Table Of ContentCopyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
Министерство образования и науки Российской Федерации
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение
высшего образования
«Ивановский государственный университет»
Шуйский филиал
ДОМАШНЕЕ ЧТЕНИЕ. АНГЛИЙСКИЙ ЯЗЫК
по произведению Francis Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”
Учебно-методическое пособие
для направления подготовки 44.03.05 Педагогическое образование
(«Иностранный язык», «Иностранный язык»)
Шуя 2016
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»
УДК 811.111 Печатается по решению редакционно-издательского
ББК 81.2 Англ.- 9 совета Шуйского филиала ФГБОУ ВО «Ивановский
У 91 государственный университет»
Автор-составитель: Л.Ю. Смолина-Степович
Рецензент: кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры русского языка и
методики обучения Соколов А.Н.
Домашнее чтение. Английский язык. По произведению Francis Scott
Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”: Учебно-методическое пособие. — Шуя:
Издательство Шуйского филиала ИвГУ, 2016. – 63 с.
Учебно-методическое пособие предназначено для направления
подготовки 44.03.05 Педагогическое образование (профиль «Иностранный
язык», «Иностранный язык») по дисциплине «Домашнее чтение».
Цель его – помочь читающему художественную литературу работать с
текстом таким образом, чтобы наряду с извлечением содержания и оценкой
его художественных достоинств извлекать из него и максимум
лингвистической информации путем наблюдения над языковыми явлениями,
их анализом и сопоставлением с родным языком, что должно способствовать
лучшему пониманию читателем текста произведения, обогащению и
идиоматизации его речи.
© Шуйский филиал ИвГУ, 2016
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Предисловие 4
2. About the author 6
3. Home assignment 1. Chapters 1-2 13
4. Home assignment 2. Chapters 3-4 21
5. Home assignment 3. Chapters 5-6 31
6. Home assignment 4. Chapter 7 38
7. Home assignment 5. Chapters 8-9 47
8. Assignments for oral and written composition 58
9. Topics for the general discussion of the novel 63
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ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ
Данное пособие предназначено для студентов старших курсов,
изучающих язык на продвинутой стадии обучения. Цель его - помочь
читающему художественную литературу работать с текстом таким образом,
чтобы наряду с извлечением содержания и оценкой его художественных
достоинств извлекать из него и максимум лингвистической информации
путем наблюдения над языковыми явлениями, их анализом и сопоставлением
с родным языком, что должно способствовать лучшему пониманию
читателем текста произведения, обогащению и идиоматизации его речи.
Кроме того, одна из задач пособия состоит в том, чтобы помочь
читающим приобрести умение делать на английском языке критический
разбор литературного произведения: его идейного содержания и
художественной формы.
Пособие начинается с кратких сведений о жизни и творчестве автора,
затем следует основная часть, помогающая в работе над самим
произведением, над словарем, отобранным для обогащения речи читателей, и
над развитием их навыков устной и письменной речи. Направленность
внимания на языковую форму создается путем анализа языковых и
стилистических явлений, сопоставление с русским языком, припоминание
эквивалентов и сверка с оригиналом, перевод парафраза, объяснение и т.д.
Все вопросы составлены с учетом именно этих целей, то есть выявления как
наиболее интересных и важных для раскрытия содержания фактических
данных в романе, так и наиболее полезных слов и словосочетаний для
овладения ими на продвинутой стадии обучения
Задания для докладов и сочинений направлены на развитие навыка
реальной речевой деятельности и умения производить критический анализ
художественного произведения по определенному плану, описание героев
произведения, оценка идейного содержания романа, социального и
политического его значения и анализ художественных средств.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francis Sсott Key Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota, on Sep. 24,
1896. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, came originally from Maryland, and was
descended on his mother's side from Scotts and Keys whose American ancestry
stretched back to the early seventeenth century. A retiring, ineffectual man with
beautiful Southern manners "but not much get up and go", he arrived in St Paul to
set up a small wicker furniture business. He married Mary McQuillan, the daughter
of an Irish immigrant whose wholesale grocery business had netted him a personal
fortune. When the furniture business failed, Scott's childhood became a succession
of moves from town to town and from apartment to hotel as his father's job or
finances dictated. Against this background of instability it is no wonder that the
McQuillan mansion came to represent the security that money can buy, even
though the McQuillans lacked a corresponding respectability. Fitzgerald's mother
spoiled him outrageously, yet his earliest and most affectionate memories were of
his father, who imparted to him those gentlemanly ideals of conduct that remained
with him all his life.
He was thus early made aware of the change then rapidly taking place in
American society: his father symbolized for him a vanishing, more gracious
civilization that was yielding before the onslaught of the new men who, like
grandfather McQuillan, understood nothing but the power of money. Between
1898 and 1908 the Fitzgeralds moved back and forth from Buffalo to Syracuse,
until, to the eleven-year-old Scott's acute distress, Edward Fitzgerald lost his job as
sales-man and the family returned to St Paul to live under the shelter of the
McQuillan fortune.
At St Paul Scott Fitzgerald organized a play production in a neighbour's attic,
wrote a detective story and began a history of the United States. He became the
school's star debater, published tales of adventure in the school magazine.
In 1911, at the age of fourteen, Fitzgerald went to Newman School, New
Jersey. Fitzgerald's two years at Newman were for the most part lonely and
miserable, relieved from time to time by visits to the New York theatres which
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fired him with the ambition to write musical comedy. He came home to St Paul for
the summer with a play which was put on locally with great success, the fifteen-
year-old author playing the lead.
In the fall of 1913 Fitzgerald entered Princeton. At the beginning of his third
year he chose to leave college using as his excuse the illness which was diagnosed
as malaria, but which he later realized had been tuberculosis.
In September 1916 Fitzgerald returned to Princeton. He moved more now
with the "literary set", which included a number of distinguished contemporaries,
and under their guidance he embarked on a course of private reading which gave
him the only education he acquired while at Princeton.
In November 1917 he volunteered for the army. The army proved as great a
disappointment to Fitzgerald as Princeton, for his fifteen months' service was spent
in American training camps. He resented not being permitted to take part in the
heroic struggle of his time. Just before he left Princeton he completed the draft of a
novel called "The Romantic Egoist", which at Officers' Training Camp he set about
rewriting. Fitzgerald sent the finished manuscript to Scribner's publishers, but it
was rejected. He was transferred to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama,
where he fell in love with the daughter of Judge Sayre of the City Court of
Montgomery. When Fitzgerald first met Zelda Sayre she was just eighteen,
renowned for her daring, her beauty, and her golden hair, and regarded as "top girl"
by the eligible young officers from nearby Camp Tailor and Camp Sheridan. He
fell passionately in love with her, and she with him, but she refused to marry him
right away. "Zelda was cagey about throwing in her lot with me before I was a
money-maker," he remembered afterwards. When his army discharge camethrough
on Feb. 14, 1919, he knew that Zelda would not wait for him forever. He went to
New York and for four months worked as copywriter with an advertising agency.
He was not very good at it, and meanwhile Zelda was growing more and more
depressed. A disastrous visit, to Montgomery resulted in her breaking off their
engagement.
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On July 4 he left New York for St Paul, where, closeted in his old room, he
began his third revision of "The Romantic Egoist". On Sept. 3, 1919 Fitzgerald
sent to New York the finished manuscript of the novel called now "This Side of
Paradise", with the comment, "Maybe this is it!" It was. Scribner's publishers were
enthusiastic, and the novel was accepted for publication.
On the strength of this he returned to Montgomery to claim Zelda. They were
engaged again, and to be married as soon as the novel came out, but Fitzgerald
knew how nearly he had lost her, and for him it could never be quite the same.
Zelda had done "the sensible thing", but Fitzgerald knew that something had been
lost, and ever after in his stories associated the "top girl" with money. As he
explained in "The Crack-Up" published in 1936: "During along summer of despair
I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out all right
for a different person. The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married
the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity towards
the leisure class."
In March 1920 he revisited Princeton. Here he wrote the long short story
"May Day". On March 26 "This Side of Paradise" was published. The book was an
immediate success.
The Jazz Age had begun – according to Fitzgerald it was born about the time
of the "May Day" demonstration and riots in 1919 – and "This Side of Paradise"
was acclaimed as the hand- book of the rising generation. The Fitzgeralds moved
with the gayest and brightest of the younger set in a whirl of parties that ended
with a roof-top taxi-ride or a spectacular plunge into the Plaza fountain. Fitzgerald
had at last arrived. As Fitzgerald later wrote in "The Crack-Up":
"I, who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months' standing, was
pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical
product of that same moment".
"This Side of Paradise" is a young man's book, immaturely imagined, but it
was addressed to the youth of its day, and its appeal was immediate. Its
extraordinary popularity derived from the fidelity of its portrait of an age. It was
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the first novel to tackle the problems confronting youth in post-war America, and
through Fitzgerald's glowing romanticism there sounded clearly for the first time
those notes of disillusionment and rebellion that were to become dominant in the
literature of the next twenty years. It issued at once a challenge to the old order and
a manifesto for the new, and those, who like Fitzgerald, had come of age with the
War – The Lost Generation, as Gertrude Stein was soon to call them – beheld in its
hero a mirror-image of themselves.
Amory Elaine, the hero of "This Side of Paradise", is clearly an idealized
projection of the young Fitzgerald. Amory discovers that what he really wants is
not to be admired nor to be loved, but "to be necessary to people, to be
indispensable..."Amory feels an immense desire to give people a sense of security
and he sees in Socialism a way to attain it. This seems to reflect Fitzgerald's own
views if we can trust what Toni Butitta, a friend of Fitzgerald's, a literary critic and
journalist, wrote about him: "Marx had helped to form his own class-consciousness
and influenced some of his best writing".
In 1921, with "This Side of Paradise" still a best-seller, Scribner's put out a
collection of Fitzgerald's short stories. His next novel "The Beautiful and
Damned," his longest and least successful book, was published in March 1922. It is
quite different from "This Side of Paradise", for the "touch of disaster" is at the
very centre of this work.
"Tales of the Jazz Age" came out in September, 1922 and though still uneven,
is a much better collection than the first one. The book contains some of his finest
short stories which are distinguished by what is aptly called Fitzgerald's "light yet
jewelled style". Two stories in "Tales of the Jazz Age" stand out above the rest –
"May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". These stories are landmarks in
the development of Fitzgerald's fictional technique.
"The Great Gatsby" was published in April, 1925, and Fitzgerald waited
anxiously to see what the critics would say. He was not disappointed, for most
reviewers were enthusiastic, but much more gratifying to the author were the
letters of congratulation from Gertrude Stein and T. S. Elliot. There was general
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agreement that in "The Great Gatsby "Fitzgerald had produced something
remarkable. With the admiration was mingled some astonishment at the maturity
of vision and mastery of technique. A projected title for the book, "Among Ash
Heaps and Millionaires", suggests the nature of Fitzgerald's vision of life, but "The
Great Gatsby" goes beyond a devastating analysis of "the foul dust" that floats in
the wake of "the American dream".
Despite the excellent reviews, "The Great Gatsby" sold only 25,000 copies
and Fitzgerald found himself haunted by debts. But he was unable to reduce his
scale of living. 1925 in Paris was the summer of "100 parties and no work",
rounded off by a month at Antibes. Fitzgerald's friendship with Hemingway dates
from this period, and he devoted considerable time and energy to furthering the
career of this writer whose genius he was among the first to recognize. Apart from
two brief trips to America, the Fitzgeralds remained in Europe until the autumn of
1931.
Worry and uncertainty are never far beneath the surface of the stories in "All
the Sad Young Men," the collection, Fitzgerald published the year after "The Great
Gatsby". The best of those stories, "The Rich Boy", reads like a study for the novel
that was to occupy Fitzgerald on and off for the next nine years, the novel that he
called "Tender Is the Night".
The summer of 1927 began with some progress on the novel, but by the
following year Fitzgerald's work had come to a stop and his depression was
increased by his detection of the first symptoms of the mental disturbance that
finally overwhelmed his wife.
Fitzgerald was again in debt, and with this accumulation of worries he began
to crack under the strain.
By October 1933 the manuscript of "Tender Is the Night" was finished. The
book came out in April, 1934. The setting of the novel is the French Riviera, the
leisure class at their most brilliant and glamourous are a group of wealthy
American expatriates, and the hero, Dr Dick Diver, is a brilliant psychiatrist. Dr
Diver's profession and decline are clearly related to Fitzgerald's personal tragedy.
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Without attempting to encompass the whole of society in his novel, Fitzgerald
nevertheless contrived to convey a sense of the forces of disintegration at work in
European society between the two World Wars. The aftermath of the First World
War is ever present, and the opposing values of Europe and America are implicit
throughout the book.
The publication of the work on which he had lavished so much time and
trouble marked the beginning of Fitzgerald's descent into darkness. With no more
than 13,000 copies sold and with very few reviews of any real perception, he found
it harder than ever to fight against an inner conviction of failure. Deeply in debt,
and more concerned about his wife's health than his own, it was not until May that
he learned how seriously ill he was. A recurrence of tuberculosis had him in and
out of hospital again and again, and the only pieces he managed to write that year
were the three painfully frank articles published in1936, "The Crack-Up", "Handle
with Care" and "Pasting It Together" .In September 1939, after a summer of
sickness and anxiety, he started to write "The Last Tycoon". The old enthusiasm
had returned. Fitzgerald sent his publisher an outline of the novel that reflects his
optimism.
"There's nothing that worries me in the novel, nothing that seems uncertain.
Unlike "Tender Is the Night", it is not the story of deterioration – it is not
depressing and not morbid in spite of the tragic ending. If one book could ever be
"like" another, I should say it is more "like" "The Great Gatsby" than any other of
my books". While writing "The Last Tycoon" Fitzgerald had "The Great Gatsby"
constantly in mind, and no doubt his successful handling of the point of view in the
earlier novel persuaded him to revert to the technique of first-person narration by
an observer at once inside and outside the story. '
For all the imperfections of its unfinished state "The Last Tycoon" is full of
splendid things. Fitzgerald had never written better, apart from passages in "The
Great Gatsby", and he had never handled dialogue so well. The prose is witty and
polished, and the story is presented through a sequence of brilliantly focused
scenes of dramatic intensity.
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