大学 高级英语 Unit_15教案

Unit 15 No signposts in the Sea

by Victoria Mary Sackville-West

Teaching Points

?I. Background information

?II. Introduction to the passage

?III. T ext analysis

?IV. Rhetorical devices

?V. Questions for discussion

I. Background Information

?1. Victoria Mary Sackville-West (1892-1962)

?2. The main idea of the Novel No Signposts in the Sea

II. Introduction to the Passage

?1.Type of literature: -- a piece of objective description

?2.The purpose of a piece of objective description: ---to record and reproduce a true picture with opinions and emotions of the author excluded

?3. Ways of developing a piece of objective description: ---to begin with a brief general picture, divide the object into parts and organize the detailed description in order of space

III. Effective Writing Skills

?1. making effective use of specific verbs

?2. using adjectives accurately

?3. using five human senses---hearing, smelling, seeing, tasting and touching to make the description vivid

?4. using rhetorical devices properly

IV. Rhetorical Devices

1. transferred epithet

2. personification

3. simile

4. metonymy

5. personification

6. metaphor

V. Text Analysis

?Words:flush, supple, preface, opinionate, gluttonously, inclination, dismissive, hydraulic, ascription, disperse, pantheism, malice, intermittent, promontory, lavender, albatross, lore, resent, unblemished, coral, innermost, quirk, boulder, vengeance, recede, palette, opaque.

?Phrases: believe in, flatter oneself, suffer from, scorn off, nothing but, divert to, longe up, slide by, lose oneself in.

VI. Questions and Answers

?1. What pleasure does Edmund Carr get by observing Laura without her knowing?

?2. Does Carr appreciate natural beauty? Was he always like that?

?3. What effect do the moon and the cool water of the swimming pool have on him?

?4. What is the ―green flash‖?

?5. What is the general function of a ―signposts‖?

?6. What is the special feature of a sea?

?7. What can you predict about the implication of the title of the text?

VII. Questions for further discussion:

Suppose if one has been informed that one‘s days in the world are numbered, what do you think one may choose to do as the best option?

I. Background Information

1. Sackville-West, Vita (1892-1962)

Most readers know Vita Sackville-West, if they know her at all, for her love affair with Virginia Woolf, and for Woolf's brilliant depiction of her as the alluring hero-heroine of Orlando (1928). But Sackville-West was a prolific author in her own right. Her fifty-five books include seven collections of poems and stories, twelve novels, and twenty-two works of nonfiction.

Y et these works reveal only in veiled and muted ways the woman who captivated Virginia Woolf and inspired Orlando, whose affairs (mostly with women) precipitated international scandals and provoked threats of murder and suicide from lovers and husbands of lovers.

Although her letters make frequent--usually cryptic--allusions to her sexual relationships with women (and Victoria Glendinning fills out the story with rich detail in her 1983 biography), Sackville-West wrote directly and at length about her sexual identity only once, in a secret journal in 1920, discovered after her death from cancer in 1962 by her son Nigel Nicolson and published as part of Portrait of a Marriage in 1973.

Nicolson was a young career diplomat when Vita met him in 1910. She was a self-conscious aristocrat, descended on her father's side from Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), Earl of Dorset, Lord High Treasurer of England, poet, courtier, and cousin to the Queen. But she was equally fascinated by her maternal grandmother--a Spanish gypsy dancer who called herself Pepita and appeared on stage as "The Star of Andalusia."

Writing was Sackville-West's passion. By the time she met Nicolson, she had already authored two novels, two plays in French, and a verse drama about the suicide of the unappreciated poet Thomas Chatterton.

She was also "in love" with her girlhood friend, Rosamund Grosvenor. "Oh, I dare say I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find it out," she admits in the secret journal, but s he saw no conflict between the two relationships: "I really was innocent." Her first son, Ben, was born in 1914, the second, Nigel, in 1917.

In 1918, when another girlhood friendship, with Violet Keppel, blazed into sexual passion, conflict careened toward public scandal. The two women traveled together to Cornwall, Paris, southern France, and Monte Carlo, with Vita dressing in men's clothes and calling herself "Julian." Keppel's marriage to Denys Trefusis in 1919 only heightened the passion between them, and in 1920, when the two women "eloped" to France, the two husbands pursued in a private plane and catapulted all four into international headlines.

Sackville-West wrote a fictional account of the affair in her novel Challenge (1923), but she moved the action to a Greek island and depicted the relationship (between "Julian" and "Eve") as heterosexual.

The more revealing document is the secret journal she began in 1920 in an effort to understand

her "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality"--a "brutal and hard and savage" side of herself that reveled in amorous adventures with female lovers, and a "seraphic and childlike" side content with marriage to Nicolson.

Nor did she write only for private catharsis. Rather, by analyzing her attractions to women "in an impersonal and scientific spirit," she hoped to create a useful record for the day she saw coming when "the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest, and ... it will be recognized that many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted."

The psychology of people like herself was not something Sackville-West explored publicly in poems and novels. Nevertheless, her works do invite readings as highly coded and carefully veiled expressions of her values and experiences.

Cultural and temperamental dualities in novels like Heritage(1919), The Dragon in Shallow Waters(1921), Grey Wethers(1923), and The Devil at Westease(1947) mirror the duality she imagined inheriting from the Sackvilles and her Spanish grandmother, and that duality mirrors the psychosexual one described in the secret journal.

Portrayals of marriage and sexual relationships between men and women in The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932), hint at the psychological balancing act that enabled her own marriage to Nicolson.

Critic Suzanne Raitt, moreover, calls attention to the almost invisible homosexual subplot in The Edwardians and points out that the charged use of the word queer in a dialogue between the explorer Anquetil and the main character--a dialogue in which Anquetil urges Sebastian to abandon his proposed marriage and "Come away with me"--predates by two years the OED's first recorded use of the word to mean "homosexual."

If Challenge (1923) is a roman à clef about the affair with Violet Keppel, Dark Island (1934) is another, about her relationship with Gwen St. Aubyn. Sackville-West here projects herself into both the jealous husband, Venn, and the devoted secretary, Cristina, who battle each other for possession of Shirin (Sackville-West's real-life Persian petname for St. Aubyn), and the erotic quality of the relationship between Shirin and Cristina, though not explicit, is unmistakably suggested.

Only in her last novel, No Signposts in the Sea (1961), does Sackville-West make any explicit reference to lesbian love, however, and there she carefully distances herself from it. "Perhaps a relationship between two women must always be incomplete," the main character, Laura, speculates to a male friend, "--unless, I suppose, they have Lesbian inclinations which I don't happen to share. Then, or so I have been given to understand, the concord may approach perfection."

Sackville-West was not the great writer she longed to be. Her poetry and prose fiction were conservative compared to the new modes being forged by T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. But her long poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927, The Edwardians was a best-seller, and her works consistently made money for Leonard

and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, which published them betwee n 1924 and 1940.

2. Plot:

The 144-page novel is written in the form of a journal kept by a man called Edmund Carr, 50, an influential political columnist and a bachelor. He learns that he has a limited time to live – a few days or weeks, a month or two at most. How shall he spend them? In this quandary, he learns that a widow who he has lately met at random social occasions has booked passage on a cruise to the Far East. Her qualities, her intelligence and warmth stiffened by a deep reserve, have struck him as uncommon; he decides to be aboard.

Edmund Carr is at sea in more ways than one. An eminent journalist and self-made man, he has recently discovered that he has only a short time to live. Leaving his job on a Fleet Street paper, he takes a passage on a cruise ship where he knows that Laura, a beautiful and intelligent widow whom he secretly admires, will be a fellow passenger. Exhilarated by the distant vista of exotic islands never to be visited and his conversations with Laura, Edmund finds himself rethinking all his values. A voyage on many levels, those long purposeless days at sea find Edmund relinquishing the past as he discovers the joys and the pain of a love he is simultaneously determined to conceal.

3. Characters:

a) Edmund Carr: an influential political columnist and bachelor who had devoted all of his time to the career, having little time to entertain himself before he decided to take the voyage abroad. It should be stressed that Sackville-West drew on her background for the setting of the ―Edwardians‖(1930), the story tinged with an undercurrent of sadness, are nonetheless idyllic. The release from pressure; the lackadaisical rhythms of ship life; the shifting panorama of magnificent skies and sea, of enticing, passing shores and the infrequent ports-of-call; his growing knowledge of Laura the widow—all these combine to give Carr an unfamiliar peace and a profound change in perspective.

b) Laura: a widow and an acquaintance of Edmund Carr‘s, who could be considered as the incarnation of Vita Mary Sackville-West. Her qualities, her intelligence and warmth stiffened by a deep reserve, have struck him as uncommon; he decides to be abroad with her.

c) Colonel: an Empire builder, who tended to appear quite knowledgeable which was the result of his frequent travels worldwide, who often tried to put right what Edmund Carr was commenting on the natural surroundings, say, the seas, the mountains, to name just a few.

Power, prestige, practicality

◆the former watchwords of Edmund Carr‘s—lost their ring. Illusion, while he had abhorred, and

personal entertainment he had not had time for, and the natural world, un-invaded by civilization, begin to seem transcendent.

◆Carr‘s growing love for Laura, despite his self-acknowledgement that she must be

unattainable for him (who looked like a delicate and beautiful flower waiting for some venturesome man to climb to the peak of the mountain to pick it up), shatters this ever-expanding felicity as the voyage went on.

◆A handsome, pompous and sometime obstinate yet unpredictably engaging Colonel form a

three, a kind of ?Triangle Relation‘ among the Three.

◆Edmund Carr is catapulted willy-nilly into the all-too-human ignominy of jealousy, despair,

meanness, and outbursts of disappointment against his ―rival‖.

Questions for further consideration on the part of students while reading the text:

◆1.What was the emotional reaction to the abrupt change for Edmund Carr himself when he

realized the sudden change of the way of life? Can you find any example to illustrate or explain this kind of sudden change?

◆2. What did the author imply by mentioning the concept of ―hard materialist‖?

◆3. Why did the author refer to the natural scenery from time to time? Was it just a matter of

coincidence or a deliberate arrangement?

◆4. What is the implication of depicting two kinds of the description of two kinds of natural

scenery: the vast expanse of desert where nothing could escape from the view of the people and the steep cliffs where there were beautiful flowers or plantations were growing without being disturbed or even damaged?

◆5. What is the ultimate purpose of the author to have three main characters in the novel?

◆6. What can you imagine the theme of the story would be by considering the personal

background of ―Edmund Carr‘s, Laura‘s and Colonel‘s?

◆7. What is the implication of the title now after the introduction?

Referents used in the text: young moon, virgin, flying fish, precipitous bluffs, sandy beach, cliffs, islands, moonlings, calf-love, seabirds, albatross

Detailed discussions of the text:

1.I have never had much of an eye...

I have never paid much attention to nor have ever had a keen appreciation of the clothes of women.

have an eye for: to have the ability to see, judge and understand clearly; to have a keen appreciation of something

have an eye to something: to have as one's aim or purpose

have eyes only for: to desire or be interested in

have set eyes on: to see, look at

2. Slender

-- slender means/cheque

-- a slender figure / a slender income /a slender hope

-- Sobs shook her slender frame

-- A slender hope still flickered within him

-- A slender smile still flickered across her face

-- The spider hung suspended on its slender thread

-- Hope is a slender reed for a stout man to lean on

-- Entombed as her is, the playwright can count on room service to sustain the slender thread life 3. Supple

-- supple leather/supple nature

-- supple the hearts and tempers of the people.

-- She exercises everyday to keep herself supple.

-- He admired the graceful, supple movements of the dancers.

-- She gets along well with people because of her supple nature

4. Compliment

-- mechanical compliment

-- a neatly phrased compliment

-- A sincere compliment boosts one's morale

-- He addressed her with high compliment.

-- Y our presence is a great compliment.

-- Her eyes sparkled her pleasure at the compliment

-- She gave a coy smile when he paid her a compliment

5. Beguile

-- beguile children with stories

-- beguile sb. into doing sth

-- beguile him (out)of his money

6. Inclination

-- against one's inclination / have an inclination for

-- the inclination of a roof/ follow one's own inclination

--- run [go] counter to one's inclination

-- She showed no inclination to staying

-- He has an inclination to stoutness/to be fat

-- Y ou always follow your own inclination instead of thinking of our feelings

-- She is not free to follow her own inclination in the matter of marriage

7. Dismissive

-- a dismissive manner

-- Don't be so dismissive of her talent

-- Reviewer was dismissive, and the play closed within a week.

8. Malice

-- kill a man of malice pretense人

-- read malice in sb.'s face

-- She certainly bears you no malice

-- It seems so absurd to bear malice after all that

9. Score off

-- Mary always likes to score off people when she can grasp a chance.

-- She knows how to score off people who ask difficult question.

-- She couldn't make a score off his opponent, who seemed to know all her arguments already.

10. Solemnity

-- with official solemnity

-- Solemnity is a trick of the body to hide the faults of the mind.

-- The judge took up the gavel with solemnity

-- He preserved his mask of solemnity even with acquaintances.

-- The Queen was crowned with all solemnity/with all the proper solemnities.

11. Ravish

-- He was ravished by her beauty

-- be ravished from the world by death

-- ravish a kiss

12. Recess

-- recess a wall/ a recess in a coastline

-- Parliament was hastily recalled from recess

-- I push the problem down into the dim recess of my mind.

13. Nurture (nature and nurture)

-- We want to nurture the new project, not destroy it.

-- The child got his nurture from his loving parents.

-- He wants to take the nurture of that delicate child.

-- Now we can bask in the rainbow of the memories that we'll nurture in the years ahead.

14. Austere

-- I like an austere style of writing.

-- Monks are leading simple, austere lives.

-- Father was an austere man, very strict with his children.

-- May be a little austere for foreign taste.

15. Impart

-- impart news [secret] to sb

-- The red curtains impart a certain elegance to the room.

-- A teacher's aim is to impart knowledge.

16. Insistence

-- The thought returned with a dogged insistence

-- the government's insistence on a price freeze.

-- We resent your insistence that the debt (should) be paid at once.

17. Lounge

-- lounge about the door/ lounge away one's time

-- We watched television in the hotel lounge.

-- She had entered the arrivals' lounge when I got to the airport.

-- Get up and help me, will you? Don't lounge away your time.

18. Serenity

-- A hoped-for period of joy, serenity, prosperity, and justice.

-- He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity.

-- And, though the gleams blind and dazzle, yet do they convey a hint of beauty and serenity greater than we have known or imagined.

19. Divert

-- divert the funds to some other purpose

--- divert water from a river into the fields

-- I found a computer game to divert the children.

-- How can we divert her thoughts from her sad loss?

-- The scheme to divert the river has come to a full stop because of lack of money to finis h it.

20. Recede

-- recede from a bargain /recede into the background

-- Memories of childhood recede.

-- His hair is beginning to recede from his forehead.

21. Obscure

--an obscure corner/ an obscure view/ an obscure sound

-- an obscure passage/ an obscure village/ an obscure poet

-- be of obscure origin of birth

-- The room is too obscure for reading

-- This language serves to disguise and obscure

-- The reasons why he did it are obscure.

-- Her poetry is full of obscure literary allusions.

-- The path grew more obscure in the fading light.

-- It is written by an obscure young poet.

-- The poem is obscure to those unlearned in the classics.

22. Streak

-- Mrs White always talks a blue streak.

-- A dazzling streak of lightning lit up the sky.

-- He had a streak of stubbornness.

-- He disappeared round the corner like a streak of lightning.

-- There is a streak of cruelty in his character.

-- She had a long streak of bad luck.

-- I'll hit a streak of good luck someday.

-- They traveled like a blue streak through Italy.

-- We got up at the first streak of daylight.

-- His hair is beginning to streak with grey.

23. Bliss

-- Innocence is bliss.

-- the road to eternal bliss.

-- T om was swimming in bliss.

-- They were in a state of bliss during the honeymoon.

24. Exhilarated

-- The refugees were exhilarated by the news.

-- We were exhilarated by our brisk walk in the rain.

Importance Sentences

1. try not to tease him by putting forward views which would only bring a puzzled look to his face.

Carr knew if he put forward some liberal views the conservative Colonel would look puzzled. So he refrained from doing so because personally he liked the Colonel and didn‘t want to make fun of him.

2. I observe with amusement how totally the concerns of the world … to th e extent of a bored distaste.

I was once so completely absorbed in the important affairs of the world that I devoted all my attention, time and energy to them and only occasionally did I allow myself a little rest by reading poetry or listening to music. Y et now these world problems no longer hold any interest for me. Actually I dislike them and they bore me now. I feel quite amused as I watch how this dramatic change in perspective is taking place.

2) to the exclusion of: so as to keep out, bar, leave out, excluding

♂All editorials were about the general election ∽ of all other topics.

♂He was advised to study English literature ∽ of all other subjects.

3. some instinct impels me gluttonously to cram these the last weeks of my life with the gentler things I never had time for

Perhaps because I know my days are numbered, I am impelled by instinct to enjoy myself to the full with more refined, pleasant and softer things (as compared with writing political leaders and so on) which I never had time to enjoy i n the past.

4. Protests about damage to ?natural beauty' froze me with contempt

I was not moved by the protests about damage to ?natural beauty‘ and I view them with great contempt. Believing in practicality and materialism, Carr disagreed with those who protested that industrialization had spoiled the natural beauty of the world.

5. any ascription of disinterested motives aroused not only my suspicion but my scorn.

I firmly believed in uncompromising materialism which in my opinion represented the law of human progress.

6. And now see how I stand, as sentimental and sensitive as any old maid doing water-colour s of sunsets

Just imagine how I have changed now. Here I stand, sentimental and sensitive, like an old unmarried woman painting a water-colour picture of sunset.

sentimental: having or showing tender, gentle, or delicate feelings, especially, in an excessive way or exaggerated or affected way

sensitive: having or showing keen sensibility, highly responsive intellectually

water-colour: a painting done with pigments mixed with water

7. The young moon lies on her back tonight as is her habit in the tropics, and as, I think, is suitable if not seemly for a virgin.

The moon which has just risen lies on her back, which is her habit in the tropics, and I think the way the young moon lies is suitable if not proper for a virgin. Here the narrator personifies the moon, describing it as a beautiful virgin.

8. I creep up again to the deserted deck and slip into the swimming pool and float… a vision of the world inspired from Olympus.

I come up stealthily again to the empty deck and slip into the swimming pool and let myself float in the water freely. At this moment I am not a middle-aged journalist that people believe me to be spending a holiday on an ocean-going liner. I have now become a liberated person, bathed in magic waters, and I feel I am like Endymion, a young and strong youth who has a god for his father and gifted with the power to see the world given by gods at Olympus.

Here the narrator uses this allusion because he feels he has become incapable of envy, ambition, malice, etc. while floating in the swimming pool, as the pool had changed him completely by a miracle just like mythological waters.

9. Thus, I imagine, must the pious feel cleansed on leaving the confessional after the solemnity of absolution .

I imagine devoted religious people must feel as clean and pure as I do now when they leave the solemn confessional after gaining pardon of their sins.

the confessional: a small, enclosed place in a church, where a priest hears confessions

absolution: a remission of sin; specially, in the Roman Catholic Church, such remission is

formally given by a priest in a sacrament of penance.

10. with ranges of mountains soaring behind them, full of possibilities, peaks to be scaled only by the most daring

Behind the stern cliffs, rising high into the sky are ranges of mountains and peaks which only the most daring people climb. There mountains may have all kinds of beautiful things hidden in them, things that cannot be seen from outside. For instance, one may find some strange species of plants or animals there.

11. so austere in the foreground but nurturing what treasures of tenderness, like delicate flowers, for the discovery of the venturesome

(She looks) so severe outwardly, but inwardly she id full of tenderness – tenderness like delicate flowers waiting for the daring to discover. This is another instance of analogy. The author is comparing the cliffs to Laura. Both look stern at first glance. Behind the cliffs there are mountains and peaks whose crags and valleys present mysterious things. And Laura, serious though she may look, has a deep reserve and profound feelings of tenderness in the recesses of her character. The mysterious peaks are to be scaled by the most daring. Similarly only the outrageous can discover the secrets in the innermost place of Laura‘s heart.

12. the intermittent gleam of a lighthouse: A lighthouse is a tower located at some place important or dangerous to navigation; it has a bright light at the top and often foghorns, sirens, etc. by which ships are guided and warned. The light stops and stars again at intervals (occulting light)

13. knowing the latitude we can permit ourselves

knowing how far we can allow ourselves to go; knowing how much freedom of conduct we can allow ourselves to have. Here the word latitude, use figuratively, means freedom of opinion, conduct, action, etc

14. Thus, and no farther, can I follow Laura.

Like the albatross, I should know how far I can go and I cannot follow Laura farther than that. What the means is that there is a limit to his relationship with Laura, and that he should not allow himself to go beyond that limit. This reveals the narrator‘s feeling torn between love of Laura and his self-acknowledgement that she is unattainable for him.

15. Laura and I amuse ourselves by watching for the green flash

Note watch for not watch because the green flash does not appear every time the sun sets. They have to watch and wait for it to come. It is said that only under certain conditions does the green light come – the sky must be clear with good visibility; humidity of the air should be low; there must be no cloud or mist in the sky. The green light appears on the land only where the line of horizon is straight without any buildings or forests. Very rarely can this streak of green light be seen at the instant the sun rises above the horizon.

16. the wine pink width of water merging into lawns of aquamarine

the wide expanse of winepink water mixing with strips of bluish-green water. The whole phrase is nominative absolute construction. The word lawns is used metaphorically, meaning wide strips of bluish-green water.

17. snatch it way, burnt: take my hand away quickly, feeling very hot. All these details given in this paragraph show the change in the narrator‘s perspective.