Follow-Up Work

1. Compare the uses of nouns in terms of article use in the context below. Prove that its semiotic function is complemented stylistically:

a) Her eyes were blue, blue as autumn distance – blue, as the blue we see between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny September morning. A shady and misty blue, that had no beginning or surface and was looked into rather than at. (T. Hardy)

b) ‘Ah, but you were by the sea, were you not?’ said Evvy.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Carter, ‘but a melancholy sea as I remember it. A tideless sea. I can recall, as a child, seeing pictures in English children’s books of boys and girls playing on the sand and making sandcastles and I tried to play on my sand. But a Mediterranean beach is not a place for playing on. It is dirty and very dry. The tides never wash the sand or make it firm. When I tried to make a sandcastle, the sand would just run away between my fingers. It was too dry to hold together. And even if I poured sea water over it, the sun would dry it up at once.’ (I. Murdock)

c) The woman in love attracts: lovers come in shoals or not at all. Eleonor Darcy is intelligent, of course, and intelligence in a woman does turn some men on, though not many. She thought that Hugo was no beauty, woman agreed, but he had charm. (F. Weldon)

d) And this again can be no other than the proper­ty of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written [Coleridge. "From Biographia Literaria". 1981: 230].

e) It would be convenient to believe that the Romantic Movement in Literature began with the storming of the Bastille in Paris. But, as we have seen, Romanticism was trying to stir all the way through the Age of Reason: the 18^th century had a nunmer of rebels, individualists, madmen, who - often unsuccessfully, because of the difficulty of language – worked at a literature of instinct, emotion, enthusiasm, tried to return to the old way of the Elizabethans and even the meadiaeval poets. It was perhaps because of the influence of the great conservative classicist, Dr. Johnson, that a Romantic literature did not come earlier.

2. Comment on the classified and individualized meanings of the noun God in bold type. Compare them with dictionary data:

a) “He is gone” murmured Sybil sadly. “I wish you had seen him.”

“I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven, if he ever does you any wrong I shall kill him. (O. Wilde)

b) If there is a God I would like to humbly ask him to stop Daniel getting into bed at night wearing pyjamas and reading glasses, staring at a book for 25 minutes then then switchin off the light and turning over. (H.Fielding)

c) Not ‘Forgive us our sins”, but ‘smite us for our iniquities”, should be the prayer of a man to a most just God. (O. Wilde)

d) And when that has happened, why, we might be able to invent a God as good, as moral, as human beings. (F. Weldon)

e) If an all-good and all-powered God created the world, why did He create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to recieve His grace... I wasn’t prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn’t created the world, but had to make the best of the bad job he’d found, a being enormously better, wise, and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn’t made and who hoped might in the end overcome it. (S. Maugham)

f) The good God should not allow such things. We are not so wicked as that in Germany. (A. Christie)

3. Prove that the use of proper names in the extracts below is stylistically significant:

a) They passed two Frenchmen, one saying to the other with precise, upper-class diction, ‘Voila – le ciel tourmenté par des peintres anglais…’ Mark looked up and there indeed was a Constable sky with grey swags of pewter-bellied clouds sweeping down to the tops of the hills. And below, in a shaft of light, were feathery grey splodges of Cotman trees and a great glowing Constable cornfield and a sweep of a Paul Nash plough and the distant silvery white tower of a John Piper church. (P. Lively)

b) But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelly, discovered vast realms of the spirit, that none had explored before…I have read desultorily the writings of the young generations. It may be that among them a more fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelly, has already published numbers the world will willingly remember. (S. Maugham)

c) Trollope, it has often been said, is a lesser Thackeray. But the two novelists cannot be linked in this kind of way. Trollope is big enough to exist in his own right, and however inferior he may be to Thackeray as a writer, there are grounds for considering him a more satisfying novelist.

d) How was she to bear the change? It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs. Weston, only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful. (J. Austen)

e) Nobody, of course, stood more in need of the liberty to be himself than Sterne. For while there are writers whose gift is impersonal, so that a Tolstoy, for example, can create a charac­ter and leave us alone with it, Sterne must always be there in person to help us in our intercourse. Little or nothing of A Sentimental Journey would be left if all that we call Stern him­self were extracted from it. He has no valuable information to give, no reasoned philosophy to impart. He left London, he tells us, ‘with so much precipitation that it never entered my mind that we were at war with France’. He has nothing to say of pictures or churches or the misery or well-being of the country­side. He was travelling in France indeed, but the road was often through his own mind, and his chief adventures were not with brigands and precipices but with the emotions of his own heart. (V. Woolf)

f) It is thus that Stern transfers our interest from the outer to the inner. It is no use going to the guide-book; we must consult our own minds; only they can tell us what is the comparative importance of a cathedral, of a donkey, and of a girl with a green satin purse. In this preference for the windings of his own mind to the guide-book and its hammered high road, Sterne is singularly of our own age. In this interest in silence rather than in speech Sterne is the forerunner of the moderns. And for these reasons he is on far more intimate terms with us today than his great contemporaries the Richardsons and the Fieldings. (V. Woolf)

g) I had expected that EuroDisney would be an embarrassing, envious, derivative collection of cardboard castles, an American dream of old-world splendor, so I was surprised that it was so pretty, with a wedding-cake pink hotel that somehow looked familiar, Victorian turnings and Tiffany glass. It was American. I had expected to feel a rush of cultural indignation, a sort of humiliated, apologetic feeling that America had put over anything this dumb on Europeans. But it was hard to object to… I believe we had a nice time, it was all so decorative and sweet, an idealized America, and I had to admit it was nice to be back in America… (D. Johnson)