Аракин 4 курс полностью

a) Express briefly in your own words what the talk to 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 Austen saw 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. Hartley is 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 Amis is 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. 

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Практический курс английского языка. 4 курс под ред. В.Д. Аракина
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