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1. Read and translate into your mother tongue Text One from the book by V.D.Arakin (5 year) pp.13-15.
2. Do exercise 11 pp. 21-22.
3. Do exercises 18, 19 p.25.
4. Read the pattern stylistic analysis of the text (compiled by L.I.Serdyukova) and give your own commentaries on the style of Text One taking into account the suggested analysis (see Supplement 2 ‘The Scheme of a Stylistic Analysis of Fiction’).
The extract under analysis comes from the novel “The Passionate Year” by James Hilton (1900-1954), the author of “Good-bye, Mr. Chips” (1934), the tale famous in the English speaking world, of a gentle, unassuming school-master with a noble mind and a great heart. To use James Hilton’s words, both novels are the author’s tributes to a great profession. The title of the novel “The Passionate Year” is rather striking and suggestive. The transferred epithet “passionate” highlights the point that during the first year of teaching the novel’s protagonist K. Speed was dominated by intense emotions, that he lived and worked with all his senses alive, trying to cope with the demands that the teaching profession sets upon educators. The name of the protagonist is the so-called speaking name, built on the lexical stylistic device antonomasia. The surname Speed points out the character’s chief trait – the ability to act promptly, with verve.
The basic theme of the given text is the first lesson conducted by a young master. The subject-matter is disclosed through a plot built on one collision: between the beginner-teacher and his pupils during a preparation period.
The text has a closed plot structure. In the exposition the author describes: the scene of action – the Big Hall of Millstead Boarding School for boys; the behaviour of the pupils before the lesson and at its beginning; the inner state of the young master at the time.
The story starts with the indication of the beginning of the collision – a banging of desk-lids at the far end of the hall. The teacher’s warning to the class develops the action further, bringing it to the collision itself – a deliberate dropping of a desk-lid by a pupil.
The episodes that follow: the young master’s discovery of the mischief-maker’s name; his doubts about the way the name should be pronounced; the decision to play upon two variants of pronouncing the name lead to the climax of the plot. The climax resolves into the roar of laughter that followed the teacher’s pun, his fear of loosing his hold of the class, the challenge made by the bearer of the name and the master’s prompt response to the challenge.
The subsequent episodes: the conduct of the pupils during the rest of the evening; the teacher’s talk with the mischief-makers after class make up the denouement of the plot. The text has one more component of plot structure – the epilogue. In the epilogue K. Speed and Clanwell, the school headmaster, discuss the outcome of the first lesson.
The development of the plot, the characterization of the participants of actions realized with the help of various language means and stylistic devices bring home to the reader the message of the text that the first lesson is a decisive battle for which the beginner teacher should be equipped with effective means of teaching and upbringing. The thing that counts most in the outcome of the battle is the personality of the young master, his vocation for teaching. To gain a victory the teacher should possess a feeling for atmosphere, firmness, quick wits, fairness and love for children. Another idea that runs through the text is that teaching is an enjoyable profession for the people who are suitable to it. To get these ideas across to the reader the author writes the text in two emotive keys: the dramatic and humorous ones, which alternate in the narrative.
The humorous key is maintained by the thematic network of words, denoting various shades of laughter: grin, titter, roar with laughter, go off into hysteric of laughter, smile, laugh. It is noteworthy that the words with the seme of laughter are spread throughout the text and the sentences containing them form parts of two syntactical compositional devices – emotive climax and framing. The framing is realized through the repetition of the verbal collocation “to roar with laughter”, that firstly appeared in the paragraph, depicting the most dramatic episode of the lesson, at the very and of the text. This time the collocation denotes the teachers’ reaction to the events of the day and accentuates close affinity between the teachers and their pupils. In this way the author puts the idea over to the reader that both counterparts of the educative process have derived a pleasure from the encounter.
One more source of humour in the text is the use of formal, special literary words to denote everyday things and actions of school life: an assembly, a passage of the ordeal, a star benefit performance, to put into execution, to subscribe, to purchase etc. The discrepancy between the gravity, seriousness and solemnity of the words and the simplicity and triviality of the things and actions they indicate produces a facetious effect.
The main idea of the text of the crucial importance of the first lesson as a test of suitability for the profession is suggested in the dramatic key. The dramatic key is set up, among other elements of the text, by the word-images created with the help of a simile, metaphors and epithets.
Let’s consider the imagery in detail. The simile ”as if he were sitting on a powder magazine” gives the first suggestion of the classroom as a battlefield or an enemy’s territory, explosive with unpredictable dangers. The sustained metaphor “the most dangerous weapon in a new master’s armory and the one most of all likely to recoil on himself” vividly presents the master as a warrior heavily armed for the battle but easily vulnerable for all that. The battle is for the brave but it is also for the shrewd, for the one who has that “uncanny feeling of atmosphere”. The epithet “uncanny” emphasizes the idea that this quality is beyond the ordinary, rare in people and that is why really good teachers are so few. Is the final analysis it was instinct – “that uncanny feeling for atmosphere” which “embarked him on an outrageously bold adventure”. This metaphor further develops the image of the teacher as a warrior, plunging into the fight at the most decisive moment and winning the battle because he has the courage to use “the most dangerous weapon in his armory”. Nothing disarms people so readily as facetiousness, especially if these people are children prepared to rag a teacher.
When the teacher turned the tables on them by making a pun the pupils could not help admiring him and “roared with laughter”. By laughing for the second time after the teacher’s apt punishment of the mischief-maker, the pupils admitted their defeat and willingness to recognize the authority of the teacher. Rejoicing at the victory the young master looked upon the pupils as his prisoners, the rest of the evening “passed entirely without incident”, “pleaded for the remission of his hundred lines” and “you must pay the penalty of being pioneers”. But the teacher bore the pupils no grudge and with a light heart he allowed the mischief-makers to share the hundred lines between themselves. The young master’s love for children did not allow him to treat pupils with hostility even at the most tense moments of the lesson. The author very neatly presses this point by a skilful usage of epithets to reveal the teacher’s attitude towards the pupils. In the mischief-makers he saw “a bright, rather pleasant-faced boy” and “a clever-looking boy”. The epithets are telling, they speak for the teacher’s genuine love for children and his ability to assess fairly their characters even under pressing circumstances.
The analysis of the imagery plainly shows that J. Hilton is a talented writer who uses tropes pointedly and skillfully. For him epithets, metaphors, similes aren’t devices of ornament but meaningful elements which within the poetic structure of the text share in the expression of the content.
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