Table Of ContentА.А. Гольдман
И.Ж. Винокурова
ИнтерпретАцИя
брИтАнскоГо ромАнА
UNDERSTANDING
BRITISH NOVELS
Учебное пособие
2-е издание, стереотипное
Допущено УМО по классическому университетскому
образованию для студентов высших учебных заведений
в качестве учебного пособия
по направлению подготовки 032700 — «Филология»
Москва
Издательство «ФЛИНТА»
2014
1
УДК 811.111(075.8)
ББК 81.2Англ-923
Г63
Гольдман А.А.
Г63 Интерпретация британского романа. Understanding British
Novels. A student’s activity book for advanced learners of
English [Электронный ресурс] : учеб. пособие / А.А. Гольдман,
И.Ж. Винокурова. — 2-е изд., стер. — М. : ФЛИНТА, 2014.
— 256 с.
ISBN 978-5-9765-1756-1
Пособие призвано активизировать самостоятельную работу в
процессе подготовки к занятиям по домашнему чтению,
интерпретации и анализу текста. Оно состоит из глав романа Гр.
Грина «The Quiet American», каждая из которых сопровождается
рядом заданий, способствующих углублению понимания прочитанного,
развитию умений излагать содержание, интерпретировать смысл
художественного текста.
Для студентов старших курсов, изучающих английский язык по
направлению 032700 «Филология», профиль «Зарубежная филология»
(английский язык и литература).
УДК 811.111(075.8)
ББК 81.2Англ-923
ISBN 978-5-9765-1756-1 © Гольдман А.А., Винокурова И.Ж.,
2013
© Издательство «ФЛИНТА», 2014
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CONTENTS
Предисловие / Preface .....................................................................................4
Introduction .......................................................................................................5
PART ONE
Chapter I ........................................................................................................11
Chapter II ......................................................................................................24
Assignment I ....................................................................................................34
Chapter III .....................................................................................................37
Chapter IV .....................................................................................................51
Assignment II ..................................................................................................67
Chapter V .......................................................................................................71
PART TWO
Chapter I .........................................................................................................79
Chapter II (1, 2) .............................................................................................91
Assignment III ...............................................................................................101
Chapter II (3) ...............................................................................................107
Assignment IV ...............................................................................................131
Chapter III ...................................................................................................136
Assignment V .................................................................................................157
PART THREE
Chapter I ......................................................................................................162
Chapter II (1) ...............................................................................................180
Assignment VI ...............................................................................................184
Chapter II (2) ...............................................................................................188
PART FOUR
Chapter I .......................................................................................................196
Chapter II ....................................................................................................201
Chapter III ...................................................................................................216
Assignment VII ..............................................................................................219
Assignment VIII .............................................................................................223
Assignment IX ...............................................................................................231
Assignment X .................................................................................................236
Assignment XI ...............................................................................................246
Assignment XII ..............................................................................................247
List of References .........................................................................................254
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преДИсЛоВИе
Учебное пособие рассчитано на студентов старших кур-
сов институтов и факультетов иностранных языков. Оно пред-
назначено для домашнего чтения и включает в себя задания на
развитие навыков чтения, говорения, а также ряд упражнений,
способствующих совершенствованию навыков интерпретации
художественного текста.
Пособие построено на материале романа известного бри-
танского писателя Грэма Грина «The Quiet American». Выбор
произведения объясняется не только тем, что это детективный
психологический роман, который, безусловно, вызывает инте-
рес читателя, но и тем, что оно содержит в себе вопросы, остаю-
щиеся актуальными независимо от времени — вопросы полити-
ки, мира и войны, любви и ненависти, дружбы и предательства,
психологии преступления. Роман также в большей степени рас-
крывает порывы человечности и ставит под сомнение право че-
ловека судить других людей.
Каждый раздел пособия начинается с главы или подглавки
романа, приводимой без сокращений и каких-либо изменений
авторского стиля. Текст произведения сопровождается коммен-
тариями, поясняющими исторические и географические реалии.
После чтения каждой главы романа студентам предлагается вы-
полнить ряд заданий, направленных на обогащение словарного
запаса обучающихся, развитие навыков понимания оригиналь-
ного текста и совершенствование навыков говорения. Наиболее
эффективным типом упражнений в этом пособии являются зада-
ния, которые рассчитаны помочь студентам обсудить основные
проблемы произведения, интересные эпизоды, поступки и раз-
мышления персонажей, излюбленные стилистические приемы
автора и т.п.
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В конце пособия приводится ряд заданий, рекомендуемых
для заключительного обсуждения книги.
PREFACE
The aim of the present manual is to give the students of philology
the tool for understanding and interpretation of a literary text. It is
based on the novel “The Quiet American” by Graham Greene. It
provides an introduction about the author, the chapters of the book
with commentaries on historical and geographical realia.
The manual contains a set of vocabulary exercises on some
interesting expressions from the novel. Special focus is made also
on the fragments of the text which can help a student to apply a
linguostylistic approach to understanding of a literary text. Besides,
every chapter of the novel is followed by discussion of the themes
which Gr. Greene is exploring.
The manual is intended to help teachers, students and general
readers to enjoy reading and understanding a contemporary classic
novel by one of Britain’s finest writers.
INTRODUCTION
Graham Greene, in full Henry Graham Greene (born October 2,
1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England—died April 3, 1991,
Vevey, Switzerland) is an English novelist, short-story writer, play-
wright, and journalist whose novels treat life’s moral ambiguities in
the context of contemporary political settings.
His father was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which
Greene attended for some years. After running away from school,
he was sent to London to a psychoanalyst in whose house he lived
while under treatment. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford,
Greene converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926, partly through
the influence of his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he
married in 1927. He moved to London and worked for The Times
as a copy editor from 1926 to 1930. His first published work was a
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book of verse, Babbling April (1925), and upon the modest success
of his first novel, The Man Within (1929; adapted as the film The
Smugglers, 1947), he quit The Times and worked as a film critic
and literary editor for The Spectator until 1940. He then traveled
widely for much of the next three decades as a freelance journalist,
searching out locations for his novels in the process.
Greene’s first three novels are held to be of small account. He
began to come into his own with a thriller, Stamboul Train (1932;
also published as Orient Express), which plays off various characters
against each other as they ride a train from the English Channel
to Istanbul. This was the first of a string of novels that he termed
“entertainments,” works similar to thrillers in their spare, tough
language and their suspenseful, swiftly moving plots, but possessing
greater moral complexity and depth. Stamboul Train was also the
first of Greene’s many novels to be filmed (1934). It was followed
by three more entertainments that were equally popular with the
reading public: A Gun for Sale (1936; also published as This Gun for
Hire; films 1942 and, as Short Cut to Hell, 1957), The Confidential
Agent (1939; film 1945), and The Ministry of Fear (1943; adapted
as the film Ministry of Fear, 1945). A fifth entertainment, The Third
Man, which was published in novel form in 1949, was originally a
screenplay for a classic film directed by Carol Reed.
One of Greene’s finest novels, Brighton Rock (1938; films
1947 and 2010), shares some elements with his entertainments —
the protagonist is a hunted criminal roaming the underworld of an
English sea resort — but explores the contrasting moral attitudes
of its main characters with a new degree of intensity and emotional
involvement. In this book, Greene contrasts a cheerful and warm-
hearted humanist he obviously dislikes with a corrupt and violent
teenage criminal whose tragic situation is intensified by a Roman
Catholic upbringing. Greene’s finest novel, The Power and the
Glory (1940; also published as The Labyrinthine Ways; adapted as
the film The Fugitive, 1947), has a more directly Catholic theme: the
desperate wanderings of a priest who is hunted down in rural Mexico
at a time when the church is outlawed there. The weak and alcoholic
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priest tries to fulfill his priestly duties despite the constant threat of
death at the hands of a revolutionary government.
Greene worked for the Foreign Office during World War II and
was stationed for a while at Freetown, Sierra Leone, the scene of
another of his best-known novels, The Heart of the Matter (1948;
film 1953). This book traces the decline of a kindhearted British
colonial officer whose pity for his wife and mistress eventually
leads him to commit suicide. The End of the Affair (1951; films
1955 and 1999) is narrated by an agnostic in love with a woman who
forsakes him because of a religious conviction that brings her near to
sainthood.
Greene’s next four novels were each set in a different Third
World nation on the brink of political upheaval. The protagonist
of A Burnt-Out Case (1961) is a Roman Catholic architect tired
of adulation who meets a tragic end in the Belgian Congo shortly
before that colony reaches independence. The Quiet American (1956;
films 1958 and 2002) chronicles the doings of a well-intentioned
American government agent in Vietnam in the midst of the anti-
French uprising there in the early 1950s. Our Man in Havana (1958;
film 1959) is set in Cuba just before the communist revolution there,
while The Comedians (1966; film 1967) is set in HaitI during the
rule of François Duvalier. Greene’s last four novels, The Honorary
Consul (1973; adapted as the film Beyond the Limit, 1983), The
Human Factor (1978; film 1979), Monsignor Quixote (1982), and
The Tenth Man (1985), represent a decline from the level of his best
fiction.
The world Greene’s characters inhabit is a fallen one, and the
tone of his works emphasizes the presence of evil as a palpable force.
His novels display a consistent preoccupation with sin and moral
failure acted out in seedy locales characterized by danger, violence,
and physical decay. Greene’s chief concern is the moral and spiritual
struggles within individuals, but the larger political and social
settings of his novels give such conflicts an enhanced resonance.
His early novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken Europe sliding
toward fascism and war, while many of his subsequent novels are
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set in remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions, or other political
upheavals.
Despite the downbeat tone of much of his subject matter, Greene
was in fact one of the most widely read British novelists of the 20th
century. His books’ unusual popularity is due partly to his production
of thrillers featuring crime and intrigue but more importantly to
his superb gifts as a storyteller, especially his masterful selection
of detail and his use of realistic dialogue in a fast-paced narrative.
Throughout his career, Greene was fascinated by film, and he often
emulated cinematic techniques in his writing. No other British writer
of this period was as aware as Greene of the power and influence of
cinema.
Greene published several collections of short stories, among
them Nineteen Stories (1947; revised as Twenty-one Stories, 1954).
Among his plays are The Living Room (performed 1952) and The
Potting Shed (1957). His Collected Essays appeared in 1969. A Sort
of Life (1971) is a memoir to 1931, to which Ways of Escape (1980)
is a sequel. A collection of his film criticism is available in Mornings
in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993). In 2007
a selection of his letters was published as Graham Greene: A Life
in Letters. The unfinished manuscript The Empty Chair, a murder
mystery that Greene began writing in 1926, was discovered in 2008;
serialization of it began the following year.
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THE QUIET AMERICAN
by Graham Greene
Dear Rene and Phuong,
I have asked permission to dedicate this book to you not only
in memory of the happy evenings I have spent with you in Saigon1
over the last five years, but also because I have quite shamelessly
borrowed the location of your flat to house one of my characters,
and your name, Phuong, for the convenience of readers because it
is simple, beautiful and easy to pronounce, which is not true of all
your country-women’s names. You will both realise I have borrowed
little else, certainly not the characters of anyone in Viet Nam. Pyle,
Granger, Fowler, Vigot, Joe-these have had no originals in the life of
Saigon or Hanoi2, and General The is dead: shot in the back, so they
say. Even the historical events have been rearranged. For example,
the big bomb near the Continental3 preceded and did not follow the
bicycle bombs. I have no scruples about such small changes. This is
a story and not a piece of history, and I hope that as a story about a
few imaginary characters it will pass for both of you one hot Saigon
evening.
Yours affectionately,
Graham Greene
1 A city and port on the south coast of Vietnam. It was the capital of the
French colony established in Vietnam in the 19th century, becoming capital of
South Vietnam in the partition of 1954.
2 The capital of Vietnam, situated on the Red River in the north of the country.
It was the capital of French Indo-China from 1887 to 1946 and of North Vietnam
before the reunification of North and South Vietnam.
3 The Continental Hotel situated in the main street of Saigon.
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“I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action
Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
We’re so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty.”
A.H. Clough4
“This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions.”
Byron
4 Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819—1861), English poet.
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