- •Britis values and assumptions. Monarchy
- •Tasks for the video lesson 1. The island people (I)
- •Lesson 2. The island people (II)
- •Task 3. After watching. Sailing to britain...
- •As others see us
- •0 Wad1 come Pow'r the giftie2 gie3 us
- •It wad frae5 mony6 a blander free us
- •Views of britain. The official view
- •Тhe people's view
- •British society a changing world
- •Attitudes
- •Stereotypes and change
- •English versus british
- •Multiculturalism
- •Conservatism
- •Being different
- •The love of nature
- •The national trust
- •The love of animals
- •Formality and informality
- •The scruffy british
- •Public spiritedness and amateurism
- •I. Mark the following areas of activity as 'professional' or 'amateur / voluntary':
- •II. Sort out the following as positively or negatively viewed by the British:
- •Privacy and sex
- •Lovely weather we're having
- •I. Turn the following noun phrases into the corresponding verbal ones. Make the necessary changes.
- •II. Match the nouns with the adjectives they collocate with:
- •What is england?
- •I. Which of the following proverbs best reflect, to your thinking, the peculiarities of the English national character?
- •II. Explain the meaning of the following:
- •III. Match the adjectives with the nouns they collocate with:
- •IV. Explain the use of articles with the word England:
- •I. Fill in the grid:
- •II. Sort out the details for each "stereotype" of the English person
- •III. Answer the questions:
- •IV. Do you agree that
- •No longer an island
- •Have the english finally left their
- •Island mentality behind?
- •Cast in the same mould
- •Change of direction
- •I. Match the following proper names with relevant characteristics:
- •I. In groups and pairs discuss:
- •Vigdis Vad Milsen: a foreigner's point of view
- •Interview people who had contacts with the British or Americans. Ask about their impressions and discuss the results of your research in class. О национальном характере англичан.
- •Monarchy
- •Vocabulary
- •The royal family
- •The Sovereign
- •The Royal Family
- •The monarchy
- •I. Great Britain is a monarchy. Find out from your partner: what is the role of the monarch in a highly developed modern country?
- •II. Choose the correct equivalent for the word:
- •V. Say if you agree or .Disagree with the following and explain why:
- •VII. Express your opinion on the following:
- •Adapt or die?
- •I. Find out the following.
- •II. Make sure you understand the following words and expressions:
- •III. Match the words on the left with their definitions in the right-hand column:
- •IV. Fill in the gaps with the prepositions:
- •In groups and pairs discuss:
- •Republicans owe Sophie a debt of thanks
- •Banish minor royals from public life, say No 10 aides
- •The speaker we need
- •An open letter to her majesty queen elizabeth II
- •I remain,
- •III. Choose the right preposition:
- •IV. Fill in the gaps where necessary with suitable notional or functional words, using your active vocabulary:
- •V. Translate from Russian into English, using your active vocabulary:
Lovely weather we're having
The British are always talking about the weather. Unlike many others, this stereotype is actually true to life. But constant remarks about the weather at chance meetings are not the result of polite conventions. They are not obligatory. Rather, they are the result of the fact that, on the one hand, to ask personal questions would be rude while, at the same time, silence would also be rude. The weather is a very convenient topic with which to 'fill the gap'.
I. Turn the following noun phrases into the corresponding verbal ones. Make the necessary changes.
Example: a lack of respect — to lack respect
Respect for privacy
Increase in informality
Request for information
Revelation about extra-marital affairs
Deviation from what is normal
II. Match the nouns with the adjectives they collocate with:
conventional affairs
demanding attitudes
direct consequences
extra-marital formula / reply
moral life
national questions
negative relevance
personal role
private security
public standards
FOLLOW-UP
Frequent mention is made in this chapter of British individualism. How many examples of this can you find? Can you think of any others?
It has been said that the British are suspicious of things in public life which are logical or systematic. Can you find examples in this chapter which could be used to support this opinion?
Imagine this situation: you are at home, just about to have lunch, when there is a knock at the door. It is a British friend of yours, not a very close friend, but closer than a mere acquaintance. He or she has come to pay you an unexpected visit. You suggest that your friend comes in and stays for lunch. But your friend is embarrassed to find that he or she has called at a mealtime and refuses the invitation. You want to persuade your friend to change his or her mind. Here are two possible ways of doing this:
A. Please stay. We don't have much, I'm afraid, but we'd be honoured. Whatever we have is yours.
B. It's no trouble at all. There's plenty of food. Don't think twice about it. We're used to people popping in.
Which of these two do you think would be a more successful way to persuade a British person? A or B? Why?
4. Which (if any) of the British characteristics described in this chapter would you regard as also characteristic of people in your country? To what extent?
What is england?
PRE-READING TASK
I. Which of the following proverbs best reflect, to your thinking, the peculiarities of the English national character?
Honesty is the best policy.
Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.
Never say die.
What can't be cured must be endured.
Where there's a will there's a way.
A hedge between keeps friendship green.
Speak fair and think what you like.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
When I was young I was led to believe that being an Englishman meant being an imperial adventurer. Those images, of Englishmen who faced extreme danger with complete equanimity, who cheerfully shot large numbers of animals and black people, and who failed ever to have a conversation with a woman, were always for me images of ideal types which I knew were quite beyond me. I found them impressive and intimidating, but also terrifying and absurd.
Later I became conscious of, and learned to feel at home with, different ways of thinking about what it has meant to be English. For example, I learned to revere Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, John Locke and Bertrand Russell. These giants of English science and philosophy signify, to me, that to be English can mean not shooting big game but daring to think big thoughts (and thoughts get no bigger than those of Newton and Darwin), to be intellectually ambitious and unconventional and not to be intimidated by orthodoxy. Moreover, it is 'English' to celebrate the liberties that make all this possible.
So 'England' has not been an unchanging thing. There have been many versions of it which have been culturally important.
While imperial adventure narratives of 'England' survived until after World War II, another and quite different set of images and ideas had been developed in women's fiction in the 1930s. The idea of Englishness was 'feminized', and offered 'a private and retiring people, pipe-smoking "little men" with their quietly competent partners, a nation of gardeners and housewives'. Englishness was located above all in the southern suburbs and garden cities. Writing Englishness quotes Osbert Lancaster's observation that: 'English is the only language that has a word for "home".'
Gardening was a component of one idea of Englishness which was most immediate for me as a child during the war, that of the unbowed civilian population at war, who continued to 'dig for victory' and to remain calm during airraids. This version of Englishness overlaps with those of Orwell's famous essay on English patriotism, The Lion and the Unicorn, Henry Moore's drawings of Londoners in the underground during the Blitz and Humphrey Jennings's wartime films. This was perhaps the last time when it was possible to plausibly represent the nation as united in a common purpose and as exhibiting a national character to which the masses of people, rather than just elites, could at least aspire. The English person, according to this conception, exhibited calm determination under very difficult circumstances. In Jennings's films, Listen to Britain and Fires were Started, people do not rush about and they do not shout and panic, even though bombs fall and buildings blaze. They exhibit quiet heroism and a willingness to make very real sacrifices in the common good. Of course, not everybody behaved like this during the war, but very many people felt that they ought to do their best to do so. After the war, this democratized version of Englishness fed into the building of the Welfare State, the people's deserved reward for their wartime sacrifices and a powerful component of postwar conceptions of Englishness.
What has been the fate of 'Englishness' in the period since the war?
There are many ways of writing the history of post-war 'England', different selections can be made of defining moments and outstanding achievements which seemed to clarify what it could mean to be English. The most ambitious literary view is that offered in the novels of Angus Wilson. What did we think that the English had been especially good at? It was taken to be a truism in 1950 that the English could write novels and poetry but could not compose music, but the 1960s changed all that and young people today would find that a strange thought. This helpfully reminds us of just how variable the perception of national identity can be and how unwise it is to attempt to fix it in thought.
My own version of the history of 'Englishness' since the war would conjecture that there has been a radical discontinuity in the vocabulary of 'Englishness'. I would locate in the mid-1980s a moment of national convulsion, a cultural whirlwind of destruction of fables and icons, which radically destabilized accepted ideas of 'England' and 'Englishness'. The mood was apocalyptic and was caught in the work of Hanif Kureishi and others, and with great foresight in Doris Lessing's novels a decade or so earlier.
This was a convulsion caught with particularly ferocious precision in a film by Derek Jarman called The Last of England (1987). His title is borrowed from a well-known Victorian painting by Ford Madox Brown, which shows a group of emigrants looking back from their ship as they sail away towards a new life. They seem to wonder anxiously just what their new life might bring and also perhaps to survey in imagination the England that they are leaving behind. Jarman's film looks back to the war (he uses home movies shot by his father during and just after the war) towards an England with which he had had a troubled and ambivalent relationship and which was now moving for ever out of view.
Contemporary England is presented as a strife-torn and derelict wasteland. Whereas in Humphrey Jennings' wartime propaganda films men in uniform were heroic firefighters, sailors and airmen, in Jarman's film they are the sinister, masked agents of a state turned against its own people. I imagine that some people would not accept that this was an accurate description of England in the mid-1980s, yet it was a time when something like half of the population felt that official attitudes excluded them from membership of the nation. They were deemed to be, in one guise or another, the 'enemy within'.
By the mid-1990s the mood is less apocalyptic but still valedictory. Familiar ideas of 'England', with which we have felt at home for a long time, are moving away from us for ever. As we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of victory over fascism in Europe, the question of England's identity was posed in terms of its relationship with Europe. Forging a European dimension to our identity, a project with which many of us feel quite at home, has become the occasion of much, as yet inconclusive argument. The ancient iconography of 'England' as a warlike, global power is, unfortunately, still deployed by posturing politicians from time to time.
Not only has England's relationship with Europe changed beyond recognition but so also has the relationship between England and the English language. Churchill wrote a book called A History of the English Speaking People. I do not remember at the time, in the early 1950s it must have been, finding the title especially puzzling. But now the idea of 'English speaking people' is wonderfully baffling, and those who are English are enormously outnumbered by those who speak English. What are they all doing with 'our' language, and who is this 'our' in any case? Pronouns which used to seem to work in relatively uncomplicated ways, can now cause confusion. Not only the Scots and Irish but also Americans, Indians, New Zealanders, Nigerians, among many others, speak English and write in English, and this is enormously to our enrichment.
What is 'England' now? It is something to be imagined and created rather than remembered and preserved unchanged, something inclusive and culturally multiple rather than a quintessence or a heritage. Perhaps in future it just won't matter to people so much what England is because it will be so many different but equally valued things. The ideal would be if we were all free to tell our different stories without each claiming to be the inheritor of the only true meaning of Englishness.
John Mepham
WORD STUDY |
|
| |
I. Choose the correct equivalent for the |
word: |
| |
1) to revere — |
a. enjoy oneself |
b. venerate |
c. disclose |
2) plausible - |
a. imploring |
b. enjoyable |
с reasonable |
3) truism - |
a. platitude |
b. ceasefire |
c. vagrant |
4) to conjecture - |
- a. implore |
b. guess |
c. accumulate |
5) ferocious — |
a. cruel |
b. iron |
с fruitful |
6) derelict - |
a. surviving |
b. scornful |
с abandoned |
7) to deem - |
a. consider |
b. condemn |
с respect |
8) valedictory — |
a. adequate |
b. sickly |
с farewell |
9) quintessence - |
- a. revival |
b. embodiment |
c. inactivity |