The aim of the lesson is to teach you to analyze the composition and the conflict of a short story.
Read the following piece of information and reproduce the jist of it, enumerating the problems Steinbeck touched upon..
John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) did not start his literary career until Lewis and Fitzgerald had reached their peak. He seemed to be from a different world - the world of the Great Depression, the world of mass poverty. It was a world as far removed from that of Lewis as from that of Fitzgerald.
A Californian, Steinbeck was an athlete and president of his high school class, who went to Standford University in between various jobs. He learned to know the poor, in particular the migrant farm workers, American and Mexican, and he wrote from their point of view. By the middle of 1930s, when Lewis and Fitzgerald were past their writing prime, Steinbeck had authorized some very popular novels. Tortilla flat was a humorous story about a Mexican-American colony in Monterey, while In Dubious Battle was a serious work about a strike by migrant farmworkers. Of Mice and Men is a touching and perennially popular tale of two migrants and their mutual dependence and shared dreams. His greatest success came in 1939 with The Grapes of Wrath. This is the saga of a family of Oklahoma farmers named Joad, who are driven by drought to migrate to California.
The collection of stories The Pastures of Heaven (1932) is Steinbeck’s attempt to study the life of Californian farmers, with its everyday chores and trivial amusements. But describing the slow rhythm and the atmosphere of tolerance characteristic of rural life the writer ponders on the people’s disillusionment and their inability to realize their fondest dreams. In the collection of stories The Long Valley published in 1938 the accent is almost completely removed from the details of rural life. It is an investigation of hidden inner motives of people’s behaviour.
Read the following piece of information, render the given summary and say what the story is about (in your opinion), if you don’t agree with the interpretation of its theme given in the extract. (If your interpretation coincides with the one given in the extract render it as well and provide a brief comment of your own.)
В новелле “Хризантемы” изображена скрытая для окружающих драма жены преуспевающего фермера, уже немолодой женцины - Элизы. Событийная канва рассказа, как это зачастую бывает у Стейнбека, предельно обыденна. Автор описывает несколько часов из жизни своих героев, во время которых всё идёт своим чередом: муж совершает удачную торговую сделку, жена ухаживает за своими любимыми хризантемами, дом посещает точильщик ножей, которому Элиза дарит горшок с цветами. Вечером, отправляясь с мужем в кино, Элиза замечает выброшенные точильщиком цветы. Всё буднично, обычно, лишено каких бы то ни было признаков драматизма. Однако под покровом обыденного обнаруживается душевная драма героини, неудовлетворённой своим мужем, органически неспособным понять радость творчества, преобщиться к прекрасному, символом которого оказываются для Элизы не приносящие дохода чудесные хризантемы. Инстинктивно потянувшись в случайному посетителю дома, проявившему интерес к её жизни, к её цветам, Элиза вынуждена горько пожалеть о своём порыве. Вызвавший его человек оказался не менее прозаическим и практичным, чем её муж.
Give the character study of Elisa Allen analyzing the author’s way of character drawing.
(What do we come to know about the main character? her desires? her inner motives? her attitude to her husband? etc. as the narration moves forward? What are the chief devices the author employs to create the image?)
What is the role of description in the story? Take any piece of description and analyze it explaining its peculiarities and its purpose.
5. Most stories and novels are made up of incidents arising because of a struggle of some kind - a struggle which becomes more and more tense till a turning point or Grand climax is reached. Then the action drives on, still a series of dramatic movements, to its close, or the resolution. First there comes an introduction that covers the earlier scenes, which serve principally to acquaint us with the preliminaries, or attending circumstances. Somewhere near the beginning is the inciting force, which definitely begins the conflict between the opposing forces. Then comes the grand climax. The rising action (the entanglement, the complication) is the presentation of all the events that happened up to the grand climax. After the grand climax there comes the falling action (resolution, the denouement).
Conflicts may be of different kinds: the difficulty arising of one’s own limitations, physical or mental; the difficulty arising in one’s own mind, such as fear or nervousness, misinterpretation of other people’s motives, etc.; the opposition of other people - their hopes, fears, beliefs, judgements; the difficulty created by natural environment; the difficulty created by social environment.