphorically related to their original senses. But suppose these new metaphorical uses are no longer parallel to each other. By seeing where the parallelism breaks down, we discover something about the different roles played by men and women in this culture. One good example of such a divergence through time is found in the pair, master: mistress. Once used with reference to one’s power over servants, these words have become unusable today in their original master-servant sense as the relationship has become less prevalent in our society. But the words are still common. Unless used with reference to animals, master now generally refers to a man who has acquired consummate ability in some field, normally nonsexual. But its feminine counterpart cannot be used this way. It is practically restricted to its sexual sense of “paramour”. We start out with two terms, both roughly paraphrasable as “one who has power over another”. But the �Содержание masculine form, once one person is no longer able to have absolute power over another, becomes usable metaphorically in the sense of “having power over something”. Master requires as its object only the name of some activity, something inanimate and abstract. But mistress requires a masculine noun in the possessive to precede it. One cannot say: “Rhonda is a mistress”. One must be someone’s mistress. A man is defined by what he does, a woman by her sexuality, that is, in terms of one particular aspect of her relationship to men. It is one thing to be an old master like Hans Holbein, and another to be an old mistress. The same is true of the words spinster and bachelor – gender words for “one who is not married”. The resemblance ends with the definition. While bachelor is a neuter term, often used as a compliment, spinster normally is used pejoratively, with connotations of prissiness, fussiness, and so on. To be a bachelor implies that one has the choice of marrying or not, and this is what makes the idea of a bachelor existence attractive, in the popular literature. He has been pursued and has successfully eluded his pursuers. But a spinster is one who has not been pursued, or at least not seriously. She is old, unwanted goods. The metaphorical connotations of bachelor generally suggest sexual freedom; of spinster, puritanism or celibacy. These examples could be multiplied. It is generally considered a faux pas, in society, in society, to congratulate a woman on her engagement, while it is correct to congratulate her fiancé. Why is this? The reason seems to be that is impolite to remind people of things that may be uncomfortable to them. To congratulate a woman on her engagement is really to say, “Thank goodness! You had a close call!” For the man, on the other hand, there was no such danger. His choosing to marry is viewed as a good thing, but not something essential. The linguistic double standard holds throughout the life of the relationship. After marriage, bachelor and spinster become man and wife, not man and woman. The woman whose husband dies remains “John’s widow”; John, however, is never “Mary’s widower”. Finally, why is it that salesclerks and others are so quick to call women customers “dear,” “honey”, and other terms of endearment they really have no business using? A male customer would never put up with it. But women, like children, are supposed to enjoy these endearments, rather than being offended by them. In more ways than one, it’s time to speak up. �Содержание PART IV. THE LANGUAGE OF FICTION: A SHORT STORY The Art of Reading and Analysing a Story James Joyce. Eveline Oscar Wilde. The Model Millionaire Katherine Mansfield. A Cup of Tea Somerset Maugham. The Happy Man O. Henry. The Cop and the Anthem Ernest Hemingway. Cat in the Rain Stories for Self-Guided Analysis Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras �Содержание The Art of Reading and Analysing a Story We enjoy stories for many reasons. Some are intrinsic to the story itself: language artfully used, characters we believe in and care about, actions that carry significant messages for us and give us new insights into ourselves and our society. Other causes of enjoyment are external, coming not from the artistry of the story, but from the fact that the story fits our notions of what a story should be like, or calls forth some pleasant personal memories. In short, the external factors for our response to a story come from things we already think or feel. Intrinsic factors come from the writer’s craftsmanshift and art. When we read for pleasure alone, we need not care where our pleasure comes from. When we study literature or learn to interpret texts, we should concentrate on the intrinsic qualities of stories, on the “how” aspects of a story, for they can help us to understand the craft of the writer. To understand the craft we must look closely at such aspects of a story as: the plot, the structure, the type of narrator, the ways of conveying the message, means of character portrayal, individual means that constiture a writer’s individual style etc. Now let’s repeat the question we have already asked: what steps should we take when thinking about a story in order to discuss and interpret it in class? STEP I. Give the gist of the story (in 10 sentences or so). Present in a very succinct and precise form the plot of the story, pointing out its main characters, the place and the time of action, and the events presented in the story. Give a short characteristic of the plot. This step is really important because it helps us to make our speech succinct and precise. STEP II. Share your initial impression. The first thing to do is to jot down whatever things about the story strike you as being most noticeable – the ideas that affect you most strongly. STEP III. Consider the structure of the story. The same events that serve as the plot of a story can be arranged differently and the ordering of events constitute the structure, or the composition of a story. Traditionally a story’s structure is said to include four basic parts: 1. The exposition. The beginning of the story, which introduces the reader to the setting (time and place) and to some, or all the characters. 2. The conflict. Every story centers on a conflict of some sort: one person or a group of people, against another; an individual against some rule or custom of society. Generally the conflict increases in tension or in complexity until it reaches a climax. 3. The climax. The point of greatest tension, at which the turning point or the breaking point is reached. 4. The denouement, or resolution. The ending, which brings the narration to a close, picking up the pieces of the action and reordering the lives left disordered by the conflict and the climax. �Содержание Of these four parts of the structure, only the conflict and the climax are essential. Not all writers begin their stories with an exposition, sometimes the first sentence can show the characters already embroiled in their conflict. The resolution may also be not presented in the story. Thus stories may have a closed- or an open-end structure. A story with an open end structure invites the reader to be more active and think of a possible resolution of the conflict. Sometimes the ending is predictable, or logically expected, but very often stories have an unexpected, or “surprise ending”, thus creating a defeated expectancy effect, which is a characteristic feature of O. Henry’s style. STEP IV. Consider the major aspects of the story. In the introduction we suggested that each work of fiction involves the following key elements: action, or plot; character; setting; and language, or voice. Fiction is the art of the storyteller. Not only are writers of fiction storytellers themselves, but within every story they create a new storyteller. It is the narrator’s voice that we hear while reading a novel or a story. Traditionally stories are told by omniscient narrators. As the term implies these narrators “know all” about the characters and events of which they tell. Somewhat distanced by their greater knowledge from action and actors alike, omniscient narrators produce an air of authority over their material. They seem to stand somewhat apart from the events. Having no role in the action themselves they can interpret the events and characters somewhat impartially. First-person narrators or I-narrators appear to be participants of their own stories. They are telling us something that happened to them and are telling their tale from their own point of view. They cannot see into the minds of the other characters. In contrast to the total knowledge of the omniscient narrator, the first-person narrator’s powers of interpretation may be slight. As the narrator’s knowledge diminishes, the reader’s role increases. If we cannot trust the narrator as the omniscient, final authority, the role of our role judgement increases. We often feel closer to first-person narrators that to omniscient narrators. The limitation of human knowledge and insight within which the first-person narrators work, the blend of attempted objectivity and personal involvement their voices convey, and their apparent openness in telling their own stories appeal to our sympathy and our sense of fellowship. In telling us of their dreams and desires first-person narrators speak eloquently of human aspirations; in confessing their shortcomings they speak no less eloquently of human limitations. A characteristic feature of the XXth century literature is the so-called disguised first-person narration, when the story is told in the third-person, yet from the mode of presentation we understand that it is not the omniscient third-person narrator, but a personal Inarrator. When the writer delegates the narration not to one, but several characters, it results in a polyphony which is another typical feature of modern literature. This type of narration plays an important role in portraying characters. �Содержание Talking about the characters we must direct our attention to the author’s means of portraying them. They may be portrayed directly, or through their actions and speech, especially inner speech. Special attention should be paid to small details which may matter a lot for portraying a character and conveying a meaning. Discussing the language of an author we should pay utmost attention to the means which constitute the author’s idiostyle and by which we can tell one author from another. Some authors favour metaphors and similes (V. Woolf, K. Mansfield), others use metonymies more frequently (O. Henry), still others are fond of paradoxes and puns (O. Wilde). There are authors who use figures of speech very sparingly, whose prose is crystal-clear (E. Hemingway), which makes it no less expressive in effect. STEP V. Create a synthesis. At this stage summarize your own observations, add what you think important from the discussion you had in class and prepare the final analysis of the story. �Содержание James Joyce (1882–1941) James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark novel which perfected his stream of consciousness technique and combined nearly every literary device available in a modern re-telling of The Odyssey. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Joyce was born into a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce’s fictional universe does not extend beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. James Joyce had begun his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian Brothers school on North Richmond Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits’, Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893. By the age of 16, however, Joyce appears to have made a break with his Catholic roots, even though the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas continued to have a strong influence on him for most of his life. He enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin (UCD) in 1898, studying English, French, and Italian. After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris to study medicine, but he soon abandoned this after finding the technical lectures in French too difficult. The same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara, County Galway who was working as a chambermaid. On 16 June 1904, they first stepped out together, an event which would be commemorated by providing the date for the action of Ulysses. Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zurich, where he had supposedly acquired a post to teach English at the Berlitz Language School through an agent in England. It turned out that the English agent had been swindled, but the director of the school sent him on to Trieste, which was part of Austria-Hungary until World War I . Once again, he found there was no position for him, but he finally secured a teaching position in Pola, then also part of Austria-Hungary. He stayed there, teaching English mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pola base, when the Austrians – �Содержание having discovered an espionage ring in the city – expelled all aliens. He moved back to Trieste and began teaching English there. He would remain in Trieste for most of the next ten years. In 1915, after most of his students were conscripted in Trieste for World War I, he moved to Zurich. While in Zurich he wrote Exiles, published A Portrait..., and began serious work on Ulysses. Joyce set himself to finally finishing Ulysses in Paris, delighted to find that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer. With the appearance of both Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, 1922 was a key year in the history of English-language literary modernism. In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other established literary technique to present his characters. The action of the novel, which takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904, sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, parodically contrasted with their lofty models. The book consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around 8 a.m. and ending some time after 2 a.m. the following morning. Each chapter employs its own literary style, and parodies a specific episode in Homer’s Odyssey. Furthermore, each chapter is associated with a specific colour, art or science, and bodily organ. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal schematic structure renders the book a major contribution to the development of 20th-century modernist literature. The use of classical mythology as an organising framework, the near-obsessive focus on external detail, and the occurrence of significant action within the minds of characters have also contributed to the development of literary modernism. Joyce’s method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all conventions of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure language, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than that used by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky. This has led many readers and critics to apply Joyce’s oftquoted description in the Wake of Ulysses as his “usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles” to the Wake itself. However, readers have been able to reach a consensus about the central cast of characters and general plot. On 11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer and died two days later. He is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery within earshot of the lions in the Zurich Zoo. The work and life of Joyce is celebrated annually on 16 June, Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide. His influence on the world literature is great. Eveline She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired. Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built �Содержание houses in it – not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field – the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home. Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he show. “He is in Melbourne now.” She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. Of course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad she had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening. “Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting? ” “Look lively, Miss Hill, please. ” She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores. But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married – she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her, like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages – seven shillings – and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad on Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through �Содержание the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work – a hard life – but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life. She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Aires where he had a home waiting for her. How well she remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and, when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. He used to call her Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the different services. He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Aires, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her father had found out the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him. “I know these sailor chaps,” he said. One day he had quarreled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover secretly. The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mother’s bonnet to make the children laugh. Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty, cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother’s illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her farther strutting back into the sickroom saying: “Damned Italians! Coming over here!” As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her being – that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard �Содержание again her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish insistence: “Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!” She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her. She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage aver and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, to-morrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Aires. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer. A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand: “Come! ” All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them; he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing. “Come!” No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish! “Eveline! Evvy! ” He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story 1. Speak about James Joyce and his main contribution to British and world literature. James Joyce was an Irish man. What place does his motherland occupy in his writing? 2. Give a short summary of the story. What exactly happens in the story? 3. Comment on the plot of the story. Is it dynamic? Is it full of events or otherwise? Where does the action mostly take place: in the outside world or in the inner world of the character? 4. Comment on the title of the story. Does it reveal the contents or the central message of the story? Can you suggest any other titles to the story? 5. The story is written in the third person, yet who appears to be the narrator? Give facts from the story to support your opinion. 6. Pay close attention to the temporal structure of the story, compare and comment on the proportion of the present, past and future in the main character’s inner world. Is present as �Содержание important for her as her past and her future? Point out the language means of expressing present, past and future (count up the number of times “would” and “used to” are repeated in the story and comment on the effect of these repetitions). What are the colors in which the past, the present and the future are painted? What is the girl’s present life like? Comment on the use of the word ‘dust’ in the story. What are its connotations? 7. Comment on her reminiscences of her family, when her mother was alike. Pay attention to the tonality of this passage. Did these memories affect her final decision? Is there a moment in the story when we get a hint that she will not go away? Pay attention to the use of the conjunction “if” in the following sentence: “If she went, tomorrow she would be…” What does it suggest? 8. Comment on the climax of the story. Pay attention to the use of expressive means in the passage describing her emotional state at the moment of departure. Are her actions directed by reason or by emotions? What exactly makes Eveline stay at home? 9. Does the story have a generalizing effect? How would you define its central message? 10. Summarize your observations and prepare the final analysis of the story. �Содержание Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death. Wilde’s parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. He also profoundly explored Roman Catholicism, to which he would later convert on his deathbed. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States of America and Canada on the new “English Renaissance in Art”, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the most well-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French in Paris but it was refused a licence. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London. At the height of his fame and success, whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde sued the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel. After a series of trials, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency with other men and imprisoned for two years, held to hard labour. In prison he wrote De Profundis (written in 1897 & published in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six. More than a hundred years after his death Oscar Wilde continues to gain new admirers in every part of the world: no playwright except Shakespeare is as widely quoted, and few wits are as often or as happily recalled. His outlook is best expressed by his own words: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the sky”. �Содержание The Model Millionaire Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. These are the great truths of modern life, which Hughie Erskine never realized. Poor Hughie! Intellectually, we must admit, he was not of much importance. He never said a brilliant or even an ill-natured thing in his life. But then he was wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his gray eyes. He was as popular with men as he was with women, and he had every accomplishment except that of making money. His father had bequeathed him his cavalry sword and a History of the Peninsular War in fifteen volumes. Hughie hung the first over his looking glass, put the second on a shelf between Ruff’s Guide and Bailey’s Magazine, and lived on two hundred a year that an old aunt allowed him. He had tried everything. He had gone on the Stock Exchange for six months; but what was a butterfly to do among bulls and bears? He had been a teamerchant for a little longer, but had soon tired of pekoe and souchong. Then he had tried selling dry sherry. That did not answer; the sherry was a little too dry. Ultimately he became nothing, a delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no profession. To make matters worse, he was in love. The girl he loved was Laura Merton, the daughter of a retired Colonel who had lost his temper and his digestion in India, and had never found either of them again. Laura adored him, and he was ready to kiss her shoestrings. They were the handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them. The Colonel was very fond of Hughie, but would not hear of any engagement. “Come to me, little boy when you have got ten thousand pounds of your own, and we will see about it,” he used to say; and Hughie looked very glum in those days, and had to go to Laura for consolation. One morning, as he was on his way to Holland Park, where the Mertons lived, he dropped in to see a great friend of his, Alan Trevor. Trevor was a painter. Indeed, few people escape that nowadays. But he was also an artist, and artists are rather rare. Personally he was a strange rough fellow, with a freckled face and a red, ragged beard. However, when he took up the brush he was a real master, and all his pictures were eagerly sought after. He had been very much attracted by Hughie at first, it must be acknowledged, entirely on the account of his personal charm. “The only people a painter should know,” he used to say, “are the people who are bete and beautiful, people who are an artistic pleasure to look at and an intellectual repose to talk to. Men who are dandies and women who are darlings rule the world, at least they should do so.” However, after he got to know Hughie better, he liked him quite as much for his bright, buoyant spirits and his generous, reckless nature, and had given him the permanent entree to his studio. When Hughie came in he found Trevor putting the finishing touches to a wonderful life-size portrait of a beggar-man. The beggar himself was standing on a raised platform in a corner of the studio. He was a wizened old man, with a face like wrinkled parchment, and a most piteous expression. Over his shoulder was flung a course brown cloak, all tears and tatters; his thick boots were patched and cobbled, and with one hand he leant on a rough stick, while with the other he held out his battered hat for alms. �Содержание “What an amazing model!” whispered Hughie, as he shook hands with his friend. “An amazing model?” shouted Trevor at the top of his voice; “I should think so! Such beggars as he are not to be met with every day. A trouvaille, mon cher; a living Velasquez! My stars! What an etching Rembrandt would have made out of him!” “Poor old chap!’ said Hughie, ‘how miserable he looks! But I suppose, to you painters, his face is his fortune?” “Certainly,” replied Trevor, “you don’t want a beggar to look happy, do you?” “How much does a model get for his sitting?” asked Hughie, as he found himself a comfortable seat on a divan. “A shilling an hour.” “And how much do you get for your picture, Alan?” “Oh, for this I get two thousand!” “Pounds?” “Guineas. Painters, poets, and physicians always get guineas.” “Well, I think the model should have a percentage,” cried Hughie, laughing; “they work quite as hard as you do.” “Nonsense, nonsense! Why, look at the trouble of laying on the paint alone, and standing all day long at one’s easel! It’s all very well, Hughie, for you to talk, but I assure you that there are moments when Art almost attains to the dignity of manual labour. But you mustn’t chatter; I’m very busy. Smoke a cigarette, and keep quiet.” After some time the servant came in, and told Trevor that the framemaker wanted to speak to him. “Don’t run away, Hughie,” he said, as he went out, “I will be back in a moment.” The old beggar-man took advantage of Trevor’s absence to rest for a moment on a wooden bench that was behind him. He looked so forlorn and wretched that Hughie could not help pitying him, and felt in his pockets to see what money he had. All he could find was a sovereign and some coppers. “Poor old fellow”, he thought to himself, “he wants it more than I do, but it means no hansoms for a fortnight”; and he walked across the studio and slipped the sovereign into the beggar’s hand. The old man started, and a faint smile flitted across his withered lips. “Thank you, sir”, he said, “thank you.” Then Trevor arrived, and Hughie took his leave, blushing a little at what he had done. He spent the day with Laura, got a charming scolding for his extravagance, and had to walk home. That night he strolled into the Palette Club about eleven o’clock, and found Trevor sitting by himself in the smoking-room drinking hock and seltzer. “Well, Alan, did you get that picture finished all right?” He said as he lit his cigarette. “Finished and framed, my boy!” answered Trevor, “and by the by, you have made a conquest: that old model you saw is quite devoted to you. I had to tell him all about you, who you are, where you live. What your income is, what prospects you have.” �Содержание “My dear Alan”, cried Hughie, “I shall probably find him waiting for me when I go home. But, of course, you are only joking … Poor old wretch! I wish I could do something for him. I think it is dreadful that any one should be so miserable. I have got heaps of old clothes at home – do you think he would care for any of them? Why, these rags are falling to bits.” “But he looks splendid in them”, said Trevor. “I wouldn’t paint him in a frock coat for anything. What you call rags I call romance. What seems poverty to you is picturesqueness to me. However, I’ll tell him of your offer.” “Alan”, said Hughie seriously, “you painters are a heartless lot.” “An artist’s heart is his head,” replied Trevor; “and besides, our business is to realize the world as we see it, not to reform it as we know it. A chacun son metier. And now tell me how Laura is. The old model was quite interested in her.” “You don’t mean to say you talked to him about her?” said Hughie. “Certainly I did. He knows all about the relentless colonel, the lovely Laura, and the 10,000 pounds.” “You told that old beggar all my private affairs?” cried Hughie, looking very red and angry. “My dear boy”, said Trevor, smiling, “that old beggar, as you call him, is one of the richest men in Europe. He could buy all London tomorrow without overdrawing his account. He has a house in every capital, dines off gold plates, and can prevent Russia going to war when he chooses.” “What on earth do you mean?” exclaimed Hughie. “What I say,” said Trevor. “The old man you saw today in the studio was Baron Houseberg. He is a great friend of mine, buys all my pictures and that sort of thing, and gave me a commission a month ago to paint him as a beggar. Que voulez-vous? La fantaisie d’un millionaire! And I must say he made a magnificent figure in his rags, or perhaps I should say in my rags; they are an old suit I got in Spain.” “Baron Houseberg!” cried Hughie. “Good Heavens! I gave him a sovereign”. And he sank into the armchair, the picture of dismay. “Gave him a sovereign!” shouted Trevor, and he burst into a roar of laughter. “My dear boy, you will never see it again.” “I think you might have told me, Alan,” said Hughie sulkily, “and not have let me make such a fool of myself.” “Well, to begin with, Hughie,” said Trevor, “it never entered my mind that you went about distributing alms in that reckless way. I can understand your kissing a pretty model, but your giving a sovereign to an ugly one – by Jove, no! Besides, the fact that I really was not at home today to any one; and when you came in I didn’t know whether Houseberg would like his name mentioned. You know he wasn’t in full dress.” “What a duffer he must think me!” said Hughie. “Not at all. He was in the highest spirits after you left, kept chuckling to himself and rubbing his old wrinkled hands together. I couldn’t make out why he was so interested to know all about you but I see it all now. He’ll invest your sovereign for you, Hughie, pay you the interest every six months, and have a capital story to tell after dinner.” �Содержание “I am an unlucky devil,” growled Hughie. “The best thing I can do is to go to bed; and my dear Alan, you mustn’t tell anyone. I shouldn’t dare show my face in the Row.” “Nonsense. It reflects the highest credit of your philanthropic spirit, Hughie. And don’t run away. Have another cigarette, and you can talk about Laura as much as you like.” However, Hughie wouldn’t stop, but walked home, feeling very unhappy and leaving Alan in fits of laughter. The next morning, as he was at breakfast, the servant brought him up a card on which was written, “Monsieur Gustave Naudin, de la par de M. le Baron Houseberg.” “I suppose he has come for an apology,” said Hughie to himself and he told the servant to show the visitor up. An old gentleman with gold spectacles and very gray hair came into the room, and said, in a slight French accent, “Have I the honour of addressing Monsieur Erskine?” Hughie bowed. “I have come from Baron Houseberg,” he continued. “The Baron – ” “I beg, sir, that you will offer my sincerest apologies,” stammered Hughie. “The Baron”, said the old gentleman with a smile, “has commissioned me to bring you this letter”; and he extended a sealed envelope. On the outside was written, “A wedding present to Hugh Erskine and Laura Merton, from an old beggar”, and inside was a cheque for ₤10,000. When they were married Alan Trevor was the best man, and the Baron made a speech at the wedding breakfast. “Millionaire models,” remarked Alan, “are rare enough, but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!” Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story 1. Speak about Oscar Wilde and his aesthetic and literary principles. Is this a typical Oscar Wilde story or is it different in some way? 2. What exactly happens in the story? Give the gist of the plot. Do you find it intricate or rather trivial? In the Penguin Edition this story was published in the collection of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. Was it a random choice or are there good reasons for it? Can we regard this story as a kind of modern fairy tale? What fairy tale features can we point out in the story? 3. The story opens with a short introduction in which the author states the well known maxim. Analyze the means of generalization employed by the author in this maxim. Comment on the role of this introduction in the structure of the story. Do the ensuing events prove the author’s statement or disprove it? 4. Give sketches of the main characters (draw a parallel with the typical fairy tale characters). Are they depicted very minutely or rather schematically? Point out the expressive means employed by the author to portray the characters. 5. Comment on the general mood of the story. Is it lyrical, matter-of-fact or ironical? How is this mood created? �Содержание 6. Can you hear the voice of the narrator in the story? What is the role of the narrator? What does it add to the general mood of the story? 7. Oscar Wilde is known as a great master of paradox and pun. Are these devices used in this story? Point them out and comment on their stylistic effect. What are other expressive means employed by Oscar Wilde and what is their effect? 8. Comment on the message of the story. What appeals to you most in the story? What is your general impression in the story? You are welcome to add your own observations about the message and the style of the story. 9. Sum up your observations and present the final analysis of the story. �Содержание Katherine Mans ield (1888–1923) Kathleen Mansfield Murry (1888–1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield, which is in itself a short form of her real name as she was born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp. She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen’s College, along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed, during her time at Queen’s, she would take up professionally, but she also began contributing to the school newspaper, with such a dedication to it that she eventually became editor during this period. She was particularly interested in the works of the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated amongst peers for her vivacious and charismatic approach to life and work. Mansfield first began journeying into continental Europe from 1903–1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, Mansfield returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories. She had several works published in the Native Companion (Australia), which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym ‘K. Mansfield’. She rapidly wearied of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, and of her family, during this time, and two years later headed again for Londo. Back in London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into the bohemian way of life lived by many artists and writers of that era. She hastily entered into a marriage, with a singing teacher 11 years her elder, George Bowden, but left him the same evening, having failed to consummate the marriage. Mansfield’s time in Bavaria was to have a significant effect on her literary outlook. She was introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov, a writer who proved to have greater influence upon her writing in the short-term than Wilde, on whom she had been fixated during her earlier years. She returned to London in January 1910, and had over a dozen works published in A.R. Orage’s The New Age, a socialist magazine and highly-regarded intellectual publication Although discouraged by the volume’s relative lack of success, Mansfield submitted a lightweight story to a new avant-garde magazine called Rhythm. The piece was rejected by the magazine’s editor, John Middleton Murry, who requested something darker. Mansfield and Murray had begun, in 1911, a relationship that would culminate in their marriage in 1918. Later that year, they moved to Paris, with the hope that the change of setting would make writing for both of them easier. The couple had befriended D.H. Lawrence and his wife. Mansfield began to broaden her literary acquaintances for the remainder of the year, �Содержание encountering Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and Bertrand Russell through social gatherings and introductions from others. At the beginning of 1917, Mansfield and Murry separated, although he continued to visit her at her new apartment. Mansfield entered into her most prolific period of writing post-1916, which began with several stories, including Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day and A Dill Pickle being published in The New Age. In December 1917, Mansfield became ill, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Rejecting the idea of a sanatorium on the basis that it would cut her off from writing, she took the only available option, which was to move abroad during the English winter. She moved to Bandol, France, but stayed at a half-deserted and cold hotel, where she became depressed. However, she continued to produce stories. “Miss Brill,” the bittersweet story of a fragile woman living an ephemeral life of observation and simple pleasures in Paris, established Mansfield as one of the preeminent writers of the Modernist period, upon its publication in 1920’s Bliss. The title story from that collection, “Bliss,” which involved a similar character facing her husband’s infidelity, also found critical acclaim. She followed with the equally praised collection, The Garden Party, published in 1922. She died in 1923 and was buried in a cemetery in the Fontainebleau District in the town of Avon. A street in Menton, France, where she lived and wrote, is named after her and a Fellowship is offered annually to enable a New Zealand writer to work at her former home, the Villa Isola Bella. New Zealand’s pre-eminent short story competition is also named in her honour. A Cup of Tea Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn’t have called her beautiful. Pretty? Well, if you took her to pieces… But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces? She was young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important people and… artists – quaint creatures, discoveries of hers, some of them too terrifying for words, but others quite presentable and amusing. Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not Peter – Michael. And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really rich, not just comfortably well off, which is odious and stuffy and sounds like one’s grandparents. But if Rosemary wanted to shop she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street. If she wanted to buy flowers, the car pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside the shop just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way, and said: “I want those and those and those. Give me four bunches of those. And that jar of roses. Yes, I’ll have all the roses in the jar. No, no lilac. It’s got no shape.” The attendant bowed and put the lilac out of sight, as though this was only too true; lilac was dreadfully shapeless. “Give me those stumpy little tulips. Those red and white ones.” And she was followed to the car by a thin shop-girl, staggering under an immense white paper armful that looked like a baby in long clothes… One winter afternoon she had been buying something in a little antique shop in Curzon Street. It was a shop she liked. For one thing, one usually had it to oneself. And then the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her. He beamed whenever she came in. He clasped his �Содержание hands; he was so gratified he could scarcely speak. Flattery, of course. All the same, there was something… “You see, madam,” he would explain in his low respectful tones, “I love my things. I would rather not part with them than sell them to someone who does not appreciate them, who has not that fine feeling which is so rare…” And breathing deeply, he unrolled a tiny square of blue velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale finger-tips. Today it was a little box. He had been keeping it for her. He had shown it to nobody as yet. An exquisite little enamel box with a glace so fine it looked as though it had been baked in cream. On the lid a minute creature stood under a flowery tree, and a more minute creature still had her arms round his neck. Her hat, really no bigger than a geranium petal, hung from a branch; it had green ribbons. And there was a pink cloud like a watchful cherub floating above their heads. Rosemary took her hands out of her long gloves. She always took off her gloves to examine such things. Yes, she liked it very much. She loved it; it was a great duck. She must have it. And, turning the creamy box, opening and shutting it, she couldn’t help noticing how charming her hands were against the blue velvet. The shopman, in some dim cavern of his mind, may have dared to think so too. For he took a pencil, leant over the counter, and his pale bloodless fingers crept timidly towards those rosy, flashing ones, as he murmured gently. “If I may venture to point out to madam, the flowers on the little lady’s bodice.” “Charming!” Rosemary admired the flowers. But what was the price? For a moment the shopman did not seem to hear. Then a murmur reached her. “Twenty- eight guineas, madam.” “Twenty-eight guineas.” Rosemary gave no sign. She laid the little box down; she buttoned her gloves again. “Twenty-eight guineas. Even if one is rich…” She looked vague. She stared at a plump tea-kettle like a plump hen above the shopman’s head, and her voice was dreamy as she answered: “Well, keep it for me – will you? I’ll…” But the shopman had already bowed as though keeping it for her was all any human being could ask. He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever. The discreet door shut with a click. She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter afternoon. Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something. And people hurried by, hidden under their hateful umbrellas. Rosemary felt a strange pang. She pressed her muff against her breast; she wished she had the little box, too, to cling to. Of course the car was there. She’d only to cross the pavement. But still she waited. There are moments, horrible moments in life, when one emerges from shelter and looks out, and it’s awful. One oughtn’t to give way to them. One ought to go home and have an extra-special tea. But at the very instant of thinking that, a young girl, thin, dark, shadowy – where had she come from? – was standing at Rosemary’s elbow and a voice like a sigh, almost like a sob, breathed: “Madam, may I speak to you a moment?” “Speak to me?” Rosemary turned. She saw a little battered creature with enormous eyes, someone quite young, no older than herself, who clutched at her coat-collar with reddened hands, and shivered as though she had just come out of the water. �Содержание “M – madam,” stammered the voice. “Would you let me have the price of a cup of tea?” “A cup of tea?’ There was something simple, sincere in that voice; it wasn’t in the least the voice of a beggar. “Then have you no money at all?” asked Rosemary. “None, madam,” came the answer. “How extraordinary!” Rosemary peered through the dusk and the girl gazed back at her. How more than extraordinary! And suddenly it seemed to Rosemary such an adventure. It was like something out of a novel by Dostoyevsky, this meeting in the dusk. Supposing she took the girl home? Supposing she did do one of those things she was always reading about or seeing on the stage, what would happen? It would be thrilling. And she heard herself saying afterwards to the amazement of her friends: “I simply took her home with me,” as she stepped forward and said to that dim person beside her: “Come home to tea with me.” The girl drew back startled. She even stopped shivering for a moment. Rosemary put out a hand and touched her arm. “I mean it,” she said, smiling. And she felt how simple and kind her smile was. “Why won’t you? Do. Come home with me now in my car and have tea.” “You – you don’t mean it, madam,” said the girl, and there was pain in her voice. “But I do,” cried Rosemary. “I want you to. To please me. Come along.” The girl put her fingers to her lips and her eyes devoured Rosemary. “You’re – you’re not taking me to the police station?” she stammered. “The police station!” Rosemary laughed out. “Why should I be so cruel? No, I only want to make you warm and to hear – anything you care to tell me.” Hungry people are easily led. The footman held the door of the car open, and a moment later they were skimming through the dusk. “There!” said Rosemary. She had a feeling of triumph as she slipped her hand through the velvet strap. She could have said, “How I’ve got you,” as she gazed at the little captive she had netted. But of course she meant it kindly. Oh, more than kindly. She was going to prove to this girl that – wonderful things did happen in life, that – fairy god-mothers were real, that – rich people had hearts, and that women were sisters. She turned impulsively, saying: “Don’t be frightened. After all, why shouldn’t you come back with me? We’re both women. If I’m the more fortunate, you ought to expect…” But happily at that moment, for she didn’t know how the sentence was going to end, the car stopped. The bell was rung, the door opened, and with a charming, protecting, almost embracing movement, Rosemary drew the other into the hall. Warmth, softness, light, a sweet scent, all those things so familiar to her she never even thought about them, she watched that other receive. It was fascinating. She was like the rich little girl in her nursery with all the cupboards to open, all the boxes to unpack. “Come, come upstairs,” said Rosemary, longing to begin to be generous. “Come up to my room.” And, besides, she wanted to spare this poor little thing from being stared at by the servants; she decided as they mounted the stairs she would not even ring to Jeanne, but take off her things by herself. The great thing was to be natural! And “There!” cried Rosemary again, as they reached her beautiful big bedroom with the �Содержание curtains drawn, the fire leaping on her wonderful lacquer furniture, her gold cushions and the primrose and blue rugs. The girl stood just inside the door; she seemed dazed. But Rosemary didn’t mind that. “Come and sit down,” she cried, dragging her big chair up to the fire, ”in this comfy chair. Come and get warm. You look so dreadfully cold.” “I daren’t, Madam,” said the girl and she edged backwards. “Oh, please,” – Rosemary ran forward – “you mustn’t be frightened, you mustn’t, really. Sit down, when I’ve taken off my things we shall go into the next room and have tea and be cosy. Why are you afraid?” And gently she half pushed the thin figure into its deep cradle. But there was no answer. The girl stayed just as she had been put, with her hands by her sides and her mouth slightly open. To be quite sincere, she looked rather stupid. But Rosemary wouldn’t acknowledge it. She leant over her, saying: “Won’t you take off your hat? Your pretty hair is all wet. And one is so much more comfortable without a hat, isn’t one?” There was a whisper that sounded like “Very good, madam,” and the crushed hat was taken off. “And let me help you off with your coat, too,” said Rosemary. The girl stood up. But she held on to the chair with one hand and let Rosemary pull. It was quite an effort. The other scarcely helped her at all. She seemed to stagger like a child, and the thought came and went through Rosemary’s mind, that if people wanted helping they must respond a little, just a little, otherwise it became very difficult indeed. And what was she to do with the coat now? She left it on the floor, and the hat too. She was just going to take a cigarette off the mantelpiece when the girl said quickly, but so lightly and strangely: “I’m very sorry, madam, but I’m going to faint. I shall go off, madam, if I don’t have something.” “Good heavens, how thoughtless I am!” Rosemary rushed to the bell. “Tea! Tea at once! And some brandy immediately!” The maid was gone again, but the girl almost cried out: “No, I don’t want no brandy. I never drink brandy. It’s a cup of tea I want, madam.” And she burst into tears. It was a terrible and fascinating moment. Rosemary knelt beside her chair. “Don’t cry, poor little thing,” she said. “Don’t cry.” And she gave the other her lace handkerchief. She really was touched beyond words. She put her arm round those thin, birdlike shoulders. Now at last the other forgot to be shy, forgot everything, except that they were both women, and gasped out: “I can’t go on any longer like this. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. I shall do away with myself. I can’t bear no more.” “You shan’t have to. I’ll look after you. Don’t cry any more. Don’t you see what a good thing it was that you met me? We’ll have tea and you’ll tell me everything. And I shall arrange something. I promise. Do stop crying. It’s so exhausting. Please!” The other did stop just in time for Rosemary to get up before the tea came. She had the table placed between them. She plied the poor little creature with everything, all the sandwiches, all �Содержание the bread and butter, and every time her cup was empty she filled it with tea, cream and sugar. People always said sugar was so nourishing. As for herself she didn’t eat; she smoked and looked away tactfully so that the other should not be shy. And really the effect of that slight meal was marvellous. When the tea-table was carried away a new being, a light, frail creature with tangled hair, dark lips, deep, lighted eyes, lay back in the big chair in a kind of sweet languor, looking at the blaze. Rosemary lit a fresh cigarette; it was time to begin. “And when did you have your last meal?” she asked softly. But at that moment the doorhandle turned. “Rosemary, may I come in?” It was Philip. “Of course.” He came in. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, and stopped and stared. “It’s quite all right,” said Rosemary, smiling. “This is my friend. Miss –” “Smith, madam,” said the languid figure, who was strangely still and unafraid. “Smith,” said Rosemary. “We are going to have a little talk.” “Oh, yes,” said Philip, “Quite,” and his eye caught sight of the coat and hat on the floor. He came over to the fire and turned his back to it. “It’s a beastly afternoon,” he said curiously, still looking at that listless figure, looking at its hands and boots, and then at Rosemary again. “Yes, isn’t it?” said Rosemary enthusiastically. “Vile.” Philip smiled his charming smile. “As a matter of fact,” said he, “I wanted you to come into the library for a moment. Would you? Will Miss Smith excuse us?” The big eyes were raised to him, but Rosemary answered for her: “Of course she will.” And they went out of the room together. “I say”, said Philip, when they were alone. “Explain, who is she? What does it all mean?” Rosemary, laughing, leaned against the door and said: “I picked her up in Curzon Street. Really. She’s a real pick-up. She asked me for the price of a cup of tea, and I brought her home with me.” “But what on earth are you going to do with her?” cried Philip. “Be nice to her,” said Rosemary quickly. “Be frightfully nice to her. Look after her. I don’t know how. We haven’t talked yet. But show her – treat her – make her feel…” “My darling girl,” said Philip, “you’re quite mad, you know. It simply can’t be done.” “I knew you’d say that,” retorted Rosemary. “Why not? I want to. Isn’t that a reason? And besides, one’s always reading about these things. I decided –” “But,” said Philip slowly, and he cut the end of a cigar, “she’s so astonishingly pretty.” “Pretty?” Rosemary was so surprised that she blushed. “Do you think so? I – I hadn’t thought about it.” “Good Lord!” Philip struck a match. “She’s absolutely lovely. Look again, my child. I was bowled over when I came into your room just now. However… I think you’re making a ghastly �Содержание mistake. Sorry, darling, if I’m crude and all that. But let me know if Miss Smith is going to dine with us in time for me to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.” “You absurd creature!” said Rosemary, and she went out of the library, but not back to her bedroom. She went to her writing – room and sat down at her desk. Pretty! Absolutely lovely! Bowled over! Her heart beat like a heavy bell. Pretty! Lovely! She drew her chequebook towards her. But no, cheques would be no use, of course. She opened a drawer and took out five pound notes, looked at them, put two back, and holding the three squeezed in her hand, she went back to her bedroom. Half an hour later Philip was still in the library, when Rosemary came in. “I only wanted to tell you,” said she, and she leaned against the door again and looked at him with her dazzled exotic gaze. “Miss Smith won’t dine with us to – night.” Philip put down the paper. “Oh, what’s happened? Previous engagement?” Rosemary came over and sat down on his knee. “She insisted on going,” said she, “so I gave the poor little thing a present of money. I couldn’t keep her against her will, could I?” she added softly. Rosemary had just done her hair, darkened her eyes a little and put on her pearls. She put up her hands and touched Philip’s cheeks. “Do you like me?” said she, and her tone, sweet, husky, troubled him. “I like you awfully,” he said, and he held her tighter. “Kiss me.” There was a pause. Then Rosemary said dreamily: “I saw a fascinating little box today. It cost twenty-eight guineas. May I have it?” Philip jumped her on his knee. “You may, little wasteful one,” said he. But that was not really what Rosemary wanted to say. “Philip,” she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, “am I pretty?” Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story 1. Speak about Katherine Mansfield and the peculiarities of her artistic style. 2. Give the gist of the story. What exactly happens in the story? Characterize the plot of the story and its development. Who is the narrator of the story? Is there one narrator or does the author delegate the narration to the characters? Give evidence from the text to support your opinion. 3. Read very carefully the first two paragraphs of the story which present Rosemary Fell. In what form is the description presented? Who is speaking? How many adjectives are used in this two paragraphs and what is their role? Point out various means of intensification and comment on their contribution to the description of Rosemary. Pay attention to her son’s name. Why does the author draw our attention to it? How many times does the author use the transferred epithet ‘a duck of a boy’? What is the effect of this repetition? 4. Analyze the passage starting with “One winter afternoon…” and ending with “He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever.” and comment on this part of narration. Who is �Содержание the narrator here? Through whose eyes can we see the box? What kind of person is the shopkeeper? How is his character-sketch made? Why didn’t Rosemary buy the box immediately? What is the role of unfinished sentences in this part of the text? 5. Analyze the description of the winter afternoon. The author gives the description of the evening in great detail. What is the role of this description? What is the tone of the description? What is the undertone that you can discern? Rosemary was very upset, wasn’t she? Do you share Rosemary’s feelings? Does the author sympathize with Rosemary? Support your opinion by quoting the text. 6. Read very carefully the events described in the story and comment on Rosemary’s actions and their motives. What made her invite the poor girl to her house? Did she do it for the girl’s or for her own sake? Prove your point of view by quoting the text. Comment on Rosemary’s behavior when she brought the girl home. Pick out the means of drawing the picture of a generous person that Rosemary tries to be. Is it her real self or is she acting the role of a generous person? What proves the fact that it is all staged? Comment on the sentence: “She was longing to be generous”. 7. Comment on the outcome of the story and the sudden end of Rosemary’s generosity. What is the role of the short exclamatory sentences: “Pretty! Absolutely lovely! …”? What is the role of the small detail about a money-gift in this episode? 8. There is a break in the narration of events in between Rosemary’s going to her bedroom and her returning to the library half an hour later. Let’s reconstruct the events that happened during this half an hour. Why does the author resort to the gap in the development of the plot? Analyze the dialogue that took place between Philip and Rosemary half an hour later and its role in revealing the message of the story. Comment on the closing sentence of the story. 9. What do you think is the theme and message of the story. Can we make a conclusion that K. Mansfield is a great master of psychological portrayal of people? 10. Summarize your answers, add your own observations about the style of Katherine Mansfield and prepare the final analysis of the story. �Содержание Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era, and reputedly, the highest paid author during the 1930s. Maugham’s father was an English lawyer handling the legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris, France. Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, his father arranged for William to be born at the embassy, technically on British soil, saving him from conscription into any future French wars. Maugham’s mother Edith Mary was consumptive, a condition for which her doctor prescribed childbirth. As a result, Maugham had three older brothers already enrolled in boarding school by the time he was three and he was effectively raised as an only child. Childbirth proved no cure for tuberculosis: Edith’s sixth and final son died on 25 January 1882, one day after his birth, on Maugham’s eighth birthday. Edith died six days later, on 31 January, at the age of 41. The death of his mother left Maugham traumatized for life, and he kept his mother’s photograph by his bedside until his own death at the age of 91 in Nice, France. Two years after Maugham’s mother’s death, his father died of cancer. William was sent back to England to be cared for by his uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. The move was catastrophic. Henry Maugham proved cold and emotionally cruel. The King’s School, Canterbury, where William was a boarder during school terms, proved merely another version of purgatory, where he was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father. It is at this time that Maugham developed the stammer that would stay with him all his life, although it was sporadic and subject to mood and circumstance. Maugham was miserable both at the vicarage and at school. As a result, he developed a talent for applying a wounding remark to those who displeased him. This ability is sometimes reflected in the characters that populate his writings. At sixteen, Maugham refused to continue at The King’s School and his uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. He spent the next five years as a medical student at St Thomas’ Hospital, Lambeth, London. Some critics have assumed that the years Maugham spent studying medicine were a creative dead end, but Maugham himself felt quite the contrary. He was able to live in the lively city of London, to meet people of a “low” sort that he would never have met in one of the other professions, and to see them in a time of heightened anxiety and meaning in their lives. In maturity, he recalled the literary value of what he saw as a medical student: “I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief” �Содержание In 1897, he wrote his book Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences. The novel Liza of Lambeth proved popular with both reviewers and the public, and the first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. This was enough to convince Maugham, who had qualified as a doctor, to drop medicine and embark on his sixty-five year career as a man of letters. Of his entry into the profession of writing he later said, “I took to it as a duck takes to water.” By 1914 Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published. Maugham’s masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semiautobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who like Maugham, was orphaned, and brought up by his pious uncle. Philip’s clubfoot causes him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham’s struggles with his stutter. Later successful novels were also based on real-life characters: The Moon and Sixpence fictionalizes the life of Paul Gauguin; and Cakes and Ale contains thinly veiled characterizations of authors Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Maugham’s last major novel, The Razor’s Edge, published in 1944, was a departure for him in many ways. While much of the novel takes place in Europe, its main characters are American, not British. The protagonist is a disillusioned veteran of World War I who abandons his wealthy friends and lifestyle, travelling to India seeking enlightenment. The story’s themes of Eastern mysticism and war-weariness struck a chord with readers as World War II waned, and a movie adaptation quickly followed. Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East, and are typically concerned with the emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Some of his more outstanding works in this genre include “Rain”, “Footprints in the Jungle”, and “The Outstation”. “Rain”, in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the Pacific island prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its fame and been made into a movie several times. Maugham said that many of his short stories presented themselves to him in the stories he heard during his travels in the outposts of the Empire. In 1928, Maugham bought Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, which was his home the rest of his life. His output continued to be prodigious, including plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. He died in 1965 at his villa in France. Maugham wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as “such a tissue of clichés that one’s wonder is finally aroused at the writer’s ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way”. W. Somerset Maugham’s style of writing is clear and precise. He does not impose his views on the reader. He puts a question and leaves it to the reader to answer it. Even criticizing something he sounds rather amused than otherwise. �Содержание The Happy Man It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have always wondered at the selfconfidence of the politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of view. I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower land he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, I by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself. And life, unfortunately, is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable and who am I that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own; a complete and rounded thing; I have not been tempted to teach my neighbour what he should do with his. But there are men who flounder at the journey’s start, the way before them is confused and hazardous, and on occasion, however unwillingly, I have been forced to point the finger of fate. Sometimes men have said to me, what shall I do with my life? And I have seen myself for a moment wrapped in the dark cloak of Destiny. Once I know that I advised well. I was a young man, and I lived in a modest apartment in London near Victoria Station. Late one afternoon, when I was beginning to think that I had worked enough for that day, I heard a ring at the bell. I opened the door to a total stranger. He asked me my name; I told him. He asked if he might come in. “Certainly.” He seemed a trifle embarrassed, I offered him a cigarette and he had some difficulty in lighting it without letting go off his hat. When he had satisfactorily achieved this feat I asked him if I should put it on a chair for him. He quickly did this and while doing it he dropped his umbrella. “I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you like this,” he “My name is Stephens and I am a doctor. You’re in the medical, I believe.” “Yes, but I don’t practise.” “No, I know. I’ve just read a book of yours about Spain and I wanted to ask you about it.” “It’s not a very good book, I’m afraid.” “The fact remains that you know something about Spain and there’s no one else I know who does. And I thought perhaps I wouldn’t mind giving me some information.” “I shall be very glad.” He was silent for a moment. He reached out for his hat and holding it in one hand absentmindedly stroked it with the other. I surmised that it gave him confidence. “I hope you won’t think it very odd for a perfect stranger to come to you like this.” He gave an apologetic laugh. “I’m not going to tell you the story of my life.” When people say this to me I always know that it is precisely what they are going to do. I do not mind. In fact I rather like it. “I was brought up by two old aunts. I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve never done anything. I’ve �Содержание been married for six years. I have children. I’m a medical officer at the Camberwell Infirmary. I can’t stick it any more.” There was something’ very striking in the short, sharp sentences he used. They had a forcible ring. I had not given him more than a cursory glance, but now I looked at him with curiosity. He was a little man, thick-set and stout, of thirty perhaps, with a round face from which shone small, dark and very bright eyes. His black hair was cropped close to a bullet-shaped head. He was dressed in a blue suit a good deal the worse for wear. It was baggy at the knees and the pockets bulged untidily. “You know what the duties are of a medical officer in an infirmary. One day is pretty much like another. And that's all I’ve to look forward to for the rest of my life. Do you think it's worth?” “It’s a means of livelihood,” I answered. “Yes, I know. The money’s pretty good.” “I don’t exactly know why you've come to me.” “Well, I wanted to know whether you thought there would any chance for an English doctor in Spain?” “Why Spain?” “I don’t know, I just have a fancy for it.” “It’s not like Carmen, you know.” “But there’s sunshine there, and there’s good wine, and there’s colour, and there's air you can breathe. Let me say what I have to say straight out. I heard by accident that there was no English doctor in Seville. Do you think 1 could earn a living there? Is it madness to give up a good safe job for an uncertainty?” “What does your wife think about it?” “She's willing.” “It's a great risk.” “I know. But if you say take it, I will; if you say stay where you re, I'll stay.” He was looking at me intently with those bright dark eyes of his and I knew that he meant what he said. I reflected for a moment. “Your whole future is concerned: you must decide for yourself. But this I can tell you: if you don't want money but are content to earn just enough to keep body and soul together, then go. For you will lead a wonderful life.” He left me, I thought about him for a day or two, and then forgot. The episode passed completely from my memory. Many years later, fifteen at least, I happened to be in Seville and having some trifling indisposition asked the hotel porter whether there was an English doctor in the town. He said there was and gave me the address. I took a cab and as I drove up to the house a little fat man came out of it. He hesitated when he caught sight of me. “Have you come to see me?” he said. “I’m the English doctor.” explained my errand and he asked me to come in. He lived in ordinary Spanish house, with a patio, and his consulting room which led out of it littered with papers, books, medical appliances, and lumber. The sight of it would have startled a squeamish patient. We did our business and then I asked the doctor �Содержание what his fee was. He shook his head and smiled. “There’s no fee.” “Why on earth not?” “Don’t you remember me? Why, I’m here because of something you said to me. You changed my whole life for me. I’m Stephens.” I had not the least notion what he was talking about. He reminded me of our interview, he repeated to me what we had said, and gradually, out of the night, a dim recollection of the incident came back to me. “I was wondering if I’d ever see you again,” he said, “I was wondering if ever I’d have a chance of thanking you for all you’ve done for me.” “It’s been a success then?” I looked at him. He was very fat now and bald, but his eyes twinkled gaily and his fleshy, red face bore an expression of perfect: good-humour. The clothes he wore, terribly shabby they were, had been made obviously by a Spanish tailor and his hat was the wide-brimmed sombrero of the Spaniard, He looked to me as though he knew a good bottle of wine when he saw it. He had a dissipated, though entirely sympathetic, appearance. You might have hesitated to let him remove your appendix, but you could not have imagined a more delightful creature to drink a glass of wine with. “Surely you were married?” I asked. “Yes. My wife didn’t like Spain, she went back to Camberwell she was more at home there.” “Oh, I’m sorry for that.” His black eyes flashed a bacchanalian smile. He really had somewhat the look of a young Silenus. “Life is full of compensations,” he murmured. The words were hardly out of his mouth when a Spanish woman, no longer in her first youth, but still boldly and voluptuously beautiful, appeared at the door. She spoke to him in Spanish, and I could not fail to perceive that she was the mistress of the house. As he stood at the door to let me out he said to me: “You told me when last I saw you that if I came here I should, earn just enough money to keep body and soul together, but that I should lead a wonderful life. Well, I want to tell you that you were right. Poor I have been and poor I shall always be, but by heaven I’ve enjoyed myself. I wouldn’t exchange the life I’ve had with that of any king in the world.” Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story 1. Point out the most important facts of Maugham’s biography which are important for understanding his artistic credo and the peculiarities of his individual style. 2. Comment on the title of the story and its theme. 3. Analyze the thesis presented by the author in the exposition to the story and express your own opinion about it. How does it reflect the mentality and the cultural specificity of the English? Point out the language means of generalization used in the presentation of the thesis. Point out the metaphor employed by the author in describing people in modern society and relations between them. Point out other expressive means in the exposition and comment on �Содержание their contribution to the style. 4. Give a short summary of events described in the story and characterize the plot. Is the plot intricate or rather simple and predictable? 5. What parts can we point out in the structure of the story? Reread the conversation that took place between the narrator and the unexpexted visitor. Why did the author feel so surprised to see a total stranger in his house? Was the author willing to give advice to the stranger? How did he try to decline the request? What made him finally give in and listen to the visitor’s problem? 6. Comment on the character of Dr. Stepens and the means used by the author to portray his character. Pay special attention to the little details which reveal his character. Comment on the author’s method of character drawing. What exactly was wrong with the man’s life that made him say “I can’t stick it any more”? Analyze the sentences in which he presents his story. What does the repetition of the same structure in his story reflect? 7. Compare the description of Stephens’ appearance in London and in Spain. What were the reasons of such a radical change? Point out the epithets, similes and other stylistic means which are used to describe his appearance. 8. Comment on the concluding lines of the story which actually express the message of the story. What is, in your opinion, the message of the story? Write an essay on the topic of happiness. You may make use of the following quotations. “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensible part of happiness”. Bertrand Russel “The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise man grows it under his feet”. James Oppenhaim “Happiness is nothing more than a good health and a bad memory” . Albert Scgweitzer “Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy”. Guillaume Apollinaire “To be happy for an hour, get drunk; to be happy for a year, fall in love; to be happy for life, take up gardening”. Chinese proverb �Содержание O. Henry (1862–1910) William Sidney Porter was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. His middle name at birth was Sidney; he changed the spelling to Sydney in 1898. His parents were Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter, a physician, and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter). When William was three, his mother died from tuberculosis, and he and his father moved into the home of his maternal grandmother. As a child, Porter was always reading, everything from classics to dime novels; his favorite works were Lane’s translation of One Thousand and One Nights, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Porter graduated from his aunt Evelina Maria Porter’s elementary school in 1876. He then enrolled at the Lindsey Street High School. His aunt continued to tutor him until he was fifteen. In 1879, he started working in his uncles drugstore and in 1881, at the age of nineteen, he was licensed as a pharmacist. At the drugstore, he also showed off his natural artistic talents by sketching the townsfolk. Porter traveled with Dr. James K. Hall to Texas in March 1882, hoping that a change of air would help alleviate a persistent cough he had developed. While on the ranch, he learned bits of Spanish and German from the mix of immigrant ranch hands. He also spent time reading classic literature. Porter took a number of different jobs over the next several years, first as pharmacist then as a draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began writing as a sideline. Porter led an active social life in Austin, including membership in singing and drama groups. Porter was a good singer and musician. He played both the guitar and mandolin. He became a member of the “Hill City Quartet,” a group of young men who sang at gatherings and serenaded young women of the town. Porter met and began courting Athol Estes, then seventeen years old and from a wealthy family. Her mother objected to the match because Athol was ill, suffering from tuberculosis. On July 1, 1887, Porter eloped with Athol to the home of Reverend R.K. Smoot, where they were married. The couple continued to participate in musical and theater groups, and Athol encouraged her husband to pursue his writing. Athol gave birth to a son, who died hours after birth, and then a daughter. Porter began working at the First National Bank of Austin as a teller. In 1894, he was accused by the bank of embezzlement and lost his job but was not indicted. Porter and his family moved to Houston in 1895, where he started writing for the Post. His salary was only $25 a month, but it rose steadily as his popularity increased. Porter gathered ideas for his column by loitering in hotel lobbies and observing and talking to people there. This was a technique he used throughout his writing career. While he was in Houston, the First National Bank of Austin was audited and the federal auditors found �Содержание several discrepancies. They managed to get a federal indictment against Porter. Porter was subsequently arrested on charges of embezzlement, charges which he denied, in connection with his employment at the bank. Athol Estes Porter died on July 25, 1897, from tuberculosis. Having little to say in his own defense, was found guilty of embezzlement in February 1898, sentenced to five years jail, and imprisoned on March 25, 1898 While in prison, Porter, as a licensed pharmacist, worked in the prison hospital as the night druggist. Porter was given his own room in the hospital wing, and there is no record that he actually spent time in the cell block of the prison. He had fourteen stories published under various pseudonyms while he was in prison, but was becoming best known as O. Henry . Porter was released on July 24, 1901, for good behavior after serving three years. Porter reunited with his daughter Margaret, now age 11, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Porter’s most prolific writing period started in 1902, when he moved to New York City to be near his publishers. While there, he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine. His wit, characterization and plot twists were adored by his readers, but often panned by critics. Porter married again in 1907, to childhood sweetheart Sarah (Sallie) Lindsey Coleman, whom he met again after revisiting his native state of North Carolina. His health began to deteriorate in 1908, which affected his writing. Sarah left him in 1909, and Porter died on June 5, 1910. O. Henry’s stories are famous for their surprise endings, to the point that such an ending is often referred to as an “O. Henry ending.” He was called the American answer to Guy de Maupassant. Both authors wrote twist endings, but O. Henry stories were much more playful. His stories are also well known for witty narration. Most of O. Henry’s stories are set in his own time, the early years of the 20th century. Many take place in New York City and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. Fundamentally a product of his time, O. Henry’s work provides one of the best examples of catching the entire flavor of an age written in the English language. Whether roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the “gentle grafter,” or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in turn-of-the-century New York, O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. The Cop and the Anthem On the bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand. A dead leaf fell in Soapy’s lap. That was Jack Frost’s card. Jack is kind to the regular denizens of Madison Square, and gives fair warning of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands his pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All Outdoors, so that the inhabitants thereof may make ready. Soapy’s mind became cognizant of the fact that the time had come for him to resolve himself �Содержание into a singular Committee of Ways and Means to provide against the coming rigor. And therefore he moved uneasily on his bench. The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them were no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific Southern skies or drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the Island was what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable. For years the hospitable Blackwell’s had been his winter quarters. Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time was come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed big and timely in Soapy’s mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the city’s dependents. In Soapy’s opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There was an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy’s proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman’s private affairs. Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest. Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering sign, where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm, and the protoplasm. Soapy had confidence in himself in the lowest button of his vest upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter’s mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing – with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demitasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the I management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge. But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter’s eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard. �Содержание Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted Island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be thought of. At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running around the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons. “Where’s the man that done that?” inquired the officer, excitedly. “Don’t you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?” said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good fortune. The policeman’s mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who smash windows do not remain to parley with the law’s minions. They take to their heels. The policeman saw a man halfway down the block running to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful. On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great pretensions. It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and telltale trousers without challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak, flapjacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter he betrayed the fact that the minutest coin and himself were strangers. “Now, get busy and call a cop,” said Soapy. “And don’t keep a gentleman waiting.” “No cops for you,” said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. “Hey, Con!” Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched Soapy. He arose joint by joint, as a carpenter’s rule opens, and beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drug store two doors away laughed and walked down the street. Five blocks Soapy traveled before his courage permitted him to woo capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously termed to himself a “cinch”. A young woman of a modest and pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards form the window a large policeman of severe demeanor leaned against a water plug. It was Soapy’s design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated “masher”. The refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that would insure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little isle. Soapy straightened the lady missionary’s ready-made tie, dragged his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and “hems”, smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the impudent and contemptible litany of the “masher”. With half an eye Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised his hat and said: �Содержание “Ah there, Bedelia! Don’t you want to come and play in my yard?” The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cozy warmth of the station house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand, caught Soapy’s coat sleeve. “Sure, Mike,” she said joyfully, “if you’ll blow me to a pail of suds. I’d have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.” With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked past the policeman overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty. At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon it, and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of “disorderly conduct”. On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved, and otherwise disturbed the welkin. The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked to a citizen. “ ‘Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin’ the goose egg they give to the Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We’ve instructions to lave them be.” Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling wind. In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily. “My umbrella,” he said, sternly. “Oh, is it?” sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. “Wee, why don’t you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don’t you call a cop? There stands one on the corner.” The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman looked at the two curiously. “Of course,” said the umbrella man – “that is – well, you know how these mistakes occur – I – if it’s your umbrella I hope you’ll excuse me – I picked it up this morning in a restaurant – If you recognize it as yours, why – I hope you’ll – ” “Of course it’s mine,” said Soapy, viciously. The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car that was approaching two blocks away. Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He hurled the umbrella �Содержание wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong. At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench. But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the iron fence. The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves – for a little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars. The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence. And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet: he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. Tomorrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him tomorrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would – Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman. “What are you doin’ here?” asked the officer. “Nothin’,” said Soapy. “Then come along,” said the policeman. “Three months on the Island,” said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning. Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story 1. Speak about O. Henry and his literary art: the story of his life, his literary career, his favorite themes, his favorite characters. 2. Where is the scene laid? Give a short summary of what exactly happens in the story. 3. Is this a typical or an atypical O. Henry story? Give reasons for your opinion. 4. In what key is the story written? Is the mood of the story the same or does it change as the �Содержание plot develops? Point out the main stages in the development of the plot. What is the main means of creating a humorous effect in the story? Pay attention to the mixture of styles, which finds its reflection in the choice of words, the choice of syntactic constructions and the peculiarity of his phrases. 5. Speak about the main character of the story. Comment on his name, his appearance, his lifestyle, his thoughts, and his wishes. Is he presented as an ordinary primitive tramp or as a philosopher? Follow Soapy’s desperate attempts to provide himself a shelter. Is he pleased to be sent to the Island? What is the author’s attitude to his character? What devices does the author use to portray the character? Quote the text to support your opinion. 6. Comment on the title and the message of the story. 7. Summarize your observations of the style and the language of the story. Point out the stylistic devices that the author favours. �Содержание Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and his public image. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Many of his works are classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After leaving high school he worked for a few months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to become an ambulance driver during World War I, which became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home within the year. In 1922 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During his time there he met and was influenced by modernist writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the “Lost Generation”. His first novel, “The Sun Also Rises”, was published in 1926. After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced following Hemingway’s return from covering the Spanish Civil War, after which he wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they split when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. During the war he was present at D-Day and the liberation of Paris. Shortly after the publication of “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952 Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or illhealth for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and ’40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961. Hemingway’s legacy to American literature is his style. He referred to his style as the iceberg theory: in his writing the facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out-of-sight. Writing in “The Art of the Short Story,” he explains: “A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit.” The simplicity of his prose is deceptive. Zoe Trodd believes Hemingway crafted skeletal �Содержание sentences in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had “used up words.” Hemingway offers a “multi-focal” photographic reality. His iceberg theory of omission is the foundation on which he builds. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic “snapshot” style creates a collage of images. Many types of internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) are omitted in favor of short declarative sentences. The sentences build on each other, as events build to create a sense of the whole. Multiple strands exist in one story; an “embedded text” bridges to a different angle. He also uses other cinematic techniques of “cutting” quickly from one scene to the next; or of “splicing” a scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap, as though responding to instructions from the author, and create threedimensional prose. In his literature, and in his personal writing, Hemingway habitually used the word “and” in place of commas. This use of polysyndeton may serve to convey immediacy. Hemingway’s polysyndetonic sentence – or in later works his use of subordinate clauses – uses conjunctions to juxtapose startling visions and images; Jackson Benson compares them to haikus. Many of Hemingway’s followers misinterpreted his lead and frowned upon all expression of emotion; Saul Bellow satirized this style as “Do you have emotions? Strangle them.” However, Hemingway’s intent was not to eliminate emotion, but to portray it more scientifically. Hemingway thought it would be easy, and pointless, to describe emotions; he sculpted collages of images in order to grasp the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always. Many writers of his generation were influenced not only by his style but also by his philosophy, his masculinity and his public image. His stories and novels became part of American and world cultural heritage. The extent of Hemingway's influence is seen in the tributes and echoes of his fiction in popular culture. A minor planet, discovered in 1978 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, was named for him (3656 Hemingway); Ray Bradbury wrote The Kilimanjaro Device, with Hemingway transported to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; the 1993 motion picture Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, about the friendship of two retired men, Irish and Cuban, in a seaside town in Florida, starred Robert Duvall, Richard Harris, Shirley MacLaine, Sandra Bullock, and Piper Laurie. Cat in the Rain There were only two Americans at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs to their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colours of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor-cars were gone from the square by the �Содержание war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the café a waiter stood looking out at the empty square. The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on. “I’m going down and get that kitty,” the American wife said. “I’ll do it,” her husband offered from the bed. “No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.” The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed. “Don’t get wet,” he said. The wife went downstairs and the hotel owner stood up and bowed to her as she passed the office. He was an old man and very tall. “Il piove,” the wife said. She liked the hotelkeeper. “Si, si, Signora, brutto tempo. It’s very bad weather.” He stood behind his desk in the far end of the dim room. The wife liked him. She liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he wanted to serve her. She liked the way he felt about being a hotelkeeper. She liked his old, heavy face and big hands. Liking him she opened the door and looked out. It was raining harder. A man in a rubber cape was crossing the empty square to the café. The cat would be around to the right. Perhaps she could go along under the eaves. As she stood in the doorway an umbrella opened behind her. It was the maid who looked after their room. “You must not get wet,” she smiled, speaking Italian. Of course, the hotelkeeper had sent her. With the maid holding the umbrella over her, she walked along the gravel path until she was under their window. The table was there, washed bright green in the rain, but the cat was gone. She was suddenly disappointed. The maid looked up at her. “Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signora?” “There was a cat,” said the American girl. “A cat?” “Si, il gatto.” “A cat?” the maid laughed. “A cat in the rain?” “Yes,” she said, “under the table.” Then, “Oh, I wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty.” When she talked English the maid’s face tightened. “Come, Signora,” she said. “We must get back inside. You will be wet.” “I suppose so,” said the American girl. They went back along the gravel path and passed in the door. The maid stayed outside to close the umbrella. As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk. Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at �Содержание the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance. She went on up the stairs. She opened the door of the room. George was on the bed, reading. “Did you get the cat?” he asked, putting the book down. “It was gone.” “Wonder where it went to?” he said, resting his eyes from reading. She sat down on the bed. “I wanted it so much,” she said. “I don’t know why I wanted it so mush. I wanted that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain!” George was reading again. She went over and sat in front of the mirror of the dressing-table looking at herself with the hand glass. She studied her profile, first one side and then the other. Then she studied the back of her head and her neck. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?” she asked, looking at her profile again. George looked up and saw the back of her neck, clipped close like a boy’s. “I like it the way it is.” “I get so tired of it,” she said. “I get so tired of looking like a boy.” George shifted his position in the bed. He hadn’t looked away from her since she started to speak. “You look pretty darn nice,” he said. She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the widow and looked out. It was getting dark. “I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,” she said. “I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.” “Yeah?” George said from the bed. “And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.” “Oh, shut up and get something to read,” George said. He was reading again. His wife was looking out of the widow. It was quite dark now and still raining in the palm trees. “Anyway, I want a cat,” she said, “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.” George was not listening. He was reading his book. His wife looked out of the window where the light had come on in the square. Someone knocked at the door. “Avanti,” George said. He looked up from his book. In the doorway stood the maid. She held a big tortoiseshell cat pressed tight against her and �Содержание swung down against her body. “Excuse me,” she said, “the padrone asked me to bring this for the Signora.” Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story 1. Speak about Ernest Hemingway: the most important facts from his life, his literary career, the peculiarities of his literary style, his artistic credo. What technique of writing is associated with the name of Ernest Hemingway? 2. What is your first impression of the story? What exactly happens in the story? What do you think about the plot? Is it absorbing, intricate or very simple, dynamic or somewhat static? Is there any connection between the character of the plot and the message of the story? 3. Analyze the first paragraph of the story. What do you think of the description contained in it? Do you find it emotional or rather matter of-fact? Comment on the words used in the description: are they literary or every day? Does the author resort to the ample use of epithets or metaphors which are usually employed in description? Comment on the length of sentences. Are most of them long or short? Do the structures of sentences vary much or are they mostly identical? What effect does it produce? Critics often say that Hemingway’s prose is very visual, that it has a kind of cinematographic effect. Do you agree? If you do, how is this effect created? How many times is the rain mentioned and what is the role of the rain in the story? Does it create a certain mood? If it does what is the mood it creates? What does the rain symbolize? 4. Speak about the central character of the story, the American wife. What kind of person is she? Do we learn much about her appearance, her thoughts? Through whose eyes are the events perceived? Find elements in the narration that support your point of view. Is their marriage happy? What exactly does she want to feel happy? Count up the number of times the verb “want” is used in the story and comment on the effect of this repetition. What other words are repeated in the story and how do they help us to perceive the message? Why does she want the cat so badly? What does the cat mean to her? The cat is a very complex symbol, isn’t it? What does it include? 5. Sum up the character of the husband. Does he act or speak much in the story? What is he doing all the time? Why is he reading throughout the whole story? Is he really engrossed in reading or is it a kind of shelter for him? Does he care much about his wife’s problems? Does he try to understand her and help her or is he irritated? Find facts from the story to support your opinion. Pay special attention to the shift in the narration in this part of the text. Through whose eyes are the events presented in the part devoted to her husband? 6. Comment on the minor characters of the story: the hotel keeper and the maid. What is their role in the development of the plot? Why does the American wife like the hotel keeper? Does he understand what she really wants? How does he try to help her? 7. Comment on the outcome of the story. Is the end expected or unexpected? If you consider the end unexpected, does it have anything in common with the unexpected ends in O. Henry’s stories or is it different? What does the tortoise-shell cat brought by the maid symbolize? 8. Speak about the message and the title of the story. Is the message perceived from what is written or mostly from the undercurrent (from what remains unsaid)? Sum up your �Содержание observations about Hemingway’s style and give your impression of it. Stories for Self-Guided Analysis Stories for Self-Guided Analysis Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras �Содержание Stories for Self-Guided Analysis Stories for Self-Guided Analysis Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras �Содержание Katherine Mans ield. Honeymoon And when they came out of the lace shop there was their own driver and the cab they called their own cab waiting for them under a plane tree. What luck! Wasn’t it luck? Fanny pressed her husband’s arm. These things seemed always to be happening to them ever since they – came abroad. Didn’t he think so too? But George stood on the pavement edge, lifted his stick, and gave a loud “Hi!” Fanny sometimes felt a little uncomfortable about the way George summoned cabs, but the drivers didn’t seem to mind, so it must have been all right. Fat, goodnatured, and smiling, they stuffed away the little newspaper they were reading, whipped the cotton cover off the horse, and were ready to obey. “I say,” George said as he helped Fanny in, “suppose we go and have tea at the place where the lobsters grow. Would you like to?” “Most awfully,” said Fanny fervently, as she leaned back wondering why the way George put things made them sound so very nice. “R-right, bien.” He was beside her. “Allay,” he cried gaily, and off they went. Off they went, spanking along lightly, under the green and gold shade of the plane trees, through the small streets that smelled of lemons and fresh coffee, past the fountain square where women, with water-pots lifted, stopped talking to gaze after them, round the corner past the cafe, with its pink and white umbrellas, green tables, and blue siphons, and so to the sea front. There a wind, light, warm, came flowing over the boundless sea. It touched George, and Fanny it seemed to linger over while they gazed at the dazzling water. And George said, “Jolly, isn’t it?” And Fanny, looking dreamy, said, as she said at least twenty times a day since they – came abroad: “Isn’t it extraordinary to think that here we are quite alone, away from everybody, with nobody to tell us to go home, or to – to order us about except ourselves?” George had long since given up answering “Extraordinary!” As a rule he merely kissed her. But now he caught hold of her hand, stuffed it into his pocket, pressed her fingers, and said, “I used to keep a white mouse in my pocket when I was a kid.” “Did you?” said Fanny, who was intensely interested in everything George had ever done. “Were you very fond of white mice?” “Fairly,” said George, without conviction. He was looking at something, bobbing out there beyond the bathing steps. Suddenly he almost jumped in his seat. “Fanny!” he cried. “There is a chap out there bathing. Do you see? I’d no idea people had begun. I’ve been missing it all these days.” George glared at the reddened face, the reddened arm, as though he could not look away. “At any rate,” he muttered, “wild horses won’t keep me from going in to-morrow morning.” �Содержание Fanny’s heart sank. She had heard for years of the frightful dangers of the Mediterranean. It was an absolute death-trap. Beautiful, treacherous Mediterranean. There it lay curled before them, it’s white, silky paws touching the stones and gone again… But she’d made up her mind long before she was married that never would she be the kind of woman who interfered with her husband’s pleasures, so all she said was, airily, “I suppose one has to be very up in the currents, doesn’t one?” “Oh, I don’t know,” said George. “People talk an awful lot of rot about the danger.” But now they were passing a high wall on the land side, covered with flowering heliotrope, and Fanny’s little nose lifted. “Oh, George,” she breathed. “The smell! The most divine…” “Topping villa,” said George, “Look, you can see it through the palms.” “Isn’t it rather large?” said Fanny, who somehow could not look at any villa except as a possible habitation for herself and George. “Well, you’d need a crowd of people if you stayed there long,” replied George. “Deadly, otherwise. I say, it is ripping. I wonder who it belongs to”. And he prodded the driver in the back. The lazy, smiling driver, who had no idea, replied, as he always did on these occasions, that it was the property of a wealthy Spanish family. “Masses of Spaniards on this coast,” commented George, leaning back again, and they were silent until, as they rounded a bend, the big bone-white hotel-restaurant came into view. before it there was a small terrace built up against the sea, planted with umbrella palms, set out with tables, and at their approach, from the terrace, from the hotel, waiters came running to receive, to welcome Fanny and George, to cut them off from any possible kind of escape. “Outside?” Oh, but of course they wouldn’t sit outside. The sleek manager, who was marvelously like a fish in a frock-coat, skimmed forward. “Dis way, sir. Dis way, sir. I have a very nice little table,” he gasped. “Just the little table for you, sir, over in de corner. Dis way.” So George, looking most dreadfully bored, and Fanny, trying to look as though she’d spent years of life threading her way through strangers, followed after. “Here you are, sir. Here you will be very nice,” coaxed the manager, taking the vase off the table, and putting it down again as if it were a fresh little bouquet out of the air. But George refused to sit down immediately. He saw through these fellows; he wasn’t going to be done. These chaps were always out to rush you. So he put his hands in his pockets, and said to Fanny, very calmly, “This is right for you? Anywhere else you’d prefer? How about over there? ” And he nodded to a table right over the other side. What it was to be a man of the world! Fanny admired him deeply, but all she wanted to do was to sit down and look like everybody else. �Содержание “I – I like this,” said she. “Right,” said George hastily, and he sat down almost before Fanny, and said quickly, “Tea for two and chocolate éclairs.” “Very good, sir,” said the manager, and his mouth opened and shut as though he was ready for another dive under the water. “You will not’ave toasts to start with? We’ave very nice toasts, sir.” “No,” said George shortly. “You don’t want toast, do you, Fanny?” “Oh no, thank you, George,” said Fanny, praying the manager would go. “Or perhaps de lady might like to look at de live lobsters in de tank while the tea is coming?” And he grimaced and smirked and flicked his serviette like a fin. George’s face grew stony. He said “No” again, and Fanny bent over the table, unbuttoning her gloves. When she looked up the man was gone. George took off his hat, tossed it on a chair, and pressed back his hair. “Thank God,” said he, “that chap’s gone. These foreign fellows bore me stiff. The only way to get rid of them is simply to shut up as you saw I did. Thank heaven!” sighed George again with so much emotion that if it hadn’t been ridiculous Fanny might have imagined that he had been as frightened of the manager as she. As it was she felt a rush of love for George. His hands were on the table, brown, large hands that she knew so well. She longed to take one of them and squeeze it hard. But, to her astonishment, George did just that thing. Leaning across the table, he put his hand over hers, and said, without looking at her, “Fanny, darling Fanny!” “Oh, George!” It was in that heavenly moment that Fanny heard a twing-twing-tootle-tootle, and a light strumming. There’s going to be music, she thought, but the music didn’t matter just then. Nothing mattered except love. Faintly smiling she gazed into that faintly smiling face, and the filling was so blissful that she felt inclined to say to George, “Let us stay here – where we are – at this little table. It’s perfect, and the sea is perfect. Let us stay.” But instead her eyes grew serious. “Darling,” said Fanny. “I want to ask you something fearfully important. Promise me you’ll answer. Promise.” “I promise,” said George, too solemn to be quite as serious as she. “It’s this,” Fanny paused a moment, looked down, looked up again. “Do you feel,” she said softly, “that you really know me now? But really, really know me?” It was too much for George. Know his Fanny? He gave a broad, childish grin. “I should jolly well think I do,” he said emphatically. “Why, what's up?” Fanny felt he hadn't quite understood. She went on quickly: “What I mean is this. So often people, even when they love each other, don't seem to – to – it’s so hard to say – know each other perfectly. They don't seem to want to- And I think that's awful. They misunderstand each other about the most important things of all.” Fanny looked horrified. “George, we couldn't do that, could we? We never could.” �Содержание “Couldn't be done,” laughed George, and he was just going to tell her how much he liked her little nose, when the waiter arrived with the tea and the band struck up. It was a flute, a guitar, and a violin, and it played so gaily that Fanny felt if she wasn't careful even the cups and saucers might grow little wings and fly away. George absorbed three chocolate éclairs, Fanny two. The funny-tasting tea – “Lobster in the kettle,” shouted George above the music – was nice all the same, and when the tray was pushed aside and George was smoking, Fanny felt bold enough to look at the other people. But it was the band grouped under one of the dark trees that fascinated her most. The fat man stroking the guitar was like a picture. The dark man playing the flute kept raising his eyebrows as though he was astonished at the sounds that came from it. The fiddler was in shadow. The music stopped as suddenly as it had begun. It was then she noticed a tall old man with white hair standing beside the musicians. Strange she hadn’t noticed him before. He wore a very high, glazed collar, a coat green at the seams, and shamefully shabby button boots. Was he another manager? He did not look like a manager, and yet he stood there gazing over the tables as though thinking of something different and far away from all this. Who could he be? Presently, as Fanny watched him, he touched the points of his collar with his fingers, coughed slightly, and half turned to the band. It began to play again. Something boisterous, reckless, full of fire, full of passion, was tossed into the air, was tossed to that quiet figure, which clasped its hands, and still with that far-away look, began to sing. “Good Lord!” said George. It seemed that everybody was equally astonished. Even the little children eating ices stared, with their spoons in the air... Nothing was heard except a thin, faint voice, the memory of a voice singing something in Spanish. It wavered, beat on, touched the high notes, fell again, seemed to implore, to entreat, to beg for something, and then the tune changed, and it was resigned, it bowed down, it knew it was denied. Almost before the end a little child gave a squeak of laughter, but everybody was smiling – мexcept Fanny and George. Is life like this too? thought Fanny. There are people like this. There is suffering. And she looked at that gorgeous sea, lapping the land as though it loved it, and the sky, bright with the brightness before evening. Had she and George the right to be so happy? Wasn’t it cruel? There must be something else in life, which made all these things possible. What was it? She turned to George. But George had been feeling differently from Fanny. The poor old boy’s voice was funny in a way, but, God, how it made you realise what a terrific thing it was to be at the beginning of everything, as they were, he and Fanny! George, too, gazed at the bright, breathing water, and his lips opened as if he could drink it. How fine it was! There was nothing like the sea for making a chap feel fit. And there sat Fanny, his Fanny, leaning forward, breathing so gently. “Fanny!” George called to her. As she turned to him something in her soft, wondering look made George feel that for two pins he would jump over the table and carry her off. �Содержание “I say,” said George rapidly, “let’s go, shall we? Let’s go back to the hotel. Come. Do, Fanny darling. Let’s go now.” The band began to play. “Oh, God!” almost groaned George. “Let's go before the old codger begins squawking again.” And a moment later they were gone. �Содержание Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed”. He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will – as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. �Содержание When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They staed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did nit stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime, as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination. And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognize as the strongest impulse of her being! “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering. Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door – you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.” “Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window. Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long. She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom. Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But Richards was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy that kills. �Содержание Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather George and Alice Smith detrained at Biarritz one summer noon and in an hour had run through their hotel onto the beach into the ocean and back out to bake upon the sand. George Smith was a man who loved art more than life itself. “There…” George Smith sighed. Another ounce of perspiration tricked down his chest. His mouth moved, forming a name. “George?” His wife loomed over him. “I know what you’ve been thinking. I can read your lips.” He lay perfectly still, waiting. “And?” “Picasso,” she said. “Please,” she said. “Relax. I know you heard the rumor this morning, but you should see your eyes – your tic is back. All right, Picasso is here, down the coast a few miles away, visiting friends in some small fishing town. But you must forget it or our vacation is ruined.” “I wish I’d never heard the rumor,” he said honestly. “If only,” she said, “you liked other painters.” “Alice,” he said patiently, “how can I explain? Coming down on the train, I thought, good lord, it’s all Picasso country!” But was it really? he wondered. The sky, the land, the people, the flushed pink bricks here – how much was Picasso, how much George Smith staring round the world with wild Picasso eyes? He despaired of answering. “I keep thinking,” he said aloud, “if we saved our money…” “We’ll never have five thousand dollars.” “I know,” he said quietly. “But it’s nice thinking we might bring it off someday. Wouldn’t it be great to just step up to him, say, “Pablo, here’s five thousand! Give us the sea, the sand, that sky, or any old thing you want, we’ll be happy…” After a moment his wife touched his arm. “I think you’d better go in the water now,” she said. “Yes,” he said. “I’d better do just that.” White fire showered up when he cut the water. During the afternoon George Smith came out and went into the ocean. People, with the sun’s decline, their bodies all lobster colors and colors of broiled squash, trudged for their hotels. �Содержание The beach lay deserted for endless mile on mile save for two people. One was George Smith, towel over shoulder. Far along the shore another shorter, square-cut man walked alone in the tranquil weather. He was deeper-tanned, his close-shaven head dyed almost mahogany by the sun, and his eyes were clear and bright as water in his face. The stranger stood alone. Glancing about, he saw his aloneness, saw the waters of the lovely bay, saw the sun sliding down, the late colors of the day, and then, half turning, spied a small wooden object on the sand. It was no more than the slender stick from a lime ice-cream delicacy long since melted away. Smiling, he picked the stick up. With another glance around to reinsure his solitude, the man stooped again and, holding the stick gently, with light sweeps of his hand began to do the one thing in all the world he knew best how to do. He began to draw incredible figures along the sand. He sketched one figure and then moved over and, still looking down, completely focused on his work now, drew a second and a third figure, and after that a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. George Smith, printing the shore line with his feet, gazed here, gazed there, and then saw the man ahead. George Smith, drawing nearer, saw that the man deeply tanned, was bending down. Nearer yet, and it was obvious what the man was up to. George Smith chuckled. Of course, of course… Alone on the beach this man – how old? Sixty-five? Seventy? – was scribbling and doodling away. How the sand flew? How the wild portraits flung themselves out there on the shore! How… George Smith took one more step and stopped, very still. The stranger was drawing and drawing and didn’t seem to sense that anyone stood immediately behind him and the world of his drawings in the sand. By now he was so deeply enchanted with his solitudinous creation that depth bombs set off in the bay might not have stopped his flying hand nor turned him round. George Smith looked down at the sand. After a long while, looking, began to tremble. For there on the flat shore were pictures of Grecian lions and Mediterranean goats and maidens with flesh of sand like powdered gold and satyrs piping on hand-carved horns and children dancing, strewing flowers along and along the beach with lambs gamboling after, and musicians skipping to their harps and lyres and unicorns racing youths toward distant meadows, woodlands, ruined temples and volcanoes. Everything whirled and poised in its own wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed from under the grape-blooded feet of dancing vintners’ daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to monsters while flowered kites strewed scent on blowing clouds… now… now… now… The artist stopped. George Smith drew back and stood away. �Содержание The artist glanced up, surprised to find someone so near. Then he simply stood there, looking from George Smith to his own creations fling like idle footprints down the way. He smiled at last and shrugged as if to say, “Look what I’ve done; see what a child? You will forgive me, won’t you? One day or another we are all fools… You too, perhaps? So allow an old fool this, eh? Good! Good!” But George Smith could only look at the little man with the sun-dark skin and the clear sharp eyes and say the man’s name once, in a whisper, to himself. They stood thus for perhaps another five seconds. George Smith staring at the sand-frieze, and the artist watching George Smith with amused curiosity. George Smith opened his mouth, closed it, put out his hand, took it back. He stepped forward the pictures, stepped away. Then he moved along the line of figures, like a man viewing a precious series of marbles cast up from some ancient ruin on the shore. His eyes didn’t blink, his hand wanted to touch but didn’t dare to touch. He wanted to run but didn’t run. He looked suddenly at the hotel. Run, yes! Run! What? Grab a shovel, dig, excavate, save a chunk of this all-too-crumbling sand? Find a repairman, race him back here with plaster to cast a mold of some small fragile part of these? No, no. Silly, silly. Or…? His eyes flicked to his hotel window. The camera! Run, get it, get back, and hurry along the shore, clicking, changing film, clicking, until… George Smith whirled to face the sun. It burned faintly on his face, his eyes were two small fires from it. The sun was half underwater, and as he watched it sank the rest of the way in a matter of seconds. The artist had drawn nearer and now was gazing into George Smith’s face with great friendliness, as if he were guessing every thought. Now he was bowing his head in a little bow. Now the ice-cream stick had fallen casually from his fingers. Now he was saying good night, good night. Now he was gone, walking back down the beach toward the south. George Smith stood looking after him. After a full minute he did the only thing he could possibly do. He started at the beginning of the fantastic frieze of satyrs and fauns and winedipped maidens and prancing unicorns and piping youths and he walked slowly along the shore. He walked a long way, looking down at the free-running bacchanal. And when he came to the end of the animals and men he turned around and started back in the other direction, just starting down as if he had lost something and did not quite know where to find it. he kept on doing this until there was no more light in the sky or on the sand to see by. He sat down at the supper table. “You’re late,” said his wife. “I just had to come down alone. I’m ravenous.” “That’s all right,” he said. “Anything interesting happen on your walk?” she asked. “No,” he said. �Содержание “You look funny; George, you didn’t swim out too far, did you, and almost drown? I can tell by your face. You did swim out too far, didn’t you?” “Yes,” he said. “Well,” she said, watching him closely. “Don’t ever do that again. Now – what’ll you have?” He picked up the menu and started to read it and stopped suddenly. “What’s wrong?” asked his wife. He turned his head and shut his eyes for a moment. “Listen.’ “I don’t hear anything,” she said. “Don’t you?” “No. What is it?” “Just the tide,” he said after a while, sitting there, his eyes still shut. “Just the tide coming in.” �Содержание Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras (an extract) Old age is unlikely to be a keenly anticipated period in anybody's life, and no amount of euphemistic camouflage by the senior-citizen lobby can make it any more attractive than a longawaited bill that finally arrives. Even so, it seems to me that growing old in Provence is not without its share of consolations. Some are mental, others are physical; one you can actually take to the bank. Let us say you have retired, and that your main asset is your house. It suits you, and you have every intention of living in it until you make your final public appearance in the obituary columns. But the expenses of old age – and there's always something: the Ferrari for your grandson, the services of a live-in chef, the ruinous price of vintage wines – will inevitably increase every year, and there comes a moment when a windfall might be very welcome. This may be the appropriate time to consider selling your house under that particular French arrangement which is called en viager. It's a gamble. You sell the house at a price below the full market value, but with yourself included as a fixture, having the right to continue in residence for the rest of your life. For you, it is like having your cake and living in it; for the buyer, it is a chance to acquire property at a discount – always providing that you, the ancient proprietor, have the good grace not to hang around for too long and make a lingering inconvenience of yourself. Some people find this system morbid. The French, always very practical in matters of money, see it as a chance for both buyer and seller to profit from natural causes. But the gamble can sometimes backfire, as it did not long ago in the town of Aries, itself a monument to old age. Founded before Christ and noted for its pretty women, Aries was until 1997 the home of Madame Jeanne Calment. Her story is a testament to the bracing air of Provence and a warning to all property speculators. She was born in 1875, and had met Van Gogh when she was a girl. At the age of 90, she decided to sell her apartment en viager to a local lawyer, a mere sprig in his forties, who had every reason to think he was making an impeccably sound investment. But Calment lived on. And on. And on. She treated her skin with olive oil, ate almost a kilo of chocolate a week, rode a bicycle until she was 100, and gave up smoking when she was 117. According to official records, she was the oldest person in the world when she eventually died at the age of 122. As for the unfortunate lawyer, he had died the previous year, aged 77. Calment, obviously, was an exception, one of those blips that spoil the symmetry of actuarial statistics. But while her accumulation of years was quite extraordinary, it would not surprise me if her record was eventually broken by one of the lively octogenarians I see every week – the antiques dealers who predate some of their stock, the elderly ladies who elbow you aside in the epicene with the vigor of young girls, those gnarled but stately figures muttering words of encouragement to the tomatoes in their vegetable gardens. What is it about Provence that sustains them? What is their secret? �Содержание For several years, we lived near a family whose oldest member, known as Pepe, was a daily fascination to me. A small, lean man, invariably dressed in jacket and trousers of washed-out blue and a flat cap that never left his head, he would take his promenade along the road before coming up our drive to inspect the vines. He liked it best when there were people working in the long, green alleys-weeding, trimming overlong shoots, distributing the ration of sulfate – because then he could lean on his stick and supervise. He was generous with his advice, which, as he often reminded his captive audience, was the result of more than eighty years’ experience. If anyone had the impertinence and temerity to disagree with him on matters of wine or weather, he would reach back into his memory and produce some dusty scrap of evidence from the past to prove that he was right. “Of course,” he once said, “you wouldn’t remember the summer of 1947. Hailstones in August, big as quails’ eggs. The vines never recovered.” That kind of remark was usually enough to put a stop to any loose talk about conditions being perfect for a vintage year. Optimism and nature don't mix, he used to say. After an hour or so, having satisfied himself that the vineyard was being properly attended to, he would walk back down our drive, along the road, and into his daughter-in-law’s kitchen, no doubt to supervise the preparation of the midday meal. I believe he was a contented man. The lines and wrinkles of his face went upward, as though a smile were on the way. (It often arrived, more gum than teeth, but no less delightful for that.) I never saw him agitated or upset. He was mildly critical of some modern novelties, such as noisy motorcycles, but delighted with others, particularly his large television set, which enabled him to indulge his weakness for old American soap operas. He died when he was ready, somewhere in his nineties, his passing marked by an affectionate village funeral. There are others, plenty of others, like him. You see them moving, often quite briskly and always with great deliberation, to take up their seats in the cafe for a mid-morning nip of wine or pastis. You see them perched, like a row of amiable buzzards, on a wooden bench by the war memorial in the village place, their hands with swollen brown knuckles clasped over the tops of their sticks; or sitting on chairs in the shade outside their front doors, their eyes flickering up and down the street, missing nothing. By today’s standards, they have had hard lives, working the land with little to show for their efforts but subsistence. No skiing trips, no winter breaks in the Caribbean, no golf, no tennis, no second homes, no new cars every three years, nothing of what is endlessly referred to as the good life. But there they are, spry, happy, and apparently indestructible. There are too many of them to be dismissed as exceptions, and whenever I see them I'm tempted to ask them to explain their longevity. Nine times out of ten, the only answer would be a shrug, and so I have been left to come to my own unreliable conclusions. �Содержание Their generation seems to have escaped the modern affliction of stress, which may be a result of having spent their working lives coping with nature rather than with a capricious boss. Not that nature – with its storms, forest fires, and crop diseases – is either reliable or forgiving as an employer. But at least it's free from personal malice and the pressure of office politics, and it has no favorites. The setback of a bad year is shared among neighbors, and there’s nothing to be done about it except hope for better times to come. Working with (or fighting against) nature teaches a man to be philosophical, and even allows him to derive a certain perverse enjoyment from complaining. Anyone who has lived among farmers will know the relish with which they discuss misfortune, even their own. They’re as bad as insurance agents. There must also be something reassuring about working to the fixed and predictable rhythm of the seasons, knowing that spring and early summer and the harvest season will be busy; knowing that winter will be slow and quiet. It is a pattern of life that would probably drive most corporate executives – seething with impatience and ambition – into an early grave. But not all. I have a friend who, like myself, is a refugee from the advertising business. Some years ago, he moved to the Luberon, where he now makes wine for a living. Instead of the big glossy car and matching chauffeur, he drives to work on a tractor. His problems are no longer with fractious clients but with the weather and the drifting bands of grape-pickers who come to the vineyards for the vendange. He has learned to do without what the French grandly call his entourage of secretaries and personal assistants. He has some difficulty remembering when he last wore a tie. He works long hours – longer than he ever used to in Paris – and makes less money. But he feels better, sleeps more soundly, and has a genuine pride in his work. Another contented man. The day may come when he will want to join the ranks of what he calls the living antiques who spin out the days in the village cafe. In the meantime, he leads a life of sustained physical activity, and this must be an important ingredient in the recipe for ripe old age. The human body, so we are told by men of science (who spend most of their time sitting down), is a machine that thrives on use. When left idle, muscles atrophy, and other working parts of the system deteriorate more rapidly than they would if subjected to regular exercise. The urban solution is the jog and the gym. A more primitive alternative is the kind of nianual labor that comes with country life, the rural aerobics necessary for existence. Bending and stretching to prune, lifting and piling sacks of fertilizer, cutting brush, clearing ditches, stacking logs – these are unglamorous chores, but wonderful exercise. A day of this produces an epic crop of blisters and excruciating stiffness. A month rewards you with a feeling of well-being and a distinct looseness of the waistband. A lifetime works wonders. TASK. Read the following extracts and try to identify the authors. 1. Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say. Perhaps her first real partner was the cab. It did not matter that she shared the cab with: the Sheridan girls and their brother. She sat back in her own little corner of it, and the bolster on which her hand rested felt like the sleeve of an unknown young man’s dress suit; and away they bowled, past waltzing lamp-posts and houses and fences and trees, �Содержание “Have you really never been to a ball before, Leila? But, my child, how too weird _” cried the Sheridan girls. “Our nearest neighbour was fifteen miles,” said Leila softly, gently opening and shutting her fan. Oh dear, how hard it was to be indifferent like others! She tried not to smile too much; she tried not to care. But every single thing was so new and exciting... Meg’s tuberoses, Jose’s long loop of amber, Laura’s little dark head, pushing above her white fur like a flower through snow. She would remember for ever. It even gave her a pang to see her cousin Laurie throw away the wisps of tissue paper he pulled from the fastenings of his new gloves. She would like to have kept those wisps as a keepsake, as a remembrance. Laurie leaned forward and put his hand on Laura’s knee. “Look here, darling,” he said. “The third and the ninth as usual. Twig?” Oh, how marvelous to have a brother! In her excitement Leila felt that if there had been time, if it hadn’t been impossible, she couldn't have helped crying because she was an only child and no brother had ever said “Twig?” to her; no sister would ever say, as Meg said to Jose that moment, “I’ve never known your hair go up more successfully than it has tonight!” But, of course, there was no time. They were at the drill hall already; there were cabs in front, of them and cabs behind. The road was bright on other sode with moving fan-like lights, and on the pavement gay couples seemed to float through the air; little satin shoes chased each other like birds. 2. Mr. Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, had been walking up and down Doublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty pieces of paper, arranging about the series of concerts. He had a game leg and for this his friends called him Hoppy Hollohan. He Walked up and down constantly, stood by the hour at street corners and made notes; but in the end it was Mrs. Kearney who arranged everything. Miss Devlin had become Mrs. Kearney out of spite. She had been educated in a high-class convent, where she had learned French and music. As she was naturally pale and unbending in manner she made few friends at school. When she came to the age of marriage she was sent out to many houses, where her playing and ivory manners were much admired. She sat amid the chilly circle of her accomplishments, waiting for some suitor to brave it and offer her a brilliant life. But the young men whom she met were ordinary and she gave them no encouragement, trying to console her romantic desires by eating a great deal of Turkish Delight in secret. However, when she drew near the limit and her friends began to loose their tongues about her, she silenced them by marrying Mr. Kearney, who was a bookmaker on Ormond Quay. �Содержание He was much older than she. His conversation, which was serious, took place at intervals in his great brown beard. After the first year of married life, Mrs. Kearnet perceived that such a man would wear better that a romantic person, but she never put her own romantic ideas away. He was sober, thrifty and pious; he went to the altar every first Friday, sometimes with her, oftener by himself. But she never weakened in her religion and was a good wife to him. 3. Charm is the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences. If you’ve got it you need almost nothing else, neither money, looks, nor pedigree. It’s a gift, only given to give away, and the more used, there more there is. It is also a climate of behaviour set for perpetual summer and thermostatically controlled by taste and tact. True charm is an aura, an invisible mask in the air; if you see it working, the spell is broken. At its worst, it is the charm of the charity duchess, like being struck in the face with a bunch of tulips; at its best, it is a smooth and painless injection which raises the blood to a genial fever. Most powerful of all, it is obsessive, direct, person to person, forsaking all others. Never attempt to ask for whom the char bells ring, if they toll for anyone, they must toll for you. 4. It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the daytime the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him. “Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said, “Why?” “He was in despair.” “What about?” “Nothing.” “How do you know it was nothing?” “He has plenty of money” They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the cafe and looked at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind. A girl and a soldier went by in the street. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl wore no head covering and hurried beside him. 5. There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable. Shabbiness of appearance and irregularity of life are not only forgiven to the artist but expected. Art offers scope for profound and prolonged laziness and in the event of success gives rewards quite out of proportion to industry. �Содержание Of all the arts the one most recommended to the young beginner is literature. Painting is messy; music is noisy; and the applied arts and crafts require a certain amount of skill. But writing is clean, quiet, and can be done anywhere at any time by anyone. All you need is some ink, a piece of paper, a pen and some vague knowledge of spelling. Even the last is not essential if you employ a competent typist. All you have to do is to write “Chapter One” at the head of your paper and from then onwards for better or worse you are an author. Many people never get any further that that. 6. Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, of Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities” New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco – Frank Norris. East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West, Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians go into detail. Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far as a matter of opinion, no refutation is necessary. But dear cousins (from Adam and Eve descended), and it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: “In this town there can be no romance – what could happen here?” Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and McNally. Nashville. – A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the state of Tenessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N.C.& St. L. and L.&N. railroads, this city is regarded as the most important educational center in the South. I stepped off the train at 8 p.m. Having searched thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, tie me to comparison in the form of a recipe. Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix, The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soap: but ’tis enough – ’twill serve. 7. Mr. Kelada was chatty. He talked of New York and of San Francisco. He discussed plays, pictures, and politics. He was patriotic. The Union Jack is an impressive piece of drapery, but when it is flourished by a gentleman from Alexandria or Beirut, I cannot but feel that it loses somewhat in dignity. I do not wish to put on airs, but I cannot help feeling that it is seemly in a total stranger to put mister before my name when he addresses me. Mr. Kelada, doubtless to set me at my ease, used no such formality. I did not like Mr. Kelada. I had put aside the cards when he sat down, but now, thinking that for this first occasion our conversation had lasted long enough, I went on with my game. �Содержание “The three on the four”, said Mr. Kelada. There is nothing more exasperating when you are playing patience than to be told where to put the card you have turned up before you have had a chance to look for youself. “It’ coming out, it’s coming out,” he cried. With rage and hatred in my heart I finished. I did not like Mr. Kelada. �Содержание PART V. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY Analysing Poetry Sir Walter Raleigh. Even Such Is Time John Donne. Holy Sonnets. Sonnet XIII Robert Herrick. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time William Blake. A Poison Tree Edgar Allan Poe. Alone Emily Dickinson. There is no Frigate like a Book Christina Rossetti. Up-hill William Butler Yeats. For Anne Gregory Edwin Arlington Robinson. Richard Cory Robert Frost. Gathering Leaves Edward Estlin Commings. Pity this Busy Monster, Manunkind Dylan Thomas. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Dorothy Parker. Frustration Allen Ginsberg. A Supermarket in California Tom Clark. Poem Poems for Self-Guided Analysis �Содержание Analysing Poetry One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy. Poetry is a compact language that expresses complex feelings. Unlike prose, poetry often has an underlying purpose that goes beyond the literal meaning of the words. It evokes in the reader an intense emotion: joy, sorrow, anger, love, etc. It has the ability to surprise the reader or make the reader experience revelation or insight. William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Dylan Thomas said, “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.” Poems often make heavy use of imagery and word association to quickly convey emotions. The emphasis on the aesthetics of language and the use of different techniques such as meter and rhyme dictates a specific approach to the analysis of poetic text. The reader needs to examine a poem from different perspectives and identify various tools the poet uses to make the meaning clear and understandable. Elements, including theme, structure and writing style, should be taken into consideration. The following scheme aims to organize the reader’s responses to a poem into a logical, pointby-point explanation. It involves questions that apply to most poetry. I. Impression The first immediate responses to a poem are very important. Emotional reactions, positive or negative, reminders of personal experiences, or things the reader would like to share with others, can provide a focus for the analysis and help logically connect its main aspects. The reader may change their mind about the poem later, but these first ideas are worth recording. Answering the following questions the reader should summarize their personal responses. 1. Are you emotionally moved or touched by the poem? 2. Are you entertained or bored, rejoiced or terrified? 3. Do you agree or disagree with the author? 4. Do some words and phrases capture your attention? Why? II. Background Information Knowing something about the poet’s life, times, and culture helps the reader understand what is contained in a poem and why. 1. Who is the author of the poem? 2. Does the poet’s life suggest any special point of view, such as political affiliation, religion, profession, talent or handicap, family or personal problems? 3. When was the poem written? 4. What does it tell about life during some period in history? 5. Does the poem belong to a particular literary movement? �Содержание Poetic Trends Neoclassical Poetry – poetry that contains the principles and ideals of beauty characteristic of the Greek and Roman period. Classicism concerns itself with form and discipline as opposed to emotional impact as in Romanticism. The works of Neoclassical poets (John Dryden, Alexander Pope) are characterized by their formality, simplicity, and emotional restraint Metaphysical Poetry – a group of British lyric poets of the 17th century (John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughn) whose witty, ingenious, and highly philosophical works were characterized by unusual verse forms, elaborate and surprising metaphors (conceits), puns and paradoxes. Their topics include love, God, life and death Cavalier Poets – a school of English poets of the 17th century (Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, John Suckling), who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the English Civil War. Much of their poetry is light in style, and generally secular in subject Graveyard Poets – a group of the 18th century poets (Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Edward Young) who saw in the graveyard an occasion for reflection on human mortality and emphasized the subjects of religion, death, and loss. They paved the way for the Gothic and Romanticism Romantic Poetry – an artistic and intellectual movement originated in the late 18th as a reaction against the Enlightenment. Romantic Poets (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley) emphasized imagination, strong emotion and intuition Fireside Poets – a group of 19th-century American poets associated with New England (Henry Longfellow, William Bryant, John Whittier, James Lowell, Oliver Holmes) whose poetry is characterized by domestic themes and messages of morality presented in conventional poetic forms Symbolist Poetry – a late 19th century poetic movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin. Symbolists (Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Blok, Oscar Wilde) believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly, and wrote in a very metaphorical manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning Imagism – a group of American and English poets (Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams) who wrote compact and clear verse in which an exact visual image made a total poetic statement Modernist Poetry – poetry written, mainly in Europe and North America, between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature which is characterized by the radical break with the conventions and established rules of the past. Modernist poets (e. e. commings, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens) experimented in form, style and subject to reveal fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe The Beat Generation – a group of American post WWII writers and poets (Allen Ginsberg, William S. Poetry Burrough, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso) who questioned mainstream politics and culture. In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements �Содержание The Movement – a group of English writers and poets (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Alfred Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings and Robert Conquest) who were opposed to modernists. Their tone was anti-romantic and rational. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensuous content and traditional form The reader should apply definitions of many categories to determine which describes the poem's length and style. 6. What is the genre of the poem? 7. Was it popular in the time the poem was created? 8. Does it contribute to the overall message of the poem? Poetic Genres Epic Epitaph Lyric Elegy – – – – – a long poem about a great person or national hero a commemorative inscription on a tomb or monument about the person buried a short, musical verse expressing the author’s thoughts and feelings a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem a lengthy lyric poem typically of a serious or meditative nature and having an elevated style Ode – Narrative poem – Dialogue poem – “Carpe diem” poem – Pastoral a poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful, romanticized way a poem that tells a story a poem in which two characters carry on a conversation is a poem that has the theme of living for the present derived from the Latin expression that means “seize the day” Satire poem – a poem using irony, exaggeration and ridicule, to expose and criticize stupidity and vice – a poem which deals with subjects which are "beyond reality” Dramatic monologue – a poem which is spoken to a listene Confessional poem – a poem which focuses on extreme moments of individual experience, psyche, or Speculative poem personal trauma III. Title The reader’s search for the ideas should begin at the title of the poem. It was probably carefully chosen. 1. What information does the title give? 2. Is the title’s meaning obvious, or does it imply multiple possibilities? 3. What expectations does it create? 4. Is the title an object or event that becomes a symbol? �Содержание IV. Speaker Another important aspect in a poem is the speaker. 1. Does the voice speak in first person (I, me, my, mine)? 2. Does the voice sound like the direct voice of the poet speaking to you, expressing thoughts and feelings? 3. Does the speaker address another person? 4. Is the speaker a man or a woman, someone young or old? 5. For what audience was the poem written? 6. Is the voice meant to be universal – for example, relevant to any person, time or place? V. Themes and Ideas Theme is the poem’s essence. Asking the questions “who,” “what,” “where,” “when” and “why” can help to understand the theme. “What” creates focus on the general topic and can also be used to describe the plot of the poem. 1. What is the poem about? 2. Are there several subjects? How do they relate to each other? 3. Answering the “who” question is identifying the characters of the poem. 4. Who are the characters of the poem? 5. Does the name of a character suggest extra meaning? “Where” refers to the physical location of the action in the poem. 6. Where do the events take place? “When” may refer to the time of day or the time in history the poem occurs. 7. What details specify time? 8. How long is the period of time? Are there gaps? “Why” answers the question of the author’s purpose in writing the poem. Here the reader comes close to the idea about the theme. The idea is what makes up the message of the poem. 9. What does the poet state about the theme? 10. Which lines bring out the meaning of the poem? 11. Is the idea expressed directly or implied? Does the poet insist on it? Or does he allow the reader their own interpretation? VI. Mood and Tone �Содержание The speaker’s tone (satiric, serious, mock serious, playful, somber, or teasingly) and the mood of the poem (cheerful or jolly, mysterious, provocative, zany, ominous, festive, fearful, or brooding) are among the basic aspects of analysis. 1. What is the mood of the poem? 2. Does the mood change within the body of the work? Where does the shift begin? 3. What is the speaker’s tone? Is the speaker angry, sad, happy, or cynical? 4. Is there an obvious reason for this attitude? 5. Is the poet trying to make a point, win an argument, or move someone to action? Or does the poem express something without requiring an answer? VII. Structure and Organization The structure is an essential part of how the poem is perceived. It affects how fast or slowly it is read, where the pauses are. It causes certain words to stand out more prominently. It affects the way the poem looks to the reader on the page. For example, a lot of space between words and lines gives a feeling of lightness and air. If the words are packed together in a poem it can imply emotional tension or a complicated subject. Some poems have smooth and delicate shapes; others have heavy and dense shapes. There poems with shapes that intentionally imitate what the poem is about. Thus the structure of a poem can be used as an argument to support its ideas. The number of stanzas and lines in the poem may contribute to its mood and tone. 1. How is the poem organized? How does it look on the page? 2. Are there individual stanzas or sections? 3. Does each stanza cover a separate topic, or is there a continued theme throughout the poem? 4. How does the structure reveal the poet’s attitude toward the subject? Poetic forms include many types and may be discussed in the analysis of a poem. 5. How does the form of the poem contribute to its general atmosphere and tone? 6. How do the subject and the form interact? Poetic Forms Acrostic poem – a poem in which certain letters, usually the first in each line form a word or message when read in a sequence Ballad Blank verse – a poem that tells a story similar to a folk tale or legend which often has a repeated refrain – a poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the form which resembles the rhythm of ordinary speech �Содержание Cinquain – a poem of five lines (line 1 has one word (the title), line 2 has two words that describe the title, line 3 has three words that tell the action, line 4 has four words that express the feeling, line 5 has one word which recalls the title) Epigram Free verse Haiku – a very short, ironic and witty poem usually written as a brief couplet or quatrain – poetry written in either rhymed or unrhymed lines that have no set fixed metrical pattern – a poem following a Japanese pattern which is a three-line observation about a fleeting moment involving nature. Haiku poem is composed of unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables Sonnet – a lyric poem that consists of 14 lines which usually have one or more conventional rhyme schemes Villanelle (villanesque) – a fixed verse form of French origin consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines The expression of feelings and ideas in a poem is given intensity by the use of distinctive metre and rhythm. Meter is the regular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. Foot is the basic unit of meter which consists of one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables. The number of feet in the line determines its metrical length: monometre – one foot, dimetre – two feet, trimetre – three feet, tetrameter – four feet, pentameter – five feet, hexameter – six feet, heptameter – seven feet, octametre – eight feet. 7. What is the poem’s metre? How does it affect your response to the poem? 8. Is there a dominant rhythm? 9. Does the rhythm relate to the prevalent theme of the poem? Or does it seem at odds with the theme? 10. Does the rhythm increase or decrease in speed? Iamb (iambic) Trochee (trochaic) Poetic Metre – one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (da/DUM): She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. (from She Walks in Beauty by George Gordon Byron) – one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (DUM/da): Should you ask me, whence these stories? Whence these legends and traditions, With the odours of the forest, With the dew and damp of meadows,… �Содержание Anapest (anapestic) Dactyl (dactylic) Amphibrach (amphibrachic) (from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Longfellow) – two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (da/da/DUM): Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there. (from A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Moore) – lyric poem that consists of 14 lines which usually have one or more conventional rhyme schemes. – one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables(DUM/da/da): We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die! (from The Lost Leader by Robert Browning) – one stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables (da/DUM/da): How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view! The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wild-wood, And every loved spot which my infancy knew! (from The Old Oaken Bucket by Samuel Woodworth) Another important structural element is rhyme. There are many different kinds of rhyme schemes. Rhymes are used to give the poem a musical, pleasing sound. They can also be used to deepen meaning, and strengthen the form of the poem. 11. Does the poem rhyme? 12. How does the use of rhyme add to the meaning? Rhyme End rhyme – is one of the most common forms of rhymes when the last word of a line rhymes with another last word of a line Internal rhyme – is the type of rhyme when words in the middle of line rhyme with other words in the middle of a different line True rhyme (perfect rhyme) Off-rhyme (slant rhyme) – a kind of rhyme when words rhyme exactly (“cat” – “rat”) – a kind of rhyme when words that almost rhyme, but do not rhyme exactly (“fate” – “saint”). Off rhymes use assonance and consonance. Assonance is when the vowels of two words rhyme, while consonance is when the consonants of two words are the same Eye rhyme (visual – a rhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently rhyme, or sight rhyme) Discussion of structure also includes the significant information or emotion contained in the opening and closing lines of the poem, sentence patterns and punctuation use. �Содержание VIII. Language Tools Every conclusion the reader draws about a poem should be based on its language. A poem is only words, and each has been carefully chosen to create a specific emotional response through its meaning. Word choice underlines the tone and mood of a poem. 1. Are there stylistically coloured words in the poem? 2. Are there words with common semantic components? 3. What connotations (positive or negative) prevail? Lexical devices like irony, hyperbole and symbol are typical techniques in a poem. 4. Does the poem introduce some word used in its opposite meaning, or situation that involves discrepancy? 5. Does the author exaggerate some idea or emotion? 6. Are there any symbols in the poem? Poems also tend to suggest things beyond what they actually say. Often what causes the strongest emotions is not what the poem tells, but what it makes the reader imagine. Figurative language, including metaphors, similes and personification, is the main source of a poem’s imagery. 7. Are there concrete images or pictures that the poet wants readers to see? 8. Are the pictures created by personification, metaphor, simile or allusion? 9. Which comparisons are stressed? Are they all positive? How are they connected? Allusions are another source of images. The use of intertextuality enhances a poem’s composition. 10. Does the poem contain any Biblical, historical or literary references? How do they affect the understanding of the poem’s ideas? 11. Do the allusions create specific atmosphere or mood? Some parts of a poem seem to speak directly to the readers’ senses. The use of the senses in a poem makes it more imaginative and expressive. 12. Does the poem evoke sense impressions – for example, taste, touch, smell, sound, or sight? What words or phrases accentuate them? Are these impressions pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? 13. Does the poet concentrate on a single sense or several of them? �Содержание The words in poems are doing several jobs at the same time. They do one thing with their meaning, and another thing with their sound. Phonetic devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia adds to the discussion of a poem’s theme, mood and message. Readers should also look for repetition of specific words, phrases, or verses in the poem, and decide why certain information seems to deserve the repetition. 14. Does the poet stress certain sounds, such as pleasant sounds (euphony) or harsh letter combinations (cacophony)? 15. Are certain sounds repeated (alliteration, assonance)? 16. Is there onomatopoeia? 17. How does the sounding of the poem add to its emotional effect? IX. Conclusion Now that the key elements of the poem have been considered, it is time to step back and decide what the poem means as a whole. To do this, the reader needs to synthesize (combine) the separate parts of analysis into one main idea. 1. Why do you think the poet wrote the poem? 2. How effective the form of the poem is in communicating the message? The reader should go back to the questions from the first response stage of the analysis and summarise all the impressions. �Содержание Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) Before his execution for treason, Sir Walter Raleigh brought glory to Elizabethan England as an explorer of the New World, a scholar and a gifted lyric poet. He is considered one of the foremost poets of the Elizabethan era. In his poetry Raleigh uses simple, undecorated language, plain diction and conceptual images. Even Such Is Time Да, Время таково Even such is time, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust, Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days, And from which earth, and grave, and dust The Lord will raise me up, I trust. Да, Время таково – оно ведь управляет И молодостью, и радостями жизни нашей милой. За это – отдаём ему года, и жизни наши Время забирает. И вот, во мраке и безмолвии могилы Историю мы дней своих покорно завершаем, Пройдя отпущенный нам путь. Однако знаем, Что из могилы и из праха нас возродит Господь, И вновь мы обретём живую плоть. Перевод А. Горшкова Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is the theme of the poem? 2. The poem is an epitaph. What mood is imposed by the genre of the poem? How is it revealed in the word choice? Which words are repeated? 3. What is the role of personification? What images of Time are evoked? Are they original or trite? 4. What elements construct the circular shape of the poem? Consider the repetition and rhyme. 5. What phonetic devices contribute to the rhythm and melody of the poem? 6. Interpret the idea contained in the last line. What syntactical expressive means intensifies the speaker’s opinion? Is he convinced, or is he in doubt? 7. What is the message of the poem? Does the idea of resurrection sound optimistic? 8. What is your personal response to the poem? �Содержание John Donne (1572–1631) John Donne is remembered today as the leading exponent of Metaphysical Poetry, which flourished in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Eclipsed by Romantic and Victorian trends this highly intellectual form of poetry remained disregarded until the early part of the twentieth century when it was rediscovered by modernists like T.S. Eliot. Metaphysical poetry is witty, ingenious, and highly philosophical. Its topics include life, love, death. It typically employs uncommon verse forms, elaborate metaphors, irony and paradox. Donne’s poetry exhibits each of these characteristics. Unusual meters, puns, conceits and unexpected reasoning are unified in Donne as in no other poet. Donne was a poet of inner conflict. As a minister in the Anglican Church, Donne possessed a deep spirituality, but as a man, Donne had a deep longing for life, sensation, and experience. In his best poems, Donne mixes the physical and the spiritual. His use of religious imagery in love poems and images of love in religious poetry shocked his contemporaries. The rhythm of Donne’s poems is the rhythm of natural speech and the language is dramatic. Donne usually begins with a bright thought-provoking line. He often tries to persuade his reader to share his point of view through poetry which appeals both to the intellect and the emotion. Holy Sonnets Sonnet XIII Благочестивые сонеты Сонет 13 What if this present were the world’s last night? Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell, The picture of Christ crucified, and tell Whether that countenance can thee affright, Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light, Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell. Что, если этот вечер, ночь вот эта – Последние? В предсмертный лик Христа Вглядись, душа – хотя б одна черта Тебя страшит предчувствием ответа? Смотри: в глазах – сквозь боль – сиянье света; Чело не пачкает мирская суета; And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell, Which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite? No, no; but as in my idolatry I said to all my profane mistresses, Beauty, of pity, foulness only is A sign of rigour: so I say to thee, To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned, This beauteous form assures a piteous mind. И разве “ад” произнесут уста, Когда любовь к врагам – суть их завета? Душа, не бойся. Страсть меня вела, Но я, бывало, говорил любимой: “Будь доброй, если хочешь стать красивой, А пудра не поможет, коли зла; – Ведь злость – уродством прорастёт из черт...” А Он прекрасен – значит – милосерд. Перевод А. Спарбера Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What do you know about “metaphysical poetry”? What are its main themes? 2. What is the main theme of this poem? How does the poet introduce it? �Содержание 3. What did you expect the poem to be about after reading the first line? 4. Who is the speaker of the poem? Who does he address? 5. The poem is written in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. What is the focal image of the opening sestet? What is the central concept in the following octave? Can you justify the poet’s logic? Why do you think he decided to combine divine and earthly subject? 6. How does the poet describe Christ? Analyse the word choice. What is the speaker’s tone? Is he afraid or amazed? Or both? Can you describe his feelings in one word? 7. In what context are beauty and pity introduced? What is the ground for the interaction of these two concepts? 8. Consider the ambiguity of the closing couplet. Do you support the author’s idea that beauty is a sign of pity, and ugliness is a sign of severity? 9. What is the message of the sonnet? Is the poet persuasive in his arguments? �Содержание Robert Herrick (1591–1674) Robert Herrick was one of the Cavalier Poets, the group of English poets who supported Charles I during The Puritan Revolution. Cavalier Poets were associated with Royalist unlike the Metaphysical poets who were mostly attracted to the rational and intellectual atmosphere of Puritanism. “Cavalier” implies more than just “Royalist”. It implies, for instance, a particular class of man: courtly, well-educated and genteel. Accomplished as soldiers, courtiers, gallants, and wits, Cavalier poets wrote elegant lyrics, typically on love and flirtation and sometimes on war, honour, and duty to the king. They avoided the subject of earnest emotion or public concern. In their casual and affectionate poems they celebrated pleasures and sadnesses of life using direct and colloquial language. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time Девственницам: спешите наверстать упущенное Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying. Срывайте розы поскорей, Подвластно всё старенью, Цветы, что ныне всех милей, Назавтра станут тенью. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he’s a-getting, The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he’s to setting. Вот солнце движется в зенит, Небесная лампада, И чем скорей оно бежит, Тем ближе миг заката. That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former. Прекрасны юности года, Что кровь зажгли отменно, Но время худшее всегда Приходит на замену. Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry; For having lost but once your prime, You may forever tarry. Отбросьте скромность, и наряд Оденьте подвенечный; Пройдёт весна и сей обряд Вам ждать, быть может, вечно. Перевод А. Лукьянова Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What epoch do the Cavalier Poets represent? What are the main features of their poetry? 2. What is a “carpe diem” poem? Is the main statement stated straightforwardly or implied in the poem? 3. Does the poem have a speaking title? 4. Who is the speaker of the poem? Who does the speaker address? Is the speaker’s appeal meant to be universal or personal? �Содержание 5. Analyse the imagery of the first two quatrians. What stylistic devices does the author employ? What do the images of nature symbolically represent? Are they original or trite? Are they effective in communicating the poet’s message? 6. How does the poet develop his idea in the third and the fourth stanzas? What are the poet’s arguments for the urgent pursuit of love and marriage? 7. The poem is carefully constructed. What poetic techniques contribute to its clear and simple structure? Analyse metre and rhyme of the poem. How do the mood and the form of the poem interact? 8. What phonetic expressive means are used in the poem? How do they add to its emotional effect? 9. Do you support the author’s message? What are the risks of “living for the moment”? �Содержание William Blake (1757–1827) William Blake is often regarded as the first Romantic poet who revolutionized the concept of creative process. Being a religious, political, and artistic radical he protested against the rationalist philosophy of the 18th century and its restrictive influence on man’s life and work. Blake’s talent was disregarded during his lifetime. He was recognised as a poetic genius only in the 20th century. Blake’s work is rich in symbols and images. He tried to create an alternative reality to that which dissatisfied him. This system of personal myths and visions was complex and elusive. Blake was fascinated with the idea of “contraries”. He said that the “doors of perception” are cleansed only by a transformation of categories so that contraries meet in newly energetic formations. He understood Heaven as a part of a structure which must become one with the creative energy of Hell raher than stand in opposition to it. Thus the tigers and horses, the lions and lambs, the children and adults, the innocent and the experienced in Blake’s poems should be regarded as integral elements of creation. In his most influential work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake said, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Thus Blake believes all poets have free imagination because they belong to the kingdom of Hell which is the source of creative energy in the whole structure of the universe. Blake used his imagination to express the innermost emotions of the human race. The following poem explores themes of indignation, revenge, and more generally the fallen state of mankind. A Poison Tree I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. Древо Яда В ярость друг меня привёл – Гнев излил я, гнев прошёл. Враг обиду мне нанёс – Я молчал, но гнев мой рос. And I waterd it in fears, Night and morning with my tears: And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles. Я таил его в тиши В глубине своей души, То слезами поливал, То улыбкой согревал. And it grew both day and night. Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine. Рос он ночью, рос он днём. Зрело яблочко на нём, Яда сладкого полно. Знал мой недруг, чьё оно. And into my garden stole, When the night had veiled the pole; In the morning glad I see; My foe outstretched beneath the tree. Темной ночью в тишине Он прокрался в сад ко мне И остался недвижим, Ядом скованный моим. Перевод С.Я. Маршака �Содержание Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is William Blake’s literary reputation? 2. This poem appears in Blake’s famous work Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794) in the “Songs of Experience” section. Why do you think the author included it in this section? What kind of experience is described in the poem? 3. What is the genre of the poem? 4. What expectations are suggested by the title? 5. Who is the speaker in the poem? Does the voice sound like the direct voice of the poet speaking to the reader, expressing thoughts and feelings? 6. What is the poem about? Is the theme expressed directly or implicitly? 7. How is the conflict introduced in the first quatrain? What language means accentuate the speaker’s tone? 8. What image is used to depict human anger? How does the poet foreshadow it in the first stanza? How does he extend it within the poem? 9. What is the mood of the poem? How does it change as the story progresses? What words help the poet define each stage of the speaker’s feeling towards his foe. 10. Consider the metre of the poem. Does the rhythm relate to the subject of the poem? Or does it seem at odds with it? 11. Where is the climax of the poem? How does the reader learn what happened to the speaker’s foe? Why does the author omit the murder scene from the story? 12. What is the resolution of the poem? Does the speaker regret his crime? 13. What is the message of the poem? Does it contain a moral? �Содержание Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) Edgar Poe’s life was surrounded by tragedy with his parents passing away when he was just 3 years old. He became obsessive with drink and gambling and this resulted in his own rather obscure death as a drunk in Baltimore. Despite this his poems and novels that explored the conditions of the human psyche earned him international fame both during his life and after his death. Edgar Poe was the principal forerunner of aestheticism, or the “art for art’s sake” movement, in the 19th-century European literature. His poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature. In his work Edgar Poe demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique. A literary work, according to Poe, is not a product of inspiration; it should be the result of careful consideration on the part of the author. Poe’s theory of poetic composition consists in the following points: a poem should be devoid of any moral, its beauty being an end in itself; the subject and mood of a poem are accentuated by its rhythm and rhymes; a poem should have a single effect; a poem can be read in one sitting; a poem should be sad. The emphasis on literary formalism was connected to Poe’s philosophical ideals: through the deliberate use of language one can express the essential condition of human existence. In poetry, the single effect in a poem must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss. Walt Whitman said, “Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, and a demoniac undertone behind every page.” He also pointed out “an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems”. Alone Один From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were – I have not seen As others saw – I could not bring My passions from a common spring – From the same source I have not taken My sorrow – I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone – And all I lov’d – I lov’d alone – Then – in my childhood – in the dawn Of a most stormy life – was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still – From the torrent, or the fountain – From the red cliff of the mountain – From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold – Я не таким был с детских лет, Как прочие; открылся свет Иначе мне; мирских начал В моих страстях не замечал. Я из других пределов ждал Мою печаль; не пробуждал В душе восторг под общий слог; В любви всегда был одинок. Тогда же – в детстве, в ранний миг Мятежной жизни, – вдруг возник Из глубины добра и зла Блеск тайны, что меня прожгла: Из потока, от истока, С красных круч горы высокой, От светила на заре В золотистом сентябре, �Содержание From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by – From the thunder, and the storm – And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view – От зарницы озорной, Пролетевшей надо мной, Из грозы, под грома стук, Да из тучи, ставшей вдруг На лазурных небесах Демоном в моих глазах. Перевод В. Бойко Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is Edgar Poe’s literary reputation? 2. What is the genre of the poem? What traumatic psychological experience is described? How does the poem reflect the poet’s life? 3. What is the theme of the poem? What is the idea? Is it expressed directly? Which lines bring out the meaning of the poem? 4. What were the circumstances surrounding the speaker’s childhood? How does the speaker describe his uniqueness at the beginning of the poem? 5. What is the tone of the poem? What words reinforce the tone? 6. Analyse the meter and rhyme. Where does the metre change? How does it affect the mood of the poem? 7. What images are employed to show the speaker’s mysterious estrangement? 8. What phonetic devices accentuate the rhythm of the poem? 9. What is the role of punctuation? 10. Interpret the symbol in the last line. Who or what is the demon? 11. Does the poem contain any message? 12. Does the poem meet the requirements Edgar Poe enlisted in his theory of poetic composition? 13. What is your personal response to the poem? �Содержание Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) Emily Dickinson is such a unique poet that it is very difficult to place her in any single tradition. Unlike William Blake or William Wordsworth she made no effort to organize her thoughts and feelings into a coherent, unified philosophic system. Dickinson’s poems simply record thoughts and feelings experienced naturally over the course of a lifetime. They are astonishing and thought-provoking verses devoted to reflection and creativity. Emily Dickinson had a quiet and reserved family life. Choosing to live life internally within the confines of her home, Dickinson brought her life into sharp focus. She chose to live within the limitless expanses of her imagination. She redefined the meaning of deprivation because being denied something – whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire – provided a sharper understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted. “Water, is taught by thirst”, she wrote, “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.” Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems are written in short stanzas, mostly quatrains, with short lines. She ended lines with dashes and capitalized nouns sporadically. She used forms of rhyme that were not generally accepted till late in the 19th century and are used by modern poets. Off-rhymes, or slant rhymes, seem consistent with the brooding quality of the poet’s mind and may have helped Emily Dickinson to focus on selection of words. Dickinson’s greatest achievement as a poet of inwardness is her brilliant language. She often writes aphoristically, meaning that she compresses a great deal of meaning into a very small number of words. This can make her poems hard to understand on the first reading, but when their meaning unveils itself, it often explodes in the mind all at once, and lines that seemed strange can become intensely clear. Emily Dickinson’s poems are famous for their metaphorical conceits drawn from many diverse sources. Her images sometimes create natural or social scenes but are more likely to create fantastic or allegorical landscapes. Her favorite themes are love, death, separation, inner world, religion, nature. There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Travel may the poorest take Without offence of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human soul. Нет лучше Фрегата – чем Книга – Домчит до любых берегов. Нет лучше Коня – чем страница Гарцующих стихов. Ни дозоров в пути – ни поборов – Не свяжет цепью недуг. На какой простой колеснице Летит человеческий Дух! Перевод В. Марковой Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is the connection between Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the circumstances of her life? 2. What is the theme of the poem? Is the poem about some aspect of human life or human life in general? �Содержание 3. What is the general idea? Is it stated directly? 4. What comparisons does the author use to convey the essence of reading? Analyse the imagery of the poem. Does the author use one extended image or several images? 5. Which words are capitalized? Why do you think the author decide to make them prominent? 6. What purpose do the dashes serve in the poem? 7. Does the poem have a strict metre or rhyme scheme? How does the form affect the mood of the poem? 8. What is the message of the poem? �Содержание Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) Christina Rossetti was one of the finest poets of the Victorian era. After the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861, she became the main female poet of the time. She experimented with verse forms such as sonnet, hymn, and ballad, drawing stories from the Bible and folk takes. In the Romantic tradition Rossetti’s early pieces feature meditations on death and loss. Many scholars have identified feminist themes in her poetry as well. Some of her works explore gender ideology, the restrictions imposed upon women, the difficulties facing the female writer. Christina Rossetti’s innovative use of gothic themes, medievalism and Christian symbolism established her as an influential figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. By writing thoughtprovoking poetry that demanded meticulous reading and interpretation, Rossetti developed a literary counterpart to the Pre-Raphaelite painting method characterised by sensual detail, intense colours and complex compositions. Pre-Raphaelite paintings present an original combination of romanticised view of life inspired by Medieval and early Renaissance art with almost photographic realism. Similarly Rossetti’s palpable images communicate deep sentiments and moral truths. The peculiar gift of Christina Rossetti is the gift of song manifested in perfect command of rhythm and metre, effective rhymes and refrains. Even when she wished to write allegories and moralities music would break uncontrollably through her argument. Up-hill Дорога вверх Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. Крута дорога до конца ль пути? Крута всегда она. Весь долгий день до места ли идти? С утра и дотемна. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Найдется ль там, где лечь и отдохнуть? Когда часы ночные к нам придут. Я в темноте не потеряю путь? Увидишь ты приют. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. Мне путников придётся ль повстречать? Кто путь прошёл быстрей. Когда приду, позвать иль постучать? Там не стоят у запертых дверей. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labor you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come. Усталый, я смогу ль покой узнать? Своих трудов узнаешь суть. Для странников готова ли кровать? Для всех, прошедших путь. Перевод К. Андрейчук �Содержание Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What do you know about the author of the poem? 2. What associations are suggested by the title? 3. How many speakers are there in the poem? Who are they? Are they generic or individualized persons? 4. What are the advantages of question and answer form in this poem? 5. What is the general topic of the poem? Does the poem refer to a literal, physical journey? 6. How does the metre contribute to the impression of the steady up-hill climb? 7. How does rhyme differentiate the speakers in the poem? What else indicates the change from one speaker to another? 8. What is the general mood of the poem? Find the words and expressions to support your impression. 9. How does the poet describe life and its hardships? What images are used? 10. What clues prompt the reader to interpret the poem symbolically? What are the key symbols in the poem? 11. In what way does the poem resemble a Biblical parable? What is its message? 12. What is your personal response to the poem? Do you agree with the poet’s definition of life as a hard “journey”? What other images can you offer? �Содержание William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Yeats is not only a national favorite in Ireland but also a major literary figure around the world. He was one of those artists and writers who were beginning to realize that the form and subject they used was inadequate in the face of the social and political upheavals of the early 20th century. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms. Much of Yeats’ poetry reflects his interest in Irish subject. Fascinated by his motherland, he wrote poems about Irish history and figures of Celtic mythology. Yeats’ early poetry drew heavily on Irish myths and folklore. Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the literary movement known as the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats’ new, modern, way of seeing the world matched with a rapidly changing political landscape in one of his best-known works “Easter, 1916”, a reaction to the Easter uprising, a violent and failed attempt by Irish nationalists to overthrow British rule. Yeats admired William Blake and developed a lifelong interest in mysticism and spiritualism. From early life he associated poetry with religious insights. In later years his writing became even more reflective as he contemplated the world around him. His great themes are youth and old age and the head and the heart. Yeats’ mystical inclinations were reinforced by Hindu religion. Theosophical beliefs and the occult formed much of the basis of his later poetry which is full of allusions and symbols. Yeats’s wide range of styles and subjects reflected the changing world he inhabited and influenced generations of writers who came after him. The poems and plays he produced are simultaneously local and general, personal and public, Irish and universal. For Anne Gregory Анн Грэгори “Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.” «Нет, никогда парнишка, Страдающий, несчастный, От Ваших волн медовых, Что к ушку вьются страстно, Саму Вас не полюбит, Лишь волосы атласны». “But I can get a hair-dye And set such colour there, Brown, or black, or carrot, That young men in despair May love me for myself alone And not my yellow hair.” «Но я могу покрасить Их в рыжий цвет прекрасный, Коричневый, иль чёрный. Тогда юнец несчастный, Меня саму полюбит, Не волосы атласны». “I heard an old religious man But yesternight declare «Слыхал, вчера священник, Лишь вечер пал ненастный, �Содержание That he had found a text to prove That only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.” Стих отыскал, гласящий, Что лишь Господь всевластный Любить саму Вас может, Не волосы атласны». Превод А. Лукьянова Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What makes For Ann Gregory a typical Yeats’ poem? 2. What is the genre of the poem? 3. What information is contained in the title of the poem? Is the title speaking? 4. Who are the speakers? What do they argue about? Mark the repetition of some words. Does the subject of their conversation coincide with the theme of the poem? 5. What is the theme of the poem? Are there several themes? How do they relate to each other? 6. What does the poet state about the theme/themes? Does he express his ideas directly? 7. What is the tone of the poem? How does it interact with the structure of the poem? What phonetic tools contribute to the melody of the poem? 8. Who is the embodiment of wisdom in the last stanza? Why does the poet refer to religion speaking about such an earthly subject as hair? 9. What is the philosophic message of the poem? How does the author’s interpret the concepts of internal and external beauty? Are his ideas conventional? Do you agree with the author? �Содержание Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) Robinson is a true forerunner of the modernist movement in poetry. Robinson’s subject matter differs remarkably from that of his predecessors’, but his form is traditional. He said that if free verse were as easy to write as it was difficult to read, he was not surprised there was so much of it. Robinson wrote almost exclusively about individuals or individual relationships rather than common themes of the nineteenth century. He exhibits a curious mixture of irony and compassion toward his characters – most of whom are failures. Some tragic circumstances of Robinson’s life led many of his poems to have a dark pessimism. Many of his poems deal with “an American dream gone awry”. One of his brothers died of a drug overdose. The other one, a handsome and charismatic man, married the woman Robinson himself loved, suffered business failures, became an alcoholic, and ended up in a charity hospital impoverished and estranged from his wife and children. Richard Cory Ричард Кори Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. Когда он выходил за свой порог, Мы, жители окраины, глядели На джентльмена с головы до ног, Гуляющего в царственном безделье. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, “Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked. При этом он был скромен и умён И счастлив оказать несчастным милость. Он первый всем отвешивал поклон, Он шёл, и все вокруг него светилось. And he was rich – yes, richer than a king – And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. Он был богат – богаче королей, – Он был прекрасен,— и сказать по чести, Всяк полагал, что нет судьбы светлей, И жаждал быть на дивном этом месте. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head. Мы трепетали, думая о нём, И кляли чёрствый хлеб, и спину гнули, А Ричард Кори тихим летним днём, Придя домой, отправил в сердце пулю. Перевод А. Сергеева Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is the genre of the poem? 2. What is the poem about? Where is the scene of the poem set? Who are the characters? 3. Who is the speaker in the poem? Why does the author choose this point of view? �Содержание 4. Interpret the collective image of “people on the pavement”. What does the use of metonymy underline? 5. Analyse the description of the main character. What features do the epithets underline? Are they objective or exaggerated? 6. What words and phrases reveal people’s attitude to Richard Cory? 7. What is the tone of the poem? How is it supported by the metre and rhyme? Find the cases of onomatopoeia, alliteration and assonance in the poem. What purpose do they serve in the poem? 8. How does the tone change in the last stanza? What was the poet’s purpose in making this shift? 9. What causes the defeated expectancy effect in the end of the poem? 10. What is the message of the poem? Does it concern only American Dream concept? Can it be interpreted on the scale of human condition in general? �Содержание Robert Frost (1874–1963) Robert Frost stood right at the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He does not fit into any one era. He was one of the first poets to advocate for individualism in language, before the idea became fashionable in the early 20th century, but he always wrote in his own style, never imitating the current trends. Frost was not an experimental poet. He believed that the sound of a poem, made by its metre and rhyme, is as important to the overall work as the words. He used traditional techniques to describe the world in simple detail. Many of Frost’s most famous poems are inspired by the world of nature. Frost said, “Poetry is more often of the country than the city… Poetry is very, very rural – rustic. It might be taken as a symbol of man, taking its rise from individuality and seclusion – written first for the person that writes and then going out into its social appeal and use.” Frost is famous for his colloquial tone and the subject of everyday life. However, within a seemingly banal event from an ordinary day – mending the stones of a wall, mowing a field of hay – Frost always discerned a deeper meaning. Frost’s poetry is also significant because of the amount of autobiographical material that it contains. He was not a happy man. He suffered from serious depression and anxiety throughout his life and was never convinced that his poetry was truly worthwhile. He suffered through the untimely deaths of his father, mother, and sister, as well as four of his six children and his beloved wife, all of which contributed to the melancholy that appears in much of Frost’s work. Gathering Leaves Собирая листья Spades take up leaves No better than spoons, And bags full of leaves Are light as balloons. Лопатой грести – Что детским совком. И листьев мешок, Как шар, невесом. I make a great noise Of rustling all day Like rabbit and deer Running away. Начавши с утра, Шуршу целый день, Как кролик в лесу Иль, может, олень. But the mountains I raise Elude my embrace, Flowing over my arms And into my face. Сухая волна Уходит из рук И с силой в лицо Кидается вдруг. I may load and unload Again and again Till I fill the whole shed, And what have I then? А после носить Мешки на спине. Заполнить сарай. – Зачем это мне? �Содержание Next to nothing for weight, And since they grew duller From contact with earth, Next to nothing for color. Вес вовсе не вес. Цвет вовсе не цвет. И зрелища нет. И выгоды нет. Next to nothing for use. But a crop is a crop, And who’s to say where The harvest shall stop? И все же, есть сбор. И все же, есть жнец. И кто скажет, где Сей жатве конец? Перевод Т. Стамовой Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is Robert Frost’s persistent focus in poetry? 2. Does this poem serve a good example of Robert Frost’s typical combination of casual subject and profound message? 3. What is the genre of the poem? 4. Analyse the metre of the poem. Is it regular syllabic meter? How many beats are there in each line? How does it contribute to the mood of the poem? Does the form correlate with the content? 5. What is the poem about? Is the theme explicit or implied? 6. Analyse similes and metaphors used in the poem. What do they tell us about the speaker’s attitude to what he is doing? 7. How does the fact that dry leaves are being gathered to “fill the whole shed” foreshadow the philosophic meaning of the poem? 8. How does the poet describe the leaves? What is the role of repetition in this description? Find the examples of repetition in the whole poem. What purpose does this device serve? 9. How does the last stanza illustrate the overall theme of the poem? What is the key idea Robert Frost implies in the image of “harvest”? Does he speak about the process or the result, or both? 10. Why isn’t the speaker happy about the “crop”? What do the useless leaves symbolise? �Содержание Edward Estlin Commings (1894–1962) As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Edward Estlin Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style which is immediately recognized by the liberal use of lowercase letters and acrobatic word arrangement. Cummings’s name is often turned into “e. e. cummings” in the mistaken belief that the poet legally changed his name to lowercase letters only. Cummings used capital letters only irregularly in his verse and did not object when publishers began lowercasing his name, but he himself capitalized his name in his signature and in the title pages of original editions of his books. Commings wrote avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language. He revised grammatical rules to suit his own purposes, assigning his own private meanings to words. Readers benefit from reading his poems both verbally and visually. A typical Ccummings’ poem is compact and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by the poet. Despite their nontraditional form, Cummings’ poems came to be popular with many readers. They focused on universal ideas of love, childhood, and nature. e. e. commings was a lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. Some of his love poems are frankly erotic and were meant to shock the Puritanical sensibilities of the early 20th century. Alongside his lyrical celebrations of love, nature, and imagination e. e. commings also wrote satirical poems denouncing urban and political life. His attacks on the mass mind, conventional patterns of thought, and society’s restrictions on free expression, were born of his strong commitment to the individual. Cummings satirized what he called “mostpeople,” that is, the herd mentality found in modern society. Pity this Busy Monster, Manunkind Не сострадай больному бизнесмонстру Pity this busy monster, manunkind, Не сострадай больному бизнесмонстру, not. Progress is a comfortable disease – your victim (death and life safely beyond) бесчеловечеству. Прогресс – болезнь приятная: предавшийся безумству plays with the bigness of his littleness – electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend гигантом карлик мнит себя всю жизнь – рой электронов чтит, как гор гряду, лезвие бритвы; линзы увеличат unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born -pity poor flesh невласть немысли и согнут в дугу где-и-когда, вернув немысль в неличность. Мир «сделано» не есть мир «рождено» – and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagital жалей живую тварь, любую, кроме вот этой, мнящей, что она над всеми �Содержание ultraomnipotence. We doctors know владычествует. Мы, врачи, давно a hopeless case if-listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go рукой махнули – слушай: за углом чертовски славный мир, ей-ей; идём Перевод В. Британишского Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is Edward Commings’ literary reputation? 2. What theme does he develop in this poem? What is the author’s idea? 3. What metaphors are used in the first lines of the poem? How do the epithets “busy” and “comfortable” develop the images? 4. What words exemplify the concept of progress? What words does the poet use to create the picture of nature? 5. Analyse the words composed by the poet. What are the word-building means he uses? What meaning do they accentuate? 6. Find the examples of non-standard use of grammar. What is the author’s purpose in the violation of grammar rules? 7. What is the general mood of the poem? What helps to define it? 8. Does the shape of the poem contribute to its content? 9. Who are the “doctors” the speaker identifies himself with at the end of the poem? Is the speaker sympathetic or resentful to mankind? Does his attitude remain the same throughout the poem? 10. What is the role of initial and final imperative sentences? 11. Analyse the message of the poem. Is there any way to stop progress and return to nature? �Содержание Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Dylan Thomas is one of the most well-known and influential poets of the twentieth century. He possessed a tremendous talent that made him a literary sensation at a relatively young age. However, his personal life was often disappointing. The estimation of the work has often been colored by an estimation of the man. Thomas’s biography was dominated by numerous unflattering reminiscences concerning the poet's drinking, debauching and philandering during his last years in America. The legend tells about a hard-drinking Welsh bard, a romantic artist at odds with the modern world. Attempting to define himself Thomas said, “One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women.” Thomas was a skilled reader of his own poetry which is notoriously lyrical. There is no doubt that the sound of language is central to Thomas’ style. His poems are written in tight rhyme schemes reminiscent of ballads and nursery rhymes. A typical feature in most of Thomas’ poetry is conflict between the content and the structure of the poem. Nevertheless, it is the music of his poems, as much as their themes of lost innocence, nostalgia for childhood and death, which has proved so seductive to readers and listeners. Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social and intellectual issues. His writing has a lot in common with the Romantic tradition particularly in its emphasis on imagination, emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and organic form. He uses symbols and images of nature to create a feeling of love towards life and humanity. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Не уходи покорно в сумрак смерти Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Не следуй мирно в даль, где света нет, Пусть гневом встретит старость свой конец. Бунтуй, бунтуй, когда слабеет свет. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Хоть знают мудрецы, что тьма – ответ На свет всех слов, не следует мудрец Безропотно туда, где света нет. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. И праведник, сдержавший свой обет Нести добро как солнечный венец, Рыдает зло, когда слабеет свет. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Дикарь, свободный человек, поэт, Прекрасного певец, лучей ловец, Не побредет туда, где света нет. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Увидев перед смертью рой комет Сквозь слепоту всех лет былых, слепец Бунтует, если угасает свет. �Содержание And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Ты не на склоне – на вершине лет. Встреть гневом смерть, прошу тебя, отец. Не следуй мирно в даль, где света нет. Бунтуй, бунтуй, когда слабеет свет. Перевод А. Берлиной Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is the form of the poem? What atmosphere is created by this ballad-like style? How do the subject and the form interact? 2. Who is the speaker of the poem? Who does the speaker address? 3. What does “good night” in the first line mean? Analyse other metaphors of the first tercet. 4. What examples does the speaker give to illustrate people’s resistance to death? Why does he choose “wise”, “good”, “wild” and “grave” men? Describe the main features of each category of people. Why does the poet arrange the adjectives in this order? 5. What is the attitude of “wise men” to the approaching death? Analyse the imagery in the second tercet. What does “to fork lightning” mean? 6. How do “good men” face death? Interpret the extended image of the ocean. 7. What is the reaction of “wild men” towards death? What does “the sun” stand for? What “grieves” the sun in the actions of “wild men”? 8. Interpret the two meanings of the word “grave” in the fifth tercet. Why does the poet focus on blindness as the feature of “grave men”? What does it symbolyse? Analyse the simile employed by the poet. 9. What is the role of oxymoron in the last stanza? What words and phrases create the climax of the poem? 10. What is the general tone of the poem? What phonetic expressive means add to the emotional effect of the poem? 11. What words bring out the contrast in the whole poem? What concepts are contrasted? How does the contrast highlight the theme of the poem? 12. What is the main idea of the poem? Does it present a conventional point of view? Do you support the author’s appeal? �Содержание Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) As with many literary figures, Parker’s life was filled with drama and personal darkness, which often came through in her writing which is known for its sharp wit and cynicism. Though she maintained high popularity and a steady employment in popular periodicals, theatres and film studios, the pattern of depression, affairs, suicide attempts and recovery would continue throughout Parker’s life. It seems ironic that a woman so drawn to pessimism and drinking, who had attempted suicide at least four times, lived into her seventies. Though Parker’s works are full of morbid thoughts and images of isolation, degradation and loneliness it is her many-sided humor, tenderness and pathos that readers pay attention to. The targets of Parker’s satire are the upper class, the shallow and boring, the self-pitying, the selfish, the envious and the jealous. Her major themes are universal and timeless: human frailties, social conventions, middle-class complacency, disintegration of relationships, unrequited love, and the women’s emotional dependency upon men. That Parker was a feminist is undeniable. Her voice is confined for the most part to women and what was important to them. Critics often described her poetry as sentimental, trivial, and melodramatic. Parker’s poems are written in rhymed and metered stanzas. Her romantic lyrical ballads are rich with imagery and symbolism, though her favourite devices are paradox, exaggeration, repetition, clichéd speech, epigrams, irony and sarcasm. Frustration Разочарование If I had a shiny gun, I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folk who give me pains; Когда б имела пистолет, так развлекла бы целый свет и враз мозги повышибала всем, от которых пострадала. Or had I some poison gas, I could make the moments pass Bumping off a number of People whom I do not love. Имей я ядовитый газ, так от меня б никто не спас всю ту немалую ораву, что мне на свете не по нраву. But I have no lethal weapon – Thus does Fate our pleasure step on! So they still are quick and well Who should be, by rights, in hell. Но нет оружия в руках, и тем намерениям – крах, и жизнь покуда не поблекла для тех, кому дорога в пекло. (И радостно живут сегодня все кандидаты в преисподню). Перевод В. Кормана �Содержание Questions for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is Dorothy Parker’s literary reputation? Does the poem serve a typical example of her style? 2. What is the theme of the poem? Does it deal with physical or spiritual human experience, or both? 3. What is the form of the poem? What is this kind of metre reminiscent of? Is it suitable for children reading? 4. What pictures does the poet use to illustrate the vigor and force of the speaker’s feeling? 5. What is the general mood of the poem? Can the poem be taken seriously? What device foregrounds the author’s irony? 6. What is the role of personification in the last stanza? Why does the author shift from the first to the third person? 7. Does the poem focus on personal experience or human condition in general? What is the message of the poem? �Содержание Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) Allen Ginsberg is one of the 20th century’s most influential poets. He is regarded as a founding father of the Beat Movement and an American artistic icon. As a leading member of the Beat Generation Allen Ginsberg promoted free thought and expression over cultural conformity. His works present the bleak urban landscapes focusing on poverty and despair of people living outside the mainstream. They were a generation that felt they could never settle into the lives of corporate jobs and nuclear families – ordinarily the ideal of men of the post-war era. A Supermarket in California was one of his first experiments with the long line form which would become Ginsberg’s trademark style. Ginsberg’s use of varying lengths of line and rhythm was inspired by Walt Whitman, who is considered to be America’s first original poet. In subject matter Ginsberg continued Whitman’s poetic attack on social conventions by writing about the consequences of corporate industrial growth and consumerism. A Supermarket in California What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! – and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a �Содержание smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? Супермаркет в Калифорнии Этим вечером, слоняясь по переулкам с больной головой и застенчиво глядя на луну, как я думал о тебе, Уолт Уитмен! Голодный, усталый я шел покупать себе образы и забрел под неоновый свод супермаркета и вспомнил перечисленья предметов в твоих стихах. Что за персики! Что за полутона! Покупатели вечером целыми семьями! Проходы набиты мужьями! Жены у гор авокадо, дети среди помидоров! – и ты, Гарсия Лорка, что ты делал среди арбузов? Я видел, как ты, Уолт Уитмен, бездетный старый ниспровергатель, трогал мясо на холодильнике и глазел на мальчишек из бакалейного. Я слышал, как ты задавал вопросы: Кто убил поросят? Сколько стоят бананы? Ты ли это, мой ангел? Я ходил за тобой по блестящим аллеям консервных банок, и за мною ходил магазинный сыщик. Мы бродили с тобой, одинокие, мысленно пробуя артишоки, наслаждаясь всеми морожеными деликатесами, и всегда избегали кассиршу. Куда мы идем, Уолт Уитмен? Двери закроются через час. Куда сегодня ведет твоя борода? (Я беру твою книгу и мечтаю о нашей одиссее по супермаркету, и чувствую – все это вздор.) Так что, мы будем бродить всю ночь по пустынным улицам? Деревья бросают тени на тени, в домах гаснет свет, мы одни. Что же, пойдём домой мимо спящих синих автомобилей, мечтая об утраченной Америке любви? О, дорогой отец, старый седобородый одинокий учитель мужества, какая была у тебя Америка, когда Харон перевез тебя на дымящийся берег и ты стоял и смотрел, как теряется лодка в черных струях Леты? Перевод А. Сергеева Questions for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What do you know about the Beat Generation cultural movement? How did it influence the poetic form and subject matter? 2. Interpret the title of the poem. What does the indefinite article suggest? �Содержание 3. Where is the scene of the poem set? What is the author’s purpose in contrasting urban landscape and natural world? 4. When do the events happen? Why does the poet choose this time of the day? What does the full moon symbolyse? 5. Why does the poet go to the “neon fruit supermarket”? What does “shopping for images” mean? What is he looking for? What does the diversity of supermarket commodities fail to substitute? 6. What impression is created by the enumeration used in the first stanza? What sentence type prevails? 7. The poet sees two famous literary figures in the supermarket. Who are they? Who becomes the poet’s companion? Underline the words and expressions the poet uses to describe Walt Whitman. Can you define Ginsberg’s poem as an ode to his poetic hero? 8. The poem is an example of free verse. How does the structure of the poem contribute to its general atmosphere and tone? 9. Define the speaker’s mood. Is he calm, sad, disturbed, disappointed or indignant? What is the reason for this attitude? How does the tone change within the poem? How does the word choice reflect the poet’s growing pessimism in the last stanza? 10.What is the role of epithets in the poem? 11.Ginsberg ends the poem comparing America to the mythological Hades. Charon was the guardian of Hades who would lead souls across the River Styx to their eternity. Lethe was another river that ran through Hades. The river Lethe, in Greek mythology, would cause complete forgetfulness for those that drank from its waters. Interpret the mythological allusions in the poem. What does the poet state about Walt Whitman, himself and the modern world with the help of intertextuality? 12.What is the message of the poem? �Содержание Tom Clark (born 1941) Tom Clark has worked as a poetry editor, writer and teacher in both America and England. Clark is also a respected writer in such genres of literature as biography, literary criticism, essays, novels and drama. He has written many books on sports and popular culture. Clark possesses a wistful yet ultimately optimistic sense of observation. Specific details and metaphors are arranged in his poems in service of a deep message, delivered with wit and sophistication. Clark uses a conversational pattern in his poems which are often elegiac in tone. They are thought-demanding and inspiring. Clark’s poetry has been consistently attentive to form. He focuses on the arrangement of lines treating the page as imaginative space, a framing device for words. Poem Like musical instruments Abandoned in a field The parts of your feelings Are starting to know a quiet The pure conversion of your Life into art seems destined Never to occur You don’t mind You feel spiritual and alert As the air must feel Turning into sky aloft and blue You feel like You’ll never feel like touching anything or anyone Again And then you do Questions for the Analysis of the Poem 1. What is the poem about? 2. Who is the speaker in the poem? What effect is produced by the pronoun “you”? 3. Analyse the imagery of the poem. What devices join in? 4. Mark the case of non-standard grammar. What was the author’s purpose in breaking the rules? 5. Where does the author make pauses? What words are emphasized by them? 6. Interpret the end of the poem. What implication is contained in the last line? 7. Does the shape of the poem contribute to its overall effect? 8. What is the message of the poem? Poems for Self-Guided Analysis �Содержание Poems for Self-Guided Analysis On the World by Francis Quarles (1592–1644) Holy Sonnets, Sonnet X by John Donne (1572–1631) The world’s an Inn; and I her guest. I eat; I drink; I take my rest. My hostess, nature, does deny me Nothing, wherewith she can supply me; Where, having stayed a while, I pay Her lavish bills, and go my way. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so; For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery. Thou’art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! ” I’m nobody by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) Parting By Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell! They’d advertise – you know! My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me, So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell. How dreary to be somebody! �Содержание How public like a frog To tell one’s name the livelong day To an admiring bog! Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. Never Seek to Tell Thy Love by William Blake (1757–1827) The Three Arrows by Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1983) Porcia’s Song Never seek to tell thy love Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind doth move Silently invisibly. I told my love I told my love I told her all my heart Trembling cold in ghastly fears. Ah! she did depart! Soon after she was gone from me A traveler came by Silently invisibly: He took her with a sigh. OF all the shafts to Cupid’s bow, The first is tipp’d with fire; All bare their bosoms to the blow And call the wound Desire. Love’s second is a poison’d dart, And Jealousy is named: Which carries poison to the heart Desire had first inflamed. The last of Cupid’s arrows all With heavy lead is set: That vainly weeping lovers call Repentance, or Regret. Never for Society by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) We Outgrow Love by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) Never for Society He shall seek in vain – Who His own acquaintance Cultivate – Of Men Wiser Men may weary – But the Man within We outgrow love, like other things And put it in the Drawer – Till it an Antique fashion shows – Like Costumes Grandsires wore. Never knew Satiety – Better entertain Than could Border Ballad – Or Biscayan Hymn – Neither introduction Need You – unto Him – Who Has not Found the Heaven – Below – by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) Who has not found the Heaven – below – Will fail of it above – For Angels rent the House next ours, Wherever we remove – The Best Thing in the World by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) Remember by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) What’s the best thing in the world ? June-rose, by May-dew impearled; Sweet south-wind, that means no rain; Truth, not cruel to a friend; Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. �Содержание Pleasure, not in haste to end; Beauty, not self-decked and curled Till its pride is over-plain; Light, that never makes you wink; Memory, that gives no pain; Love, when, so, you're loved again. What's the best thing in the world ? – Something out of it, I think. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you plann’d: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, – This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask! How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. An Old Song Resung by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree. In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. ’Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair �Содержание The Kiss by Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) I Shall not Care by Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) I hoped that he would love me, And he has kissed my mouth, But I am like a stricken bird That cannot reach the south. When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Tho’ you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care. For though I know he loves me, To-night my heart is sad; His kiss was not so wonderful As all the dreams I had. I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful When rain bends down the bough, And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted Than you are now. Do not stand at my grave and weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye (1905–2004) The Snow Man By Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there; I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sun on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning’s hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circling flight. I am the soft star-shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there; I did not die. One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. The Door In The Dark by Robert Frost (1874–1963) General Review Of The Sex Situation by Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) In going from room to room in the dark, I reached out blindly to save my face, But neglected, however lightly, to lace My fingers and close my arms in an arc. A slim door got in past my guard, And hit me a blow in the head so hard Woman wants monogamy; Man delights in novelty. Love is woman’s moon and sun; Man has other forms of fun. Woman lives but in her lord; Count to ten, and man is bored. �Содержание I had my native simile jarred. So people and things don't pair any more With what they used to pair with before. Dreams by Langston Hughes (1902–1967) With this the gist and sum of it, What earthly good can come of it? Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. and which you were probably saving for breakfast As Is The Sea Marvelous by e. e. commings (1894–1962) Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold Every Night I Look up at the Freckled Sky by e. e. commings as is the sea marvelous from god’s hands which sent her forth to sleep upon the world and the earth withers the moon crumbles one by one stars flutter into dust but the sea does not change and she goes forth out of hands and she returns into hands and is with sleep… love, the breaking of your soul upon my lips This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) every night i look up at the freckled sky and fall in love with the universe all over again. i will be counting the �Содержание Hope by Tom Clark (born 1941) slowly it unravels strings falling apart going this way and that such a multitude of colors before me yarn falling to and fro surrounding this form twisting slowly round this corpse such a wonderous sight before my dim eyes slowly, it drifts away away from my shaking hands and my aching heart like snow it drifts ...like snow... lazily, it expands into the twilight filling the dark corners in front with fleeting glimpses of beauty and then is gone stars for the rest of my life. Narcissus by Alice Oswald Once I was half flower, half self, That invisible self whose absence inhabits mirrors, That invisible flower that is always inwardly, Groping up through us, a kind of outswelling weakness, Yes once I was half frail, half glittering, Continually emerging from the store of the self itself, Always staring at rivers, always Nodding and leaning to one side, I came gloating up, And for a while I was half skin half breath, For a while I was neither one thing nor another, A waterflame, a variable man-woman of the verges, Wearing the last self-image I was left with Before my strenth went down down into the darkness For the best of the year and lies crumpled In a clot of sleep at the root of nothings all �Содержание SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Гальперин, И. Р. Стилистика английского языка : учебник для студентов институтов и факультетов иностранных языков / И. Р. Гальперин ; [вступ. ст. автора]. – [2-е изд., испр.]. – Москва : Высшая школа, 1977. – 332 с. 2. Обнорская, М. Е. Аналитическое чтение и интерпретация текста : учебное пособие для студентов, обучающихся по специальностям направления «Лингвистика и межкультурная коммуникация» : [на английском языке] / М. Е. Обнорская, Н. Н. Золина ; Барнаульский государственный педагогический университет, Лингвистический институт. – Барнаул : БГПУ, 2007. – 162 с. 3. Adler, M. J. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading / M. J. Adler, Ch. V. Doren. – Revised and Updated Edition. – New York : Touchstone, 1972. – 426 p. 4. Cambridge Paperback Encyclopedia / Ed. by David Crystal. – 2 edition. – Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1994. – 506 p. 5. Cross, D. W. Propaganda: How Not To Be Bamboozled [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://kellimcbride.com/pdf/cross_propaganda.pdf, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата обращения: 16.10.2017). 6. Famous People – Biography [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https:// www.biography.com/people, свободный. 7. Functional Styles of the English Language [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://irastraw.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64:2010-06-2816-40-01&catid=42:2010-06-22-19-46-16&Itemid=66, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата обращения: 12.08.2017). 8. Goumovskaya, G. English for specific purposes. Publicistic style [Электронный ресурс] / G. Goumovskaya // Английский язык. – 2007. – № 6. – Электрон. версия печ. публ. – Режим доступа: http://eng.1september.ru/article.php?ID=200700609, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата обращения: 06.11.2017). 9. How to analyse a speech [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http:// jorgenboge.wikidot.com/how-to-analyze-a-speech, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата обращения: 16.11.2017). 10.Landy, A. S. The Heath Introduction to Literature / A. S. Landy. – Fourth Edition. – Lexington, Massachusetts : D. H. Heath & Company, 1992. – 1142 p. 11.Lester, James D. A Writer’s Handbook. Style and Grammar / James D. Lester – Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1991. – 585 p. �Содержание 12.Manipulation through Words: Rhetorical Devices in Political Speeches [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https://ru.scribd.com/document/267962121/Manipulationthrough-Words-Rhetorical-Devices-in-Political-Speeches, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата обращения: 28.11.2017). 13.PoemHunter.com [Электронный www.poemhunter.com/, свободный. 14.Poetry Foundation [Электронный www.poetryfoundation.org/, свободный. ресурс]. ресурс]. – Режим – Режим доступа: https:// доступа: https:// 15.Sparknotes: Today’s Most Popular Study Guides [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.sparknotes.com, свободный. 16.U.S. Presidents [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.history.com/ topics/us-presidents, свободный. 17.Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https:// www.wikipedia.org/, свободный. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Козлова, Любовь Александровна Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Further steps in text analysis Subject The topic of the resource 1. Языкознание. 2. Германские языки. 3. английский язык. 4. лингвостилистический анализ. 5. интерпретация текста. 6. жанровые особенности. Description An account of the resource Further steps in text analysis [Электронный ресурс] : учебное пособие / Л. А. Козлова, Л. Л. Шевченко ; Алтайский государственный педагогический университет. — Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2018. — 268 с. Настоящее пособие предназначено для занятий со студентами V курса по лингвостилистическому анализу и интерпретации текстов различных жанров: эссе, биографии, автобиографии, короткого рассказа, публичной речи, научного текста и поэзии. С учетом того, что начальные навыки лингвостилистического анализа закладываются на IV курсе, данное пособие ставит своей целью расширение знаний и закрепление навыков интерпретации текстов различных жанров, выявление жанровых особенностей текста и тех стилистических приемов, которые формируют в своей совокупности идиостиль конкретного автора. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Козлова, Любовь Александровна Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2018 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Алтайский государственный педагогический университет Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 21.05.2018 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Шевченко, Людмила Леонидовна Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource ©Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2018 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf, exe Language A language of the resource русский Type The nature or genre of the resource Учебное пособие Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/kozlova1.pdf" target="_blank">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/kozlova1.pdf<br /></a><a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/kozlova1.exe" target="_blank">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/kozlova1.exe</a>