VII. Use the previous questions and tasks as a plan and analyse the extract. Say if you like Maugham’s approach to the problem raised in the story, if you share the author’s opinion.

VIII. Say what stylistic devices and expressive means are used in the following phrases and sentences in Task a. Answer the questions upon the extract in Task b.

Card 1.

Task A.

1 “In the slanting beams that streamed through the open window the dust danced and was golden” (O. Wilde).

2 “Is it too much for you to sell me one of your disgusting specimen of yellow journalism?” (J.Cheever).

3 a deafening silence

4 a heart-burning smile

5 For Gabriel Gale, as the young man was called, was a minor poet, but something of a major painter... (G.K.Chesterton)

7. a devil of a job

8. “You know which side the law’s buttered” (J. Galsworthy).

Task B.

Read the extract from “The House of the Peacock” by G.K. Chesterton [5]. Find some stylistic devices. What component of plot structure is it? Characterise the atmosphere and tone of the story. To what genre does this piece of prose belong?

Gilbert Keith Chesterton ( 1874–1936) was an influential English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy, and detective fiction. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He is also known for his series of stories about the detective Gabrial Gale. Chesterton’s language is sophisticated and recognisable.

…It happened that some years ago, down a sunny and empty street of suburban gardens and villas, a young man was walking; a young man in rather outlandish clothes and almost prehistoric hat; for he was newly come to London from a very remote and sleepy small town in the West Country. There was nothing else especially remarkable about him, except what happened to him; which was certainly remarkable, not to say regrettable. There cannonaded into him an elderly gentleman running down the street, breathless, bare-headed, and in festive evening dress, who immediately caught him by the lapels of his antiquated coat and asked him to dinner. It would be truer to say that he implored him to come to dinner. As the bewildered provincial did not know him, or anybody else for miles round, the situation seemed singular; but the provincial, vaguely supposing it to be a hospitable ceremony peculiar to London town, where the streets were paved with gold, finally consented. He went to the hospitable mansion, which was only a few doors down the road; and he was never seen again in the land of the living.

None of the ordinary explanations would seem to have fitted the case. The men were total strangers. The man from the country carried no papers or valuables or money worth mentioning; and certainly did not look in the least as if he were likely to carry them. And, on the other hand, his host had the outward marks of almost offensive prosperity; a gleam of satin in the linings of his clothes, a glitter of opalescent stones in his studs and cuff-links, a cigar that seemed to perfume the street. The guest could hardly have been decoyed with the ordinary motive of robbery, or of any form of fraud. And indeed the motive with which he really was decoyed was one of the queerest in the world; so queer that a man might have a hundred guesses before he hit on it.

Card 2.

Task A.

1. “He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face” (Ch. Dickens)

2. “Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city” (O.Henry).

3. “Kind sir, will you be good enough to favour me with one of your God-damned, no-good, ten-cent afternoon papers?” (J. Cheever)

4. “It (New York) has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great men, the haughtiest beggars, the plainest beauties...” (O.Henry).

5. encouraging smile

6. “The round game table was boisterous and happy” (Dickens).

7. “Art for Heart’s Sake” (Goldberg)

8. sweet sorrow

Task B.

Read the extract from “The House of the Peacock” by G.K. Chesterton. Find some stylistic devices. How does the author characterise the protagonist, his emotional state? What kind of person is Gabriel Gale?

…He had drifted along the sunny suburban road, drinking in a certain drowsy pleasure in seeing where the laburnum made lines of gold in the green, or patches of white or red thorn glowed in the growing shadows; for the sunshine was taking on the tinge of sunset. But for the most part he was contented to see the green semicircles of lawn repeat themselves like a pattern of green moons; for he was not one to whom repetition was merely monotony. Only in looking over a particular gate at a particular lawn, he became pleasantly conscious, or half-conscious, of a new note of colour in the greenness; a much bluer green, which seemed to change to vivid blue as the object at which he was gazing moved sharply, turning a small head on a long neck. It was a peacock. But he had thought of a thou­sand things before he thought of the obvious thing. The burning blue of the plumage on the neck had reminded him of blue fire, and blue fire had reminded him of some dark fantasy about blue devils, before he had fully realized even that it was a peacock he was staring at. And the tail, that trailing tapestry of eyes, had led his wandering wits away to those dark but divine monsters of the Apocalypse whose eyes were multiplied like their wings, before he had remembered that a peacock, even in a more practical sense, was an odd thing to see in so ordinary a setting.

For Gabriel Gale, as the young man was called, was a minor poet, but something of a major painter; and, in his capacity of celebrity and lover of landscape, he had been invited of­ten enough into those larger landscape gardens of the landed aristocracy, where peacocks as pets are not uncommon.

Card 3.

Task A.

1. “It was the moment of the year when the countryside seems to faint from its own loveliness...” (J.Galsworthy)

2. It was the moment of the year when the countryside faints from its own loveliness.

3. Dreary midnight

4. The leaves fell sorrowfully

5. “The Importance of Being Earnest” (O.Wilde)

6. “She lost her heart and necklace at a ball” (Byron)

7. Deep feeling

8. “ My heart melted within me…” (Maugham).

Task B.

Read the extract from “The House of the Peacock” by G.K. Chesterton. What is it: a narration, a description or a character-drawing? Find some stylistic devices. What kind of characterization prevails?

The members of the Thirteen Club, as they came trooping up the stairs and settled into their seats, seemed for the most part to be atleast quite ready for their dinner. Most of them had a rather rollicking attitude, which in some took the more vivid form of vulgarity. A few who were quite young, clerks and possibly dependents, had foolish and nervous faces, as if they were doing something a little too dar­ing. Two of them stood out from the com­pany by the singularity of being obviously gen­tlemen. One of these was a little dried-up old gentleman, with a face that was a labyrinth of wrinkles, on the top of which was perched a very obvious chestnut wig. He was introduced as Sir Daniel Creed, and was apparently a bar­rister of note in his day, though the day seemed a little distant. The other, who was merely pre­sented as Mr. Noel, was more interesting: a tall, stalwart man of dubious age but indubitable intelligence, even in the first glance of his eyes. His features were handsome in a large and craggy fashion: but the hollows of the tem­ples and the sunken framework of the eyes gave him a look of fatigue that was mental and not physical. The poet's impalpable intuitions told him that the appearance was not mislead­ing — that the man who had thus come into this odd society had been in many odd socie­ties, probably seeking for something more odd than he had ever found.

Card 4.

Task A.

1. “Mrs. Albert Forrester pawed the carpet with her foot like a restive, high-spirited horse pawing the ground …” (Maugham).

2. “… except for a few rings, a pearl necklace, a couple of bracelets, and a diamond brooch at her waist, she wore no jewellery” (Maugham).

3. the sea of asphalt (O.Henry)

4. “…Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering cafe, where are

gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm…” (O.Henry).

5. “…He had known it (the anthem) well in the days when his life contained

such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and

immaculate thoughts and collars…” (O.Henry).

6. “…He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled,

the de­graded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties

and base motives that made up his existence…” (O.Henry).

Task B.

Read the extract from “The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse ” by G.K. Chesterton. Find some stylistic devices. What is the basic stylistic device in this extract? Does the author use any well-known proverbs and set-expressions implicitly? Try to recollect them or at least the same proverb in Russian.

…The curious and sometimes creepy effect which Mr. Pond produced upon me, despite his commonplace courtesy and dapper deco­rum, was possibly connected with some memo­ries of child-hood; and the vague verbal asso­ciation of his name. He was a Government official who was an old friend of my father; and I fancy my infantile imagination had some­how mixed up the name of Mr. Pond with the pond in the garden. When one came to think of it, he was curiously like the pond in the garden. He was so quiet at all normal times, so neat in shape and so shiny, so to speak, in his ordinary reflections of earth and sky and the common daylight. And yet I knew there were some queer things in the pond in the garden. Once in a hundred times, on one or two days during the whole year, the pond would look oddly different; or there would come a flitting shadow or a flash in its flat serenity; and a fish or a frog or some more grotesque creature would show itself to the sky. And I knew there were monsters in Mr. Pond also: monsters in his mind which rose only for a moment to the surface and sank again. They took the form of monstrous remarks, in the middle of all his mild and rational remarks. Some people thought he had suddenly gone mad in the midst of his sanest conversation. But even they had to admit that he must have suddenly gone sane again.

Perhaps, again, this foolish fantasy was fixed in the youthful mind because, at certain mo­ments, Mr. Pond looked rather like a fish him­self. His manners were not only quite polite but quite conventional; his very gestures were conventional, with the exception of one oc­casional trick of plucking at his pointed beard, which seemed to come on him chiefly when he was at last forced to be serious about one of his strange and random statements. At such moments he would stare owlishly in front of him and pull his beard, which had a comic effect of pulling his mouth open, as if it were the mouth of a puppet with hairs for wires. This odd, occasional opening and shutting of his mouth, without speech, had quite a star­tling similarity to the slow gaping and gulping of a fish…

Some more clues for practical analysis

• while interpreting fiction your task is not just to find as many devices as possible and to identify them correctly. Your objective is to show what part they play in yout text, to discover not just what the text means, but also how it comes to mean what it does.

• There may be hundreds of opinions of a literary work but it is amazing how many points of agreement one can find if we use facts properly.

• In fact, there is more to any text than meets the eye. All you need is practice concentration.

List of books consulted