Читайте также:
|
1. Read and translate into your mother tongue Text Five from the book by V.D.Arakin (5 year) pp.131-133.
2. Do exercise 13 pp. 140.
3. Do exercises 19, 20 pp.143-144. The following information will help you to understand Browning’s quotation.
Browning, Robert (1812-1889), was one of the greatest poets of Victorian England. Browning's works reflect his robust optimism and his faith in the value of human life. Some of Browning's characters are good, and some are evil. With both, he indirectly expressed belief in the value of action, and dislike of passive behaviour. His works affirmed his faith that life's imperfections and strivings are only a prelude to the perfection of the afterlife. In "Andrea del Sarto," he wrote: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what's a heaven for?" The poem insists that an artist must continually accept new challenges. This was Browning's reason for writing about constantly changing characters.
4. Read the pattern stylistic analysis of the text (compiled by L.I.Serdyukova) and give your own commentaries on the style of Text Five taking into account the suggested analysis.
On the book-jacket of the 11th printing of the novel in 1965 it is pointed out that ‘Up the Down Staircase’ describes from the inside what goes on in a large metropolitan high school. With genuine warmth and shrewd comic touches, it shows what happens when a teacher’s ideals rum smack against the inadequate facilities, the lack of communication, the gobbledygook and pedagese, the trivia in triplicate – all that stands in the way of good teaching. It is a wise and witty book, funny and poignant, that tells a story of real people and tells it with love.
The fragment under analysis is a representative selection from the novel. The narrator of the story Sylvia Barret, a University graduate, M.A., comes to Calvin Coolidge School, a New York high school, to teach the English language and literature. She writes letters to Ellen, her former fellow student, about her teaching experience. The basic theme of the text is the state of things in the US public high school system. The message of the whole book and of the given fragment is imaginatively expressed in the title “Up the Down Staircase”. The metaphor graphically represents the process of upbringing in public high schools as the ascent of an escalator carrying people down. Going up the down staircase is not an easy matter. It is an uphill task for any person and especially so for those who help others to ascend. Teachers trying to lead their pupils along the steep path of knowledge work against heavy odds. The narrator makes this idea quite plain in the statements of the kind: “All this is easier said than done. In fact all this is plain impossible”; “Chaos, waste, cries for help – strident, yet unheard”.
The plot centers around several events in the young teacher’s school life which show obstacles standing in the way of good teaching. The sentences that highlight those function in the text as topic sentences. They are foregrounded with the help of various expressive means and stylistic devices.
The text opens with a topic sentence forming a paragraph. It conveys the idea that teachers are overworked and have very little leisure time. This is implied by two suggestive details: the eager expectation of the week-end (“It’s Friday Thank God”) and the regular setting of the alarm for 6.30 a.m. The stylistic devices in the regular half of the complex sentence, i.e. the synecdoche, by which a part is put for the whole, singular for plural – “a blouse”, “a letter”, the enumeration and syntactical parallelism moulding together the components of the synecdoche, intensify the expression of the idea and help the reader gain an insight into the strenuous life of teachers.
The two subsequent paragraphs develop the idea of absolute indifference of the authorities to the public high school system needs, in spite of constant promises that “things will be different”. The topic sentence, closing the third paragraph, neatly clinches the argument: “But in the two weeks that I have been here conditions seem greatly unimproved”. The oxymoronic phrase “greatly unimproved” emphasizes the teacher’s skepticism bred y school reality.
The wide gap between the pedagogical theory and practice, the impracticability of teaching requirements are forcefully stated in the fourth paragraph and are bluntly evaluated by the two-step epithet “plain impossible”.
The paragraphs that follow explain why good teaching is plain impossible in American public high schools. Among the main negative factors are mentioned: the poor educational background of children; the absence of proper textbooks; the supposition of creative teaching by school administration; the shortage of real teachers and their low social prestige; the clerical formalities that swamp the educators. To heighten the impact of these sore points upon the reader the author resorts to stylistic media. Thus, summing up the educational level of the pupils the narrator remarks: “They’ve been exposed to some ten years of schooling, yet they don’t know what a sentence is”. The oxymoron “to expose to schooling” and the syntactical stylistic device anti-climax, on which the utterance is built, make the observation sound bitterly ironical. The fact that creativity is held in check and frowned upon by the school authorities is enhanced by the ironic usage of the word “sin” to denote thinking, talking, listening to a record of Gielgud reading Shakespeare and the like. The young schoolmistress, who has tried to make her pupils to think and express themselves, to teach them appreciate poetry, is looked upon as a criminal who has committed a good number a good number of sins. The shortage of good teachers is made prominent with the help of anaphoric repetition of the pronoun “a few”, and their difficulties are stressed by the hyperbolic epithet “insuperable” in the paragraph dealing with the characterization of the teaching staff. The detachment of the epithets “unknown and unsung” forcefully conveys the idea that good teachers don’t receive due respect and recognition in society. The same syntactical stylistic device of detachment is used to press the point that the poor state of things in the school system is perpetuated by people unsuited to teaching. The detachment of the epithets “the bitter, the misguided, the failure from other fields” makes the characterization of bad teachers vigorous and pointed.
These are some of the salient features of the text. The surprising thing about it is that profound and comprehensive sociological study and diagnosis of the ills of the US public high school system are made in a lively conversational style, engrossing to read. The text is written in the form of a personal letter of the protagonist – a brilliantly endowed young schoolmistress. Therefore the events of the story are represented through her perception and her idiolect. The student is invited to carry on the stylistic analysis of the text by commenting upon the lexical and syntactical EMs and SDs that create the effect of lively familiar speech. The choice of the words that reflects the atmosphere of school life also merits attention.
Дата добавления: 2015-09-11; просмотров: 81 | Поможем написать вашу работу | Нарушение авторских прав |