Интерпретация художественного текста (практикум). Учебное пособие

-The author’s method of developing a story often involves a turn which

takes the audience half by surprise, as it may have taken the dramatist himself.

-There is not a character in the story that is not worth studying, nor a scene that is not life-like, not a reflection that has not a deep meaning.

-The character of the heroine is drawn with admirable skill. She is fullblooded and many-sided: adventurous, gifted, with a keen sense of humour and deep understanding of people.

-He is the only character worthy of the author’s positive estimate.

-His life is characteristic of / typical of / peculiar to …

-She is an embodiment of beauty.

-Money becomes the prime object of their worship and respect.

-This character enjoys all the sympathy of the reader.

-Through possessing some social problems, this story seems to have an air of being away from reality.

-The story reveals the author’s great knowledge of man’s inner world.

He penetrates into the subtlest windings of the human heart.

-The author’s style is remarkable for its powerful sweep, brilliant

illustrations and deep psychological analysis. Everything he touches seems to reflect the feelings of the heroes, and his power in depicting their passions – hate, fear, revenge, remorse, love – is enormous.

- Giving the author his due for brilliance of style and a pointed ridicule of many social vices, such as snobbishness, money-worship, pretence, self-interest, etc…we realize, however, his cynical attitude to mankind. It is quite obvious that when describing the corruption of modern society, he is not indignant but rather amused. His habitual attitude is that of expecting little or nothing of his fellow men. His ironical cynicism combined with a keen wit and power of observation affords him effective means of portraying reality without shrinking before its seamy side.

-The author shares in his character’s attitude towards …

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-… is given by the author with great force and skill.

-Galsworthy’s realism lies in his capacity for making his hero part and

parcel of his surroundings and convincing the reader of his typicality: he is a fine artist in reproducing the individual workings of his character’s mind.

-The foundation of Galsworthy’s talent lies in a remarkable power of

ironic insight combined with an extremely keen and faithful eye for all the phenomena on the surface of the life he observes.

-The appeal of Jerome lies in is gentleness and irony, in his power of digression, his gift of capping his comic moments with a final extravagant act that outbids life altogether.

-The atmosphere of gayety characteristic of the beginning is changed by sad humour towards the end.

-The charm of this story lies in its interesting plot and exciting situation. At the same time it conveys deep thought, keen observation and sharpness of characterization. These very qualities assure the author of an outstanding place in the annals of literature and in the hearts of all who love good stories.

-Many of the events, reactions and descriptions in the story are seen

through the main character’s eyes.

-This description provides an essential clue to the character.

-… leads to comical effect.

-… intensifies the total effect.

-… brings out the character’s essential nature.

-… adds much to the revelation of …

-… stands in contrast to …

-The compositional arrangement of the text (stylistic devices) help to bring the idea out (to create tense atmosphere, to show the real state of things).

-The author resorts to high-flown phrases / expressions to show …

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-The enumeration shows the author’s striving for an exhaustive and fully detailed presentation of the phenomenon dealt with.

-The choice of vocabulary and stylistic devices is admirable.

-The following stylistic devices contribute to the expressiveness of the

passage.

-The author makes extensive use of … to render the story more vivid, convincing, more real and emotional.

-All the descriptive attributes used in the passage serve to convey to the

reader …

-An additional humorous effect is produced by …

-The description of … is contrasted to that of …

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Appendix C

(informative)

A sample analysis of the text

JANE EYRE

The author of the text is Charlotte Brontë an English novelist and poet of the 19th century, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels have become classics of English literature. Her works are characterised as very psychological and personal to the high degree - the events unfolding on the pages of her novels are mainly the ones happened previously in her life. Among her most prominent literary works are ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847), ‘Shirley’ (1849) and ‘Villette’ (1853). The current extract has been taken from the book ‘Jane Eyre’ and it illustrates the situation when the main character - Jane Eyre - after a fight with her cousin, has been unfairly put under lock and key. The room she has to stay in is very scary for her and after some time she imagines the ghost appearing in the room. The main problem of the episode is the relationships between the foster-child and his adoptive family. The idea of the extract is the injustice expressed towards the adoptee by her foster family. The text is written in the first person narrative and is interlaced with the great number of lyrical digressions (‘All looked colder … of belated travellers’, ‘All John Reed’s violent tyrannies … from noon to night’, ‘What a consternation … I see it clearly’, ‘I was a discord … the scapegoat of the nursery’, ‘All I said was wicked … on her own family group’) and descriptive passages (‘The red-room was a square … like a pale throne’, ‘My seat, to which Bessie … majesty of the bed and room’) and the inner thoughts of the main character. The prevailing mood can be described as dramatic and bitter. Logically we can divide the text into four parts. The first part is an exposition. In this episode we learn that the main character has been locked in the room and we see the description of that very room. There are a lot of epithets

(‘massive pillars’, ‘stateliest chambers’, ‘deep red damask’, ‘a soft fawn colour’, ‘snowy Marseilles counterpane’), the similes (‘stood out like a tabernacle’, ‘like a

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pale throne’) and the metaphors (‘a chance influx of visitors’, ‘a blush of pink’) intertwined with the asyndeton (‘A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany’) used to give the readers a perfect image of the place where the events take place. Apart from it, through the curse of narrative we see the detachments (‘I might never say’, ‘as I thought’) that create the feeling of a dialogue between the reader and the main character. The second part of the text is the development of the plot where we can see the continuing description of the chamber, learn the secret of it, we have an opportunity to get the insight into the Jane Eyre’s life in her aunt’s house, her relationships with the members of the family, her reflections towards herself and other matters. This very part of the text also possesses plenty of epithets

(‘silent, ‘solemn’, ‘quiet dust’ ‘dreary consecration’, ‘bitter Miss Abbot’, ‘high, dark’, ‘broken reflections’, ‘muffled windows’, ‘fairy’, ‘rapid rush’, ‘bitter vigour’, ‘headstrong’, ‘captious … insolent carriage’, ‘pink cheeks and golden curls’, ‘dense ignorance’, ‘parentless infant’, ‘forlorn depression’, ‘preternatural voice’, ‘violent grief’), the epithets bounded in the parallel constructions and the asyndeton (‘a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them … a useless thing, incapable of serving … a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation …’), the hyperboles (‘no jail was ever more secure’, ‘to give delight to all who looked at her’, ‘an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group’), the similes (‘like a dark deposit in a turbid well’, ‘cold as stone’), the personifications (‘the bed rose before me’, ‘said my reason’, ‘the rain still beating’, ‘the wind howling’), the metaphors (‘glittering eyes of fear’, ‘the mood of the revolted slave’, ‘all my heart in insurrection’, ‘the scapegoat of the nursery’), the periphrases (‘he breathed his last’, ‘superstition was with me at that moment’, ‘the strange little figure there gazing at me’, ‘the unknown world of departed’), the antithesis (‘“old girl” … “her own darling”’) and the

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oxymoron (‘a real spirit’) which give not only the image of the room but the characteristics of all of the family members, the features of the main personage and above all, create the gothic atmosphere that is inherent to all works by Charlotte

Brontë. This episode is also full with detachments that somehow specify the things that are being talked about: ‘at far intervals’, ‘to to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted’, ‘who was headstrong and selfish’, ‘and perhaps I might be so’. Moreover, in the text we may notice the stylistic invertion (’I doubted not’), the interjection (‘Alas!’), the parallel constructions of the rhetorical questions (‘Why was I always … Why could I never … Why was it useless …), the rhetorical questions themselves (‘what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne?’), the parallel constructions intertwined with the asyndeton (‘My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp…’, ‘John no one thwarted, much less punished; though he twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks, set the dogs at the sheep, stripped the hothouse vines of their fruit…’), the parallel constructions of the sequence of the exclamatory sentences (‘What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!’). These devices give the rhythm to the narration and the best characteristic to the main character as far as the narration is led from her face. The third part is the climax of the story. In this very extract we observe the culmination of the feelings appeared under the oppressing influence of the room - Jane seems to see the ghost of her past away uncle which turns out to be extremely fearful for a little girl of her age. Here we may notice a personification (‘a light … glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head’), the rhetorical question along with the detachment (‘Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind?’), the detachment itself which shows us the situation from the point of view of Jane as an adult (‘I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn’), the

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epithets twisted with the metaphor (‘swift, darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world’) and the asyndeton interlaced with the parallel constructions (‘prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation’, ’My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned…’) which give us the feeling of rush and the rhythm in which the events have happened. The last part is the outcome where we see Bessie and Abott - two servants - entering the room and saving Jane from the mystical imaginary vision. In this very part we may find just a question of Bessie: ‘“Miss Eyre, are you ill?”’

I cannot really say that I like the story of Jane Eyre very much though the great amount of stylistic devices and the atmosphere she gives to the novel is indeed impressive.

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ПРАКТИКУМ

Анна Владимировна Осиянова Оксана Александровна Хрущева

ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ

ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ТЕКСТА

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