Практический курс английского языка 4 курс Под редакцией В. Д. Аракина издание четвертое, переработанное и дополненное
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1. As you read the text: a) Look for the answers to these questions: 1. What profession stereotypes are there? What is a stereotypical "student"? "lecturer"? "poet"? 2. Is the "classic image of a writer" completely false? Be specific. 3. Would you agree that artistic people are often superstitious? 4. Who is given the title of "Dame" in Britain? 5. What suggests that Dame Muriel Spark is rather neurotic about the tools of her trade? 6. What part did the school play in shaping her career? 7. How did Graham Green help the young writer? 8.What are the scanty biographical details given in the profile? b) Find in the text the facts to illustrate the following: 1. For Muriel Spark writing is the most important thing in her life. 2. Dame Muriel Spark is a stereotypical writer. 3. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is a great novel. c) Summarize the text in three paragraphs. 2. In spite of the Russian proverb one can argue about taste: everybody does, and one result is that tastes change. If given a choice what would you rather read a novel or short stories in book form? Why? Try to substantiate your point of view. Use some of the ideas listed below. "A novel appeals in the same way that a portrait does — through the richness of its human content." "It is not only an author's characters that endear him to the public: it is also his ethical outlook that appears with greater or less distinctness in everything he writes." "A volume of short stories contains more ideas, since each story is based on an idea; it has much greater variety of mood, scene, character and plot." 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 chidren 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). Lyras 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 in-sensitivity 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 experience 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? 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 yon agree with the view that unwillingness to 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 jazz 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? MA: 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 tilings 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 thaf 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. MA: 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 besen 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? MA.: 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? MA: 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) 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 |
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