Стилистический анализ текста. Учебное пособие
.pdfthe foundation of his fortune by selling to a Stock Exchange speculator a Cabinet secret.
S i r R o b e r t C h i l t e r n (biting his lip): What do you mean?
M r s. C h e v e 1 e y (rising and facing him): I mean that I know the real origin of your wealth and your career, and I have got your letter, too.
S i r R o b e r t C h i l t e r n: What letter?
M r s. C h e v e 1 e y (contemptuously): The letter you wrote to Baron Arnheim, when you were Lord Radley’s secretary, telling the Baron to buy Suez Canal shares – a letter written three days before the Government announced its own purchase.
Sir Robert Chiltern (hoarsely): It is not true.
M r s. C h e v e l e y You thought that letter had been destroyed. How foolish of you! It is in my possession.
S i r R o b e r t C h i l t e r n: The affair to which you allude was no more than a speculation. The House of Commons had not yet passed the bill; it might have been rejected.
M r s. C h e v e 1 e y: It was a swindle, Sir Robert. Let us call things by their proper names. It makes everything simpler. And now I am going to sell you that letter, and the price 1 ask for it is your public support of the Argentine scheme. You made your own fortune out of one canal. You must help me and my friends to make our fortunes out of another!
S i r R o b er t C h i 1 t e r n: It is infamous, what you propose – infamous! M r s. C h e v e 1 e y: Oh, no! This is the game of life as we all have to play
it, Sir Robert, sooner or later!
S i r R o b e r t C h i 1 t e r n: I cannot do what you ask me.
M r s. C h e v e 1 e y: You mean you cannot help doing it. You know you are standing on the edge of a precipice. And it is not for you to make terms. It is for you to accept them. Supposing you refuse –
S i r R o b e r t C h i l t e r n: What then?
M r s. C h e v e l e y: My dear Sir Robert, what then? You are ruined, that is all! Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbors. In fact, to be a bit better than one’s neighbor was considered excessively vulgar and middleclass. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues – and
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what is the result? You all go over like ninepins – one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man – now they crush him. And yours is a very nasty scandal. You couldn’t survive it. If it were known that as a young man, secretary to a great and important minister, you sold a Cabinet secret for a large sum of money, and that was the origin of your wealth and career, you would be hounded out of public life, you would disappear completely. And after all, Sir Robert, why should you sacrifice your entire future rather than deal diplomatically with your enemy? For the moment I am your enemy. I admit it! And I am much stronger than you are. The big battalions are on my side. You have a splendid position, but it is your splendid position that makes you so vulnerable. You can't defend it! And I am in attack. Of course 1 have not talked morality to you. You must admit in fairness that I have spared you that. Years ago you did a clever, unscrupulous thing; it turned out a great success. You owe to it your fortune and position. And now you have got to pay for it. Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do. You have to pay now. Before I leave you to-night, you have got to promise me to suppress your report, and to speak in the House in favor of this scheme.
S i r R o b e r t C h i 1 te r n: What you ask is impossible.
M r s. C h e v e l e y: You must make it possible. You are going to make it possible. Sir Robert, you know what your English newspapers are like. Suppose that when I leave this house I drive down to some newspaper office, and give them this scandal and the proofs of it! Think of their loathsome joy, of the delight they would have in dragging you down, of the mud and mire they would plunge you in. Think of the hypocrite with his greasy smile penning his leading article, and arranging the foulness of the public placard.
S i r R o b e r t C h i 1 t e r n: Stop! You want me to withdraw the report and to make a short speech stating that I believe there are possibilities in the scheme?
Mrs. C h e v c 1 e y (sitting down on the sofa): Those are my terms.
Sir R o b e r t C h i 1 t e r n (in a low voice): I will give you any sum of money you want.
M r s. C h c v e 1 e y: Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is. (O. Wilde. An Ideal Husband).
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Assignments for Stylistic Analysis
1.Note the structure of the excerpt, the role and the character of the author’s remarks.
2.Note the blending of colloquial and literary variants of language in the speech of the characters.
3.Pick out sentences of epigrammatic character in Mrs. Cheveley’s speech and dwell on the typical features of bourgeois society revealed in them.
4.Comment on the connotation of the word “gentleman” in Sir Chiltern’s indignant speech: “You seem to be unable to realize that you are talking to an English gentleman”.
5.Note the peculiar use of the verbs: “to buy”, “to sell”, “to pay” in the speech of the characters. What insight into bourgeois society is given through manipulations with these words.
6.Discuss the EMs and SDs used by Mrs. Cheveley in her monologues. What insight into Mrs. Cheveley’s character is given through the EMs and SDs she uses.
7.Speak on the SDs used by Mrs. Cheveley to characterize the English press.
8.Comment on the language used by Sir Robert Chiltern and Mrs. Cheveley and say how the author shows their characters through their speech.
9.Summing up the discussion of the scene speak on Wilde’s exposure of the evils of bourgeois society.
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D. PUBLICIST STYLE
EDUCATION by E.B.White
Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) was a well-known essayist and. contributing editor for The New Yorker. In collaboration with author James Thurber, White wrote the satire Is Sex Necessary? (1929). White's other works include The Lady Is Cold and various books for children including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's. Web (1952), and Thе Trumpet of the Swan (1970). White also revised William Strunk's The Elements of Style. His essays frequently appeared in magazines, including The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. The following essay first appeared in the March 1939 issue of Education.
1. I have an interesting admiration for the teacher in the country school where we have a third-grade scholar in attendance. She not only undertakes to instruct her charges in all the subjects of the first three grades, but she manages to function quietly and effectively as a guardian of their health, their clothes, their habits, their mothers, and their snowball engagements. She has been doing this sort of Augean task for twenty years, and is both kind and wise. She cooks for the children on the stove that heats the room, and she can cool their passions or warm their soup with equal competence. She conceives their costumes, cleans up their messes, and shares their confidences. My boy already regards his teacher as his great friend, and I think tells her a great deal more than he tells us.
2. The shift from city school to country school was something we worried about quietly all last summer. I have always rather favored public school over private school, if only because in public school you meet a greater variety of children. This bias of mine, I suspect, is partly an attempt to justify my own past (I never knew anything but public schools) and partly an involuntary defense against getting kicked in die shins by a young ceramist on his way to the kiln. My wife was unacquainted with public schools, never having been exposed (in her early life) to anything more public than the washroom of Miss Winsor's. Regardless of our backgrounds, we both knew that the change in schools was something that concerned not us but the scholar himself. We hoped it would work out all right. In New York our son went to a mediumpriced private institution with semi-progressive ideas of education, and mod-
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ern plumbing. He learned fast, kept well, and we were satisfied. It was an electric, colorful, regimented existence with moments of pleasurable pause and giddy incident. The clay the Christmas angel fainted and had to be carried out by one of the Wise Men was educational in the highest sense of the term. Our scholar gave imitations of it around the house for weeks afterward, and I doubt if it ever goes completely out of his mind.
3. His days were rich in formal experience. Wearing overalls and an old sweater (the accepted uniform of the private seminary), he sallied forth at morn accompanied by a nurse or a parent and walked (or was pulled) two blocks to a corner where the school bus made a flag stop. This flatly vehicle was as punctual as death: seeing us waiting at the cold curb, it would sweep to a halt, open its mouth, suck the boy in, and spring away with an angry growl. It was a good deal like a train picking up a bag of mail. At school the scholar was worked on for six or seven hours by half a dozen teachers and a nurse, and was revived on orange juice in mid-morning. In a cinder court he played games supervised by an athletic instructor, and in a cafeteria he ate lunch worked out by a dietitian. He soon learned to read with gratifying facility and discernment and to make Indian weapons of a semi-deadly nature. Whenever one of his classmates fell low of a fever the news was put on the wires and there were breathless phone calls to physicians, discussing periods of incubation and allied magic.
4. In the country all one can say is that the situation is different, and somehow more casual. Dressed in corduroys, sweatshirt, and short rubber boots, and carrying a
tin dinner-pail, our scholar departs at the crack of dawn for the village school, two and a half miles down the road, next to the cemetery. When the road is open and the car will start, he makes the journey by motor, courtesy of his old man. When the snow is deep or the motor is dead or both, he makes it on the hoof. In the afternoons he walks or hitches all or part of the way home in fair weather, gets transported in foul. The schoolhouse is a two-room frame building, bungalow type, shingles stained a burnt brown with weatherresistant stain. It has a chemical toilet in the basement and two teachers above the stairs. One takes the first three grades, the other the fourth, fifth, and sixth. They have little or no time for individual instruction, and no time at all for the esoteric. They teach what they know themselves, just as fast and
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as hard as they can manage. The pupils sit still at their desks in class, and do their milling around outdoors during recess.
5.There is no supervised play. They play cops and robbers (only they call it "Jail") and throw things at one another snowballs in winter, rose hips in fall. It seems to satisfy them. They also construct darts, pinwheels, and "pick-up sticks" (jackstraws), and the school itself does a brisk trade in penny candy, which is for sale right in the classroom and which contains "surprises." The most highly prized surprise is a fake cigarette, made of cardboard, fiendishly lifelike.
6.The memory of how apprehensive we were at the beginning is still strong. The boy was nervous about the change too. The tension, on that first fair morning in September when we drove him to school, almost blew the windows out of the sedan. And when later we picked him up on the road, wandering along with his little blue lunch-pail, and got his laconic report "All right" in answer to our inquiry about how the day had gone, our relief was vast. Now, after almost a year of it, the only difference we can discover in the two school experiences is that in the country he sleeps better at night—and that probably is more the air than the education. When grilled on the subject of school-in-country vs. school-in-city, he replied that the chief difference is that the day seems to go so much quicker in the country. "Just like lightning," he reported.
Assignments for the analysis of the text
1.What is the controlling idea in this essay?
2.In paragraph 3, although White says that at the city school, his son's "days were rich in formal experiences," the images, examples, and diction he chooses to back up that statement seem to indicate otherwise. What is the true nature of his son’s experiences? Explain your answer using specific details from White’s essay to illustrate what you say.
3.What does White’s son wear when he goes to school in the city? How does his choice of clothing change when he attends school in the country? Is one mode of dress more appropriate than another? Explain.
4.Contrast White’s depictions of city school teachers to country school teachers. As human beings, how are they different and how are they alike?
5.What vivid details and examples in this essay help you to envision the distinct differences (at least, according to White’s experience) between education
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at city schools and education at country schools?
6.How does the tone of this essay reflect the author’s attitude towards city (private) schools and country (public schools)?
7.Why do you think that White admits his bias towards public schools in the second paragraph? How might this lighthearted examination of the origins of his bias serve a larger purpose in this essay?
8.How does White use irony in this essay? How, for instance, do the things you relate to the word scholar contrast with the sort of learning White’s son receives in the city school?
9.Which method of structuring comparative essays tends to be predominant in this essay? Why do you imagine White selected one method of organization over another?
10.In the final paragraph, White informs us that his son initially thinks that education at the country school is just “all right”, but later states that days go by quickly – “just like lightning”. How does the final sentence sum up White’s general attitude towards country schools?
11.Search through the essay and locate as many examples of figurative language as you can. Explain what effect the use of figurative language had on you as a reader.
E. SCIENTIFIC STYLE
From: THE USE OF ENGLISH by Randolph Quirk 7.1. How then does English work?
It seems reasonable to consider language as operating through three types of organization, on two separate planes: vocabulary and grammar on one plane, means of transmission on the other plane. The part that usually seems most obvious, even most important, is the word-stock - also known as the vocabulary or lexis. We may think of this as our total collection of names for things: the names of actions, objects, qualities, and so on; words like assume, box, taxation, finger, sharp, table, extraordinary. The total vocabulary of English is immense and runs to about half a million items. None of us as individuals, of course, knows more than a fairly limited number of these, and uses even less, but obviously the greater our personal knowledge of vocabulary (the more words we recognize and the more we
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know how to use), the better we are able to enjoy our environment and describe our experience of it.
Words are so predominant in language, and a dictionary is so much regarded as the entire register of a language, that we are sometimes tempted to think that there is nothing else to consider. 'Man's word is God in man' - 'Your words, they rob the Hybla bees.' But a language cannot work with words alone. A group of words like arrive, girl, man, say cannot tell us much until we have added a second dimension, grammar. Grammar contributes features like articles, prepositions, tense number, and the conventions of arrangement - which word goes before which. With grammar added, the four words we selected can be made to tell us something: 'The man said that the girls had arrived.'
Grammar has done three things here. It has arranged the words in a particular order, making clear who did the saying and who the arriving. It has contributed tense by the alteration of say to said, and number by the addition of s to girl. Thirdly, grammar has added some additional words: the, that, the, and had. This third point raises a difficulty. We have already described the first dimension of language as 'vocabulary", the stock of words: now, it is being suggested that grammar also consists in part of words. At first sight, it may be confusing to find the same word, 'words', applied to part of grammar as well as to the whole of the vocabulary. English has, in fact, two kinds of words, lexical words and grammatical words, and this basic distinction is important to learn - even if it is not very easy to apply in some cases. The distinction can perhaps best be seen (and the importance of the distinction for English most easily appreciated), if we contrast another language, Latin, in which 'grammatical words' are less numerous and play a much smaller part. The four words arrive, girl, man, say, would be in Latin (devoid of grammatical endings) adveni-, puell-, vir, and dic-. If we now add grammar, we shall still have in this case just four words, since inflexion alone is able to achieve what in English requires both inflexion and grammatical words: vir dixit puellas advenisse, 'The man said that the girls had arrived.'
The grammatical words which play so large a part in English grammar are for the most part sharply and obviously different from the lexical words, as one can see by comparing the two sets in our present example: the, that, the, had, and man, say, girl, arrive.
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A rough and ready difference which may seem most obvious is that grammatical words have 'less meaning', and in fact some grammarians have called them the 'empty' words as opposed to the 'full' words of vocabulary. But this is a rather misleading way of expressing the distinction. Although a word like the is not the name of something as man is, it is very far from being meaningless; there is a sharp difference in meaning between 'man is vile' and 'the man is vile', yet the is the sole vehicle of this difference of meaning. Moreover, grammatical words differ considerably among themselves as to the amount of meaning they have, even in the lexical sense (as we may see by comparing the and should, for example). Another name for the grammatical words has been 'little words'. Elizabeth Barrett Browning told her husband, 'You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust, by sweeping away your little words' - as well she might, in view of such lines as 'Heine for songs; for kisses, how?' But size is by no means a good criterion for distinguishing the grammatical words of English, when we consider that we have lexical words like go, man, say, car. Apart from this, however, there is a good deal in what Mrs Browning says: we certainly do create a good deal of obscurity when we omit them. This is illustrated not only in the poetry of Robert Browning but in the prose of telegrams and newspaper headlines. 'MacArthur Flies Back to Front' is an example from wartime days which manages to be amusing without being confusing, but 'Liverpool Tea Breaks Strike Leader Under Fire' (1961) is only clear in a context of daily news about a strike in Liverpool over tea-breaks. Otherwise one might wonder what there was about Liverpool tea that could break a strikeleader - or even why tea-breaks in Liverpool should strike a leader already unfortunate enough to be under a fire.
Grammatical words, then, (or 'function' words, as they are also called' in some books) are vital signals telling us about the kind of connection that is to be understood between lexical words. It is not that they have no meaning, but that they have a special kind of meaning, sometimes called 'grammatical meaning' or 'structural meaning'. Another important characteristic is that they belong to a relatively small and permanent set of words as compared with the 'full words' of vocabulary. They do not come and go with changing fashions and changing ideas. In different occupations, in different places and at different periods, we tend to use very different nouns and verbs; totalitarianism, the axis, or evacuee may be very often on our lips for a while; we
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may invent entirely new words like, vitaminise or penicillin; we may even adopt foreign words and bandy them about freely and familiarly - blitz in the forties, sputnik in the fifties, and troika made a frequent appearance early in the sixties. Vocabulary consists of open lists of words. But we very rarely add to our stock of prepositions and pronouns, and it is equally rare for an odd one to go out of fashion. Grammatical words are in (relatively) closed lists. They remain constantly (and unobtrusively) at their station whether we are saying, 'The man said that the girls had arrived' or 'The dictator claimed that the democracies had deteriorated' or 'The beatnik found that the coffee-bar had closed.'
One may suggest an analogy in the goods and equipment of a store. On the one hand we have the articles for sale - dresses, hats, fur-coats; and on the other hand price-tickets, stands, coat-hangers, and measuring-tapes, which are used to handle the goods in which the shop deals. It is the stock that claims most of our attention; it changes from time to time; some parts of it are more in demand at one time, and other parts seem more important at another. But the things used by the shop-assistant - though often beneath our notice - are no less essential to handling the day-to-day business, and a hanger which supports a fur-coat one month may be used for a wed- ding-dress the next. So too we may think of vocabulary as the word-stock, and grammar as the set of devices for handling this word-stock.
When we have these two aspects of English clearly understood and distinguished, we can move on to consider the third. Language can exist only if there are means of sharing it with the rest of our community. That is to say, although we do quite frequently use language for self-communion (as we have seen), we are on such occasions using language in an entirely secondary way, imitating a normal situation in which we are talking or listening to someone else. A person has a vocabulary and grammar only because it has been transmitted to him by other people, to whom it was transmitted by other people - and so on, in an unbroken tradition. Our third type of organization in language is necessarily therefore the means of transmission. This needs to be seen as being on a different plane from the others for a number of reasons. For example, once a person has acquired a particular language, units such as sentences - joint products of grammar and vocabulary - can exist 'in him' independently of whether or not he decides to speak them or
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