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Page 93 3. a) What do children want to read about? This is a question that teachers and parents have been asking for a long time. Read the texts below and prepare, to give your view on the problem. One person who had no doubts about what youngsters wanted to read was the children's author Enid Blyton. Although she died in 1968, and many of her stories are today rather dated, her books continue to be hugely popular with children. They have been translated into 27 languages, and they still sell over eight million copies a year, despite tough competition from television and computer games. Blyton was not only a gifted children's author, she was also incredibly prolific. During her lifetime, she wrote over 700 books for children of all ages. Her best-known creations are the The Famous Five series, about a group of teenagers who share exciting adventures, and the Noddy books, about a little boy who lives in a world where toys come to life. But if children love Blyton's books, the same cannot be said for adults. All her stories have one thing in common: a happy ending. And this, combined with predictable plots, has led many grown-ups to dismiss Blyton's stories as boring. After her death, her critics went further and accused her of racism and of negative stereotyping — the villains in her Noddy books were "golliwogs", children's dolls representing black people. Many: of her books were also denounced as sexist because of the way she treated female characters — girls were usually given a secondary role, while the boys had the real adventures. Enid Blyton firmly believed in the innocence of childhood. She offered her young readers imaginary worlds, which were an escape from harsh realities of life. In Blyton's books, baddies; were always defeated and the children who defeated them were always good. (BBC English, August 1997) Once many years ago, in anticipation of the children we. would one day have, a relative of my wife's gave us a box of Ladybird Books from the 1950s and 60s. They all had titles like Out in the Sun and Sunny Days at the Seaside, and contained meticulously drafted, richly coloured illustrations of a prosperous, contented, litter-free Britain in which the sun always shone, shopkeepers smiled, and children in freshly pressed clothes derived happiness and pleasure from innocent pastimes — riding a bus to the shops, floating a model boat on a park pond, chatting to a kindly policeman. My favourite was a book called Adventure on the Island. There was, in fact, precious little adventure in the book — the high point, I recall, was finding a starfish suckered to a rock — but I loved it because of the illustrations (by the gifted and much-missed J.H. Wingfield). I was strangely influenced by this book and for some years agreed to take our family holidays at the British seaside on the assumption that one day we would find this magic place where summer days were forever sunny, the water as warm as a sitz-bath, and commercial blight unknown. When at last we began to accumulate children, it turned out that they didn't like these books at all because the characters in them never did anything more lively than visit a pet shop or watch a fisherman paint his boat. I tried to explain that this was sound preparation for life in Britain, but they wouldn't have it and instead, to my dismay, attached their affections to a pair of irksome little clots called Topsy and Tim. (Bill Bryson "Notes From a Small Island", 1997) b) Use the topical vocabulary in answering the questions: 1. Can you remember at all the first books you had? 2. Did anyone read bedtime stories to you? 3. You formed the reading habit early in life, didn't you? What sorts of books did you prefer? 4. What English and American children's books can you name? Have you got any favourites? 5. Is it good for children to read fanciful stories which are an escape from the harsh realities of life? Should they be encouraged to read more serious stuffs as "sound preparation for life"? 6. How do you select books to read for pleasure? Do you listen to advice? Do the physical characteristics matter? Such as bulky size, dense print, loose pages, notations on the margins, beautiful/gaudy illustrations etc.? 7. Do you agree with the view that television is gradually replacing reading? 8. Is it possible for television watching not only to discourage but actually to inspire reading? 9. Some teachers say it is possible to discern among the young an insensitivity to nuances of language and an inability to perceive more than just a story? Do you think it's a great loss? 10. What do you think of the educational benefits of "scratch and sniff" books that make it possible for young readers to ex perience the fragrance of the garden and the atmosphere of a zoo? 11. What kind of literacy will be required of the global village citizens of the 21st century? Page 95 c) There is some evidence to suggest that the concentration of young children today is greatly reduced compared with that of similar children only 20 years ago. Do you agree with the view that unwillingness13ﾧto tackle printed texts that offer a challenge through length and complexity has worked its way up through schools into universities? Discuss in pairs. 4. Read the interview with Martin Amis (MA.), one of the most successful writers in Britain today. He talks to a BBC English reporter (R) about his work. R: As the son of a famous writer, how did your own writing style develop? MA: People say, you know, "How do you go about getting: your style?" and it's almost as if people imagine you kick off by writing a completely ordinary paragraph of straightforward, declarative sentences, then you reach for your style pen — your style highlighting pen — and jazz14ﾧ it all up. But in fact it comes in that form and I like to think that it's your talent doing that. R: In your life and in your fiction you move between Britain and America and you have imported American English into your writing. Why? What does it help you do? M.A.: I suppose what I'm looking for are new rhythms of thought. You know, I'm as responsive as many people are to street words and nicknames and new words. And when I use street language, I never put it down as it is, because it will look like a three-month-old newspaper when it comes out. Phrases like "No way, Jose" and "Free lunch" and things like that, they're dead in a few months. So what you've got to do is come up with an equivalent which isn't going to have its street life exhausted. I'm never going to duplicate these rhythms because I read and I studied English literature and that's all there too. But perhaps where the two things meet something original can be created. That's where originality, if it's there, would be, in my view. R: You have said that it's no longer possible to write in a wide range of forms — that nowadays we can't really write tragedy, we can't write satire, we can't write romance, and that comedy the only form left. M.A.: I think satire's still alive. Tragedy is about failed heroes and epic is, on the whole, about triumphant or redeemed heroes. So comedy, it seems to me, is the only thing left. As illusion after illusion has been cast aside, we no longer believe in these big figures — Macbeth, Hamlet, Tamburlaine — these big, struggling, tortured heroes. Where are they in the modern world? So comedy's having to do it all. And what you get, certainly in my case, is an odd kind of comedy, full of things that shouldn't be in comedy. R: What is it that creates the comedy in your novels? M.A.: Well, I think the body, for instance, is screamingly funny as a subject. I mean, if you live in your mind, as everyone does but writers do particularly, the body is a sort of disgraceful joke. You can get everything sort of nice and crisp and clear in your mind, but the body is a chaotic slobber of disobedience and decrepitude. And think that is hysterically funny myself because it undercuts us. It undercuts our pomposities and our ambitions. R: Your latest book The Information is about two very different writers, one of whom, Gywn, has become enormously successful and the other one, Richard, who has had a tiny bit of success but is no longer popular. One of the theories which emerges is that it's very difficult to say precisely that someone's writing is better by so much than someone else's. It's not like running a race when somebody comes first and somebody comes second. MA: No, human beings have not evolved a way of separating the good from the bad when it comes to literature or art in general. All we have is history of taste. No one knows if they're any good — no worldly prize or advance or sales sheet is ever going to tell you whether you're any good. That's all going to be sorted out when you're gone. R: Is this an increasing preoccupation of yours? M.A.: No, because there's nothing I can do about it. My father said. "That's no bloody use to me, is it, if I'm good, because I won't be around." R: Have you thought about where you might go from here? M.A: I've got a wait-and-see feeling about where I go next. One day a sentence or a situation appears in your head and you just recognise it as your next novel and you have no control over it. There's nothing you can do about it. That is your next novel and I'm waiting for that feeling. (BBC English, August 1995) Page 97 4 B. .1. Apaiaffl. 4 97 Express briefly in your own words what the talk is about. What makes it sound natural and spontaneous? What does Martin Amis emphasise about his style of writing? What does he say about modern literary genres? Do you agree that "comedy is the only form left"? Is it really impossible to separate "the good from the bad when it comes to literature or art in general"? How do you understand the sentence "all we have is a history of taste"? Do library research and reproduce a talk with an important writer. Read the following extract and observe the way literary criticism is written: Jane Austen saw life in a clear, dry light. She was not without deep human sympathies, but she had a quick eye for vanity, selfishness, but vulgarity, and she perceived the frequent incongruities between the way people talked and the realities of a situation. Her style is quiet and level. She never exaggerates, she never as it were, raises her voice to shout or scream. She is neither pompous, nor sentimental, nor flippant, but always gravely polite, and her writing contains a delicate but sharp-edged irony. L.P. Hartley is one of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original. For the world of his creation is composed of such diverse elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the process of human thought and feeling; he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of a Gothic imagination that reveals itself now in fanciful reverie, now in the mingled dark and gleam of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness... Such is the vision of life presented in his novels. Martin Amis is the most important novelist of his generation and probably the most influential prose stylist in Britain today. The son of Kingsley Amis, considered Britain's best novelist of the 1950s, at the age of 24 Martin won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Rachel Papers (his father had won the same prize 20 years earlier). Since 1973 he has published seven more novels, plus three books ofjournalism and one of short stories. Each work has been well received, in particular Money (1984), which was described as "a key novel of the decade." His latest book is The Information (1995). It has been said of Amis that he has enjoyed a career more like that of a pop star than a writer. Turn the above passages into dialogues and act them out. Choose an author, not necessarily one of the greats, you'd like to talk about. Note down a few pieces of factual Information about his life and work. Your fellow-students will ask you questions to find out what you know about your subject. Pair work. Discussing books and authors involves exchanging opinions and expressing agreement and disagreement. Team up with another student to talk on the following topics (Use expressions of agreement and disagreement (pp. 290). "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good." (Samuel Johnson) "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." (Mark Twain) "There's an old saying that all the world loves a lover. It doesn't. What all the world loves is a scrap. It wants to see two lovers struggling for the hand of one woman." (Anonymous) "No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them and read a single word." (Sydney Smith) "Books and friends should be few but good." (a proverb) Group discussion. Despite the increase in TV watching, reading still is an important leisure activity in Britain. More than 5,000 titles were nominated in a national survey conducted in 1996. The public was invited to suggest up to five books. It was later suggested that the votes either came from English literary students or from people who were showing off. What do you think? Can you point out a few important names that failed to make it into the top 100 list? Page 99 Compile your own list "Favourite Books of the Century." Alexander Herzen called public libraries "a feast of ideas to which all are invited". Read the text below and say how the modern libraries differ from those of the old days. Use the topical vocabulary. MY FAVOURITE LIBRARY There are many libraries which I use regularly in London, some to borrow books from, some as quiet places to work in, but the Westminster Central Reference Library is unique. In a small street just off Leicester Square, it is run by the London borough of Westminster. You don't need a ticket to get in, and it is available to foreign visitors just the same as to local residents. You simply walk in, and there, on three floors, you can consult about 138,000 reference books and they include some very remarkable and useful items. As you come in, the first alcove on the right contains telephone directories of almost every country in the world — Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, and so on, besides directories of important addresses in each country. There is also a street directory of every British town of any size, with the streets in alphabetical order, and the residents' names, as a rule, against their number in the street, while in another section the residents themselves are listed in alphabetical order. Next there are technical dictionaries in all the principal languages. I counted 60 specialised technical dictionaries! for Russian alone. Then there is a section which, besides the best world atlases, contains individual atlases of a great many countries, some of them almost too heavy to lift. Seven hundred periodicals, mostly technical, are taken by the library, and the latest issues are put out on racks nearby. By asking at the enquiry desk you can see maps of the whole of Britain on the scale of 1/60,000 and 1/24,000, and smaller-scale maps of nearly every other country in Europe. Around the walls, on this floor and the floor above, are reference books on every possible subject, including, for instance, standard works of English literature and criticism. Foreign literature, however, is represented mainly by anthologies. Finally, on the top floor of all, is a wonderful art library, where you can take down from the shelves all those expensive, heavy, illustrated editions that you could never really afford yourself. The librarian at the desk can direct you to answers for almost any query you may have about the plastic arts. There is in fact a busy enquiry desk on each floor, and the last time I was there they had just received a letter from a distinguished medical man. He had written to ask for information about sword-swallowing! He was very interested in the anatomy of sword-swallowers, and had failed to find anything either in medical libraries or in the British Museum Library! (Anglia, 1972) Prepare to give a talk on an important library, its history and facilities. Group work. Work in groups of three or four to discuss the pros and cons of reading detective novels and thrillers. Consider the following: "It has been estimated that only 3 percent of the population in Britain read such classics as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen; Agatha Christie's novels have sold more than 300 million copies." (Longman Britain Explored) "As thoughtful citizens we are hemmed in now by gigantic problems that appear as insoluble as they are menacing, so how pleasant it is to take an hour or two off to consider only the problem of the body that locked itself in its study and then used the telephone..." (J.B. Priestley) "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." (W. Shakespeare) "The world loves a spice of wickedness." (H. Longfellow) "If Jonathan Wild the Great had been written today, I think he would have been the hero of it, not the villain, and we should have been expected to feel sorry for him. For compassion is the order of the day ... Detective stories have helped to bring this about, and the convention that the murderee is always an unpleasant person, better out of the way." (L.P. Hartley) "The crime novel is developing moral equivalency: unpleasant detectives and charismatic criminals." (The Guardian, Oct. 8 1997) "If the question "Wither Fiction?" is raised, the novelist will have to make up his mind which side he is on. Is he to write: "She was a beautiful woman, witty, clever, cultivated, sympathetic, charming, bur, alas, she was a murderess? Or is he to write: "She was a beautiful woman, witty, clever, etc., and to crown it all, was a murderess"? (L.P. Hartley) UNIT 4 (1) TEXT From: RAGTIME1 By E.L. Doctorow Ragtime is a novel set in America at the beginning of this century. Its characters reflect all that is most significant and dramatic in America's last hundred years. One character, Coalhouse Walker Jr., a black pianist, had a love affair with young Sarah and abandoned her to later reunite. But Sarah, who bore his child was resentful when he came to rectify his actions. The novel will take you through the tragedy of their lives. The author E.L. Doctorow, an American writer, is famous for his other novels which include Welcome to Hard Times and The Book of Daniel, which was nominated for a National Book Award. One afternoon, a Sunday, a new model T-Ford2 slowly came up the hill and went past the house. The boy, who happened to see it from the porch, ran down the steps and stood on the sidewalk. The driver was looking right and left as if trying to find a particular address; he turned the car around at the corner and came back. Pulling up before the boy, he idled his throttle and beckoned with a gloved hand. He was a Negro. His car shone. The brightwork gleamed... I am looking for a young woman of color whose name is Sarah, he said. She is said to reside in one of these houses. The boy realized he meant the woman in the attic. She's here. The man switched off the motor, set the brake and jumped down. When Mother came to the door the colored man was respectful, but there was something disturbingly resolute and self-important in the way he asked her if he could please speak with Sarah. Mother could not judge his age. He was a stocky man with a red-complected shining brown face, high cheekbones and large dark eyes so intense as to suggest they were about to cross. He had a neat moustache. He was dressed in the affection of wealth to which colored people lent themselves. 104 She told him to wait and closed the door. She climbed to the third floor. She found the girl Sarah not sitting at the window as she usually did but standing rigidly, hands folded in front of her, and facing the door. Sarah, Mother said, you have a caller. The girl said nothing. Will you come to the kitchen? The girl shook her head. You don't want to see him? No, ma'am, the girl finally said softly, while she looked at the floor. Send him away, please. This was the most she had said in all the months she had lived in the house. Mother went back downstairs and found the fellow not at the back door but in the kitchen where, in the warmth of the corner near the cookstove, Sarah's baby lay sleeping in his carriage. The black man was kneeling beside the carriage and staring at the child. Mother, not thinking clearly, was suddenly outraged that he had presumed to come in the door. Sarah is unable to see you, she said and she held the door open. The colored man took another glance at the child, rose, thanked her and departed. Such was the coming of the colored man in the car to Broadview Avenue. His name was Cualhouse Walker Jr. Beginning with that Sunday he appeared every week, always knocking at the back door. Always turning away without complaint upon Sarah's refusal to see him. Father considered the visits a nuisance and wanted to discourage them. I'll call the police, he said. Mother laid her hand on his arm. One Sunday the colored man left a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums which in this season had to have cost him a pretty penny. The black girl would say nothing about her visitor. They had no idea where she had met him, or how. As far as they knew she had no family nor any friends from the black community in the downtown section of the city. Apparently she had come by herself from New York to work as a servant. Mother was exhilarated by the situation. She began to regret Sarah's intransigence. She thought of the drive from Harlem, where Coalhouse Walker Jr. lived, and the drive back, and she decided the next time to give him more of a visit. She would serve tea in the parlor. Father questioned the propriety of this. Mother said, he is well-spoken and conducts himself as a gentleman. I see nothing wrong with it. When Mr Roosevelt3 was in the White House he gave dinner to Booker T. Washington. Surely we can serve tea to Coalhouse Walker Jr. 105 And so it happened on the next Sunday that the Negro took tea. Father noted that he suffered no embarrassment by being in the parlor with a cup and saucer in his hand. On the contrary, he acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. The surroundings did not awe him nor was his manner deferentiail. He was courteous and correct. He told them about himself. He was a professional pianist and was now more or less permanently located in New York, having secured a job with the Jim Europe Clef Club Orchestra, a well-known ensemble that gave regular concerts at the Manhattan4 Casino on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was important, he said, for a musician to find a place that was permanent, a job that required no travelling... I am through travelling, he said. I am through going on the road. He spoke so fervently that Father realized the message was intended for the woman upstairs. This irritated him. What can you play? he said abruptly. Why don't you play something for us? The black man placed tea, on the tray. He rose, patted his lips with the napkin, placed the napkin beside his cup and went to the piano. He sat on the piano stool and immediately rose and twirled it till the height was to his satisfaction. He sat down again, played a chord and turned to them. This piano is badly in need of a tuning, he said. Father's face reddened. Oh, yes, Mother said, we are terrible about that. The musician turned again to the keyboard. "Wall Street5 Rag," he said. Composed by the great Scott Joplin.6 He began to play. Ill-tuned or not the Aeolian had never made such sounds. Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music. When the piece was over Coalhouse Walker turned on the stool and found in his audience the entire family: Mother, Father, the boy, Grandfather and Mother's Younger Brother, who had come down from his room in shirt and suspenders to see who was playing. Of all of them he was the only one who knew ragtime. He had heard it in his nightlife period in New York. He had never expected to hear it in his sister's home. 106 Coalhouse Walker Jr. turned back to the piano and said "The Maple Leaf". Composed by the great Scott Joplin. The most famous rag of all rang through the air. The pianist sat stiffly at the keyboard, his long dark hands with their pink nails seemingly with no effort producing the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves. This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment. The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being. The music filled the stairwell to the third floor where the mute and unforgiving Sarah sat with her hands folded and listened with the door open. The piece was brought to a conclusion. Everyone applauded. Mother then introduced Mr Walker to Grandfather and to Younger Brother, who shook the black man's hand and said I am pleased to meet you. Coalhouse Walker was solemn. Everyone was standing. There was a silence. Father cleared his throat. Father was not knowledgeable in music. His taste ran to Carrie Jacobs Bond.7 He thought Negro music had to have smiling and cakewalking. Do you know any coon songs?8 he said. He did not intend to be rude — coon songs was what they were called. But the pianist responded with a tense shake of the head. Coon songs are made for minstrel shows,9 he said. White men sing them in black face. There was another silence. The black man looked at the ceiling. Well, he said, it appears as if Miss Sarah will not be able to receive me. He turned abruptly and walked through the hall to the kitchen. The family followed him. He had left his coat on a chair. He put it on and ignoring them all, he knelt and gazed at the baby asleep in its carriage. After several moments he stood up, said good day and walked out of the door. |