An Introduction to Critical Appreciation For Foreign Learners [antikvár]

EDITOR'S FOREWORD This book is intended for students of English as a foreign language who have got beyond the stage of reading for fact, simply to gain information, and can now turn their attention to literary style, to the ways in which writers communicate with their readers or listeners. The selection might be useful to students embarking on a course of English literature at a university overseas, or to students preparing for the questions on critical appreciation which are set in the examinations for the Certificate of Proficiency in English or for the Diploma of English Studies, set by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. One cannot lay down a fixed 'model' for a piece of critical appreciation. The way a student approaches his critical essay will be to a large extent governed by the piece of writing that he is examining. What he has to do is to read with close attention, determine what the author was trying to do, and evaluate how, and how far, he has been successful. Did he want to make his reader see, feel, hear, laugh, understand? Did he want to persuade him of an argument, to cajole him, to bully him? What use has he made of the tools at his disposal: of words - their sounds and associations; of the structure - length and rhythm of his sentences; of his powers of overall arrangement? What use has he made of verse-forms, of metre, of rhyme? To what faculty in us has he appealed most? In this selection each passage of prose and each poem is followed by a number of fairly searching and leading questions such as a teacher might ask in class in order to make students aware of what they could see if they looked and listened carefully. When the student has thought about and answered all these questions, he should be in a position to write a short critical essay on the piece; and he is finally asked to do so, a theme sentence often being provided. For the first prose extract the questions are answered and a possible model answer is alsó given. For the first poem the questions are again answered; for the second a possible model paragraph is given, and for Poem 7 a possible plan is