WARMING UP ACTIVITIES

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 376.

CHANGING PATTERNS OF LEISURE

UNIT 1

1. a) Travelling can be scary. Learn about the most wide-spread phobias that can prevent you from having a perfect holiday. Match the phobias with places where these phobias will certainly thrive.

b) Would you like to travel to any of these places? Which of them do you find interesting?

c) Do you have any of these phobias? What are you afraid of when travelling? How can you make your trip more comfortable?

d) How do you understand the word-combination “unplugged destination”? Would you like to spend your holidays in such a place?

II. Read the short biographical extract about Jerome K. Jerome, provided by The Jerome K Jerome Society (http://www.jeromekjerome.com/). What do you find interesting or surprising? Which biographical facts could help you interpret his literary work?

Jerome Klapka Jerome, best known as the author of 'Three Men in a Boat', one of the great comic masterpieces of the English language, was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, on 2nd May 1859, the youngest of four children.

His father, who had interests in the local coal and iron industries and was a prominent non-conformist preacher, had moved to the town in 1855 and installed the family in a fashionable middle class house in Bradford Street where they lived in comparative comfort until 1861. Following the collapse of the family business, the Jeromes moved first to Stourbridge and thence to Poplar in the East End of London where he was brought up in relative poverty.

Jerome left school at fourteen and worked variously as a clerk, a hack journalist, an actor ('I have played every part in Hamlet except Ophelia') and a schoolmaster. His first book 'On the Stage and Off' was published in 1885 and this was followed by numerous plays, books and magazine articles.

In 1927, one year after writing his autobiography 'My life and Times', he was made a Freeman of the Borough of Walsall. He died later the same year and is buried in Ewelme in Oxfordshire.

Though a relaxed, urbane man, Jerome was a relentless explorer of new ideas and experiences. He travelled widely throughout Europe, was a pioneer of skiing in the Alps and visited Russia and America several times. He was a prolific writer whose work has been translated into many foreign languages, but as Jerome himself said: "It is as the author of 'Three Men in a Boat' that the public persists in remembering me."

Source: http://www.jeromekjerome.com/About_Jerome/the_man

III. Read two extract from the article “Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel: The story behind Jerome's two comic masterpieces” by Jeremy Nicholas, President of The Jerome K Jerome Society. Find answers to the questions:

a) Were Jerome's novels based on real-life events? Is it important for literature to be rooted in real life? Does the reader need to know the background of the novel when reading it?

a) Basil Boothroyd, a celebrated editor of Punch, once regaled his fellow-humorist, the young Miles Kington, with the story of a disastrous visit to Wigan where he'd been invited to give an after-dinner speech. One terrible mishap had followed another in the course of the trip and the amused Kington asked Boothroyd if the story was true. "Never," admonished Boothroyd, "never ask a humorist if things really happened." "Yes, but did they?" persisted Kington. "Not in that order," admitted Boothroyd, "not all on the same day - and not all of it to me."

That's all you need to know about Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel. Jerome, as he underlines in the preface to Boat, recorded 'events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them; and, for this, no extra charge has been made.' But surely, you ask, the main protagonists are as fictional as Noddy and Big Ears... aren't they? Well, no. There really were three friends - George Wingrave, Carl Hentschel and Jerome himself - on whom Jerome based his main characters, who made literally scores of trips up and down the Thames and cycled together across Europe to the Black Forest. However, to then see photographs of these three 'fictional' characters actually lounging around on the river bank is the equivalent of hearing Noddy speak: it makes you rub your eyes. Only Montmorency never existed. 'Montmorency I evolved out of my inner consciousness,' admitted Jerome. 'Dog friends that I came to know later have told me it was true to life'.

2. What was the critical feedback to the novels? Do you agree with the critics? What can you say about the style of the book? How do you understand the author's statement “This book wouldn't elevate a cow”?

b) What was entirely new about Boat was the style in which it was written. Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson were widely read and highly popular but Jerome differed in two respects: his story was not of some fantastical adventure in a far-off land, peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, but of three very ordinary blokes having a high old time just down the road, so to speak; and, in an age when literary grandiloquence and solemnity were not in short supply, Jerome provided a breath of fresh air. In the preface to Idle Thoughts, Jerome had set out his stall: 'What readers ask now-a-days in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow.' He used everyday figures of speech for the first time ('colloquial clerk's English of the year 1889' as one critic described it) and was very, very funny. The Victorians had simply never come across anything like it.

Jerome was taken to task by the serious critics. They hated the 'new humour', the 'vulgarity' of the language and its appeal to the 'Arrys and 'Arriets (a term coined by the middle-classes to describe the lower-classes and those who dropped their aitches). Punch dubbed Jerome " 'Arry K. 'Arry". 'One might have imagined,' JKJ recalled, 'that the British Empire was in danger... The Standard spoke of me as a menace to English letters; and The Morning Post as an example of the sad results to be expected from the over-education of the lower orders... I think I may claim to have been, for the first twenty years of my career, the best abused author in England.' Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Boat is that, compared with almost all its contemporaries and despite Jerome's wide use of then- fashionable colloquialisms, the book has dated very little.

Source: http://www.jeromekjerome.com/About_Jerome/three_men

IV. Read some of Jerome K. Jerome's quotes. What do they tell us about his character and worldview?

Source: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jerome_k_jerome.html#bL7gQgqGJ5Pb7WZr.99

V. Read the article.

a) Comment on the following issues:

- reading phenomenon from the USA

- "community read-in"

- read-in concept

- a book club

- to promote the backlist

- a book accessible to men and women of all ages, across the socio-economic spectrum

- a book that "still reads as if it were written yesterday"

- to be considered too controversial

- the preserve of a well-read middle class intelligentsia

- to go to the top of best-sellers list

- bookcrossing