A) Express briefly in your own words what the talk is about. What makes it sound natural and spontaneous?
B) What does Martin Amis emphasise about his style of writing? What does he say about modern literary genres? Do you agree that "comedy is the only form left"? Is it really impossible to separate "the good from the bad when it comes to literature or art in general"? How do you understand the sentence "all we have is a history of taste"?
C) Do library research and reproduce a talk with an important writer.
5. Read the following extract and observe the way literary criticism is written:
Jane Austensaw life in a clear, dry light. She was not without deep human sympathies, but she had a quick eye for vanity, selfishness, but vulgarity, and she perceived the frequent incongruities between the way people talked and the realities of a situation. Her style is quiet and level. She never exaggerates, she never as it were, raises her voice to shout or scream. She is neither pompous, nor sentimental, nor flippant, but always gravely polite, and her writing contains a delicate but sharp-edged irony.
L.P. Hartleyis one of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original. For the world of his creation is composed of such diverse elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the process of human thought and feeling; he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of a Gothic imagination that reveals itself now in fanciful reverie, now in the mingled dark and gleam of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness... Such is the vision of life presented in his novels.
Martin Amisis the most important novelist of his generation and probably the most influential prose stylist in Britain today. The son of Kingsley Amis, considered Britain's best novelist of the 1950s, at the age of 24 Martin won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Rachel Papers (his father had won the same prize 20 years earlier). Since 1973 he has published seven more novels, plus three books of journalism and one of short stories. Each work has been well received, in particular Money (1984), which was described as "a key novel of the decade." His latest book is The Information (1995). It has been said of Amis that he has enjoyed a career more like that of a pop star than a writer.
A) Turn the above passages into dialogues and act them out.
B) Choose an author, not necessarily one of the greats, you'd like to talk about. Note down a few pieces of factual Information about his life and work. Your fellow-students will ask you questions to find out what you know about your subject.
Pair work. Discussing books and authors involves exchanging opinions and expressing agreement and disagreement. Team up with another student to talk on the following topics (Use expressions of agreement and disagreement (pp. 290).
"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good."
(Samuel Johnson)
"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
(Mark Twain)
"There's an old saying that all the world loves a lover. It doesn't. What all the world loves is a scrap. It wants to see two lovers struggling for the hand of one woman."
(Anonymous)
"No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them and read a single word."
(Sydney Smith)
"Books and friends should be few but good."
(a proverb)
Group discussion.
Despite the increase in TV watching, reading still is an important leisure activity in Britain. More than 5,000 titles were nominated in a national survey conducted in 1996. The public was invited to suggest up to five books. It was later suggested that the votes either came from English literary students or from people who were showing off. What do you think? Can you point out a few important names that failed to make it into the top 100 list?
Page 99
8. Compile your own list "Favourite Books of the Century."
Alexander Herzen called public libraries "a feast of ideas to which all are invited". Read the text below and say how the modern libraries differ from those of the old days. Use the topical vocabulary.
MY FAVOURITE LIBRARY
There are many libraries which I use regularly in London, some to borrow books from, some as quiet places to work in, but the Westminster Central Reference Library is unique. In a small street just off Leicester Square, it is run by the London borough of Westminster. You don't need a ticket to get in, and it is available to foreign visitors just the same as to local residents. You simply walk in, and there, on three floors, you can consult about 138,000 reference books and they include some very remarkable and useful items.
As you come in, the first alcove on the right contains telephone directories of almost every country in the world — Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, and so on, besides directories of important addresses in each country. There is also a street directory of every British town of any size, with the streets in alphabetical order, and the residents' names, as a rule, against their number in the street, while in another section the residents themselves are listed in alphabetical order.
Next there are technical dictionaries in all the principal languages. I counted 60 specialised technical dictionaries! for Russian alone. Then there is a section which, besides the best world atlases, contains individual atlases of a great many countries, some of them almost too heavy to lift. Seven hundred periodicals, mostly technical, are taken by the library, and the latest issues are put out on racks nearby. By asking at the enquiry desk you can see maps of the whole of Britain on the scale of 1/60,000 and 1/24,000, and smaller-scale maps of nearly every other country in Europe.
Around the walls, on this floor and the floor above, are reference books on every possible subject, including, for instance, standard works of English literature and criticism. Foreign literature, however, is represented mainly by anthologies.
Finally, on the top floor of all, is a wonderful art library, where you can take down from the shelves all those expensive, heavy, illustrated editions that you could never really afford yourself. The librarian at the desk can direct you to answers for
almost any query you may have about the plastic arts. There is in fact a busy enquiry desk on each floor, and the last time I was there they had just received a letter from a distinguished medical man. He had written to ask for information about sword-swallowing! He was very interested in the anatomy of sword-swallowers, and had failed to find anything either in medical libraries or in the British Museum Library!
(Anglia, 1972)