Аракин. Учебник английского языка для студентов языковых специальностей. Аракин. Учебник английского языка для студентов языковых специал. Практический курс английского языка 4 курс Под редакцией В. Д. Аракина
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a) Express briefly in your own words what the talk to about. What makes it sound natural and spontaneous? b) 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"? c) Do library research and reproduce a talk with an important writer. 5. 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 of journalism 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. a) Turn the above passages into dialogues and act them out. b) 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. 6. 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) 7. 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? 1. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien 2. 1984 George Orwell 3. Animal Farm George Orwell 4. Ulysses James Joyce 5. Catch-22 Joseph Heller 6. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger 7. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 8. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez 9. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 10. Trainspotting Irvine Welsh 11. Wild Swans Jung Chang 12. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 13. Lord of the Flies William Golding 14. On the Road Jack Kerouac 15. Brave New World Aldous Huxley 16. The Wind in the WillowsKenneth Grahame 17. Winnie-the-Pooh A. A, Milne 18. TheCotor Purple Alice Walker 19. The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien 20. The Outsider Albert Camus 21. The lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis 22. The Trial Franz Kafka 23. Gone with the Wind Margaret Michell 24. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 25. Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 26. The Diary of Anne Frank 27. A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 28. Sons and Lovers D.S. Lawrence 29. To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 30. If this is a Man Primo Levi 31. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 32. The Wasp Factory Iain Banks 33. Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust 34. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl 35. Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 36. Beloved Toni Morrison 37. Possession A. S. Byatt 38. Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 39. A Passage to India E. M. Forster 40. Watership Down Richard Adams 41. Sophie's World Jostein Gaarder 42. The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco 43. Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 45. The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro 46. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 47. Birdsong Sebastian Faulks 48. Howards End E. M. Forster 49. Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh 50. A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth 51. Dune Frank Herbert 52. A Prayer for Owen Meany John Irving 53. Perfume Patrick Susskind 54. Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 55. The Gormenghast Trilogy Mervyn Peake 56. Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee 57. The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath 58. The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood 59. Testament Of Youth Vera Brittain 60. The Magus John Fowles 61. Brighton Rock Graham Greene 62. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist Robert Tressell 63. The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 64. Tales of the City Armistead Maupin 65. The French lieutenant's Woman John Fowles 66. Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernieres 67. Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vbnhegut 68. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig 69. A Room with a View E.M. Forster 70. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis 71. If Stephen King 72. The Power and the Glory Graham Greene 73. The Stand Stephen King 74. All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque 75. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Roddy Doyle 76. Matilda Roald Dahl 77. American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis 78. Fear and Loathiflg in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson 79. A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking 80. James and the Giant Peach Roald Dahl 81. Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence 82. The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe 83. The Complete Cookery Course Delia Smith 84. An Evil Cradling Brian Keenan 85. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence 86. Down and out in Paris and London George Orwell 87. 2001 — A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke 88. The Tin Drum Gunther Grass 89. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Alexander Solzhenitsyn 90. Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela 91. The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkifts 92. Jurassic Park Michael Crichtdn 93. The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell 94. Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton 95. High Fidelity Nick Hornby 96. The Van Roddy Doyle 97. The BFG Roald Dahl 98. Earthly Powers Anthony Burgess 99. I, Claudius Robert Graves 100. The Horse Whisperer Nicholas Evans 8. Compile your own list "Favourite Books of the Century." 9. Alexander Herzen called public libraries "a feast of ideas to which all are invited”. Read the text below and say how the modem 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 alts. 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) 10. Prepare to give a talk on an important library, its history and facilities. 11. 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." (LP.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, but, 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 Four 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 love affair with young Sarah and abandoned her to later reunite. But 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 comer 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. Site'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. 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. 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 deferential. 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. 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. |