SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

Unit 1

E-BOOKS: YES OR NO?

A century ago, George Gissing wrote: “I know any book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.” What then would he make of the Rocket eBook, one of the new electronic books now making its way onto the American market and soon to arrive in Britain?

There is no denying that the Rocket eBook feels like the future. The size of a paperback and made from a sleek, grey plastic, the electronic “book” is a portable hand-held device that allows you to read text and pictures on a screen instead of off the page. It is light (22 oz) and easy to hold – the curved spine is supposed to feel like a paper­back with its pages rolled back. It is also easy to use: on the side of the screen there are two buttons for scrolling up and down the pages. There is also a touch-sensitive screen which can be used to call up a dictionary if need­ed, increase the font size, even to add notes in the margin. It can store up to 4,000 pages, roughly the equivalent of ten novels. And without use of its bright backlight, the battery lasts for 33 hours.

The idea of the eBook is attractive: imagine leaving for holiday without six novels, a guide­book and a dictionary weighing you down. All you have to carry is a lightweight eBook. The new technology also makes sense for anyone unable to get to a bookshop – to buy electronic books, you simply need access to the Internet. The electronic book can be downloaded for the same price as a book in a shop, first on to the hard drive of your computer and then into the Rocket eBook for immediate reading. It all takes a couple of minutes, and there are plans to place download terminals in bookstores and air­ports, enabling those away from, or without, a computer to make direct purchases. Once they have been bought, the electronic titles can be stored in personal computer “libraries”.

And the appeal of electronic books will grow as the technology improves. Already a company named Everybook Inc. has developed a “reader” that is based on the shape and form of a leather-bound book but with two 13-in. colour screens instead of pages. But this technology does not come cheap: the “reader” costs $1,500, and the Rocket eBook is $499, although the price will eventually come down.

So will readers be willing to give up page for the screen? John Schlein, from the New York of­fices of publishers Penguin-Putnam, thinks so – partly because the eBook is so compact. He enjoys the fact that he can hold the eBook with one hand and read it on the subway. He is convinced that a generation of kids accustomed to computer screens will prefer the technology to the paper books. It will also be a useful tool for keeping reference manuals updated or for reading newspapers and magazines. But there remain plenty of physical and psychological obstacles to book’s success. For a start, few people enjoy reading from a screen: it feels too much like hard work (even though with 105 dots per inch as opposed to the 72 dots per inch on most computer screens, the eBook is easy to read). And so far there is only a limited selection of electronic books being published.

While there are plenty of business tomes, mys­tery and crime novels, and classics, there is little new fiction and non-fiction to entice the buyer (although NuvoMedia Inc. recently made pub­lishing history by providing an electronic edition of ‘Monica’s Story’ on the same day it came out in print). The problem is that publishers are reluctant to go down the eBook route because it will be difficult to control: for instance, it will be possible for British readers to purchase the electronic versions of books only published in America. Consumers may not wait for the book to come to a store near them when they can download it months earlier using a telephone line. Where does that leave the British publisher who has paid for the rights to publish and sell that American book in England?

But the greatest hurdle the eBook faces is that it has neither the romance nor the allure of a tra­ditional book. There are no sassy colours on its cover, no roughly-hewn pages, and there’s certain­ly no hint of the earthy scent of good paper. Who would swap those pleasures for a portable screen? And who wants to lie in a hammock on the beach holding the hard plastic of the Rocket eBook? I like to drop my book into the sand or toss it aside. Do that to the Rocket eBook and it will break.

Also, the device starts feeling heavy after 20 minutes or so. Worse, I often lost my place, both actually and imaginatively, while scrolling down pages. Nor did I like having no sense of where I was in the book. It is hard to skip ahead in an electronic book to see where the chapter ends, or to look back to remind yourself of who a character is. Perhaps such complaints will seem like nonsense in years to come, but electronic books need to feel a lot more like the real thing for that to happen. Yet lovers of the paper-bound book should not despair. What seems most likely is that electronic books will co­exist with the traditional form. As Eric Simonoff, of the literary agency representing authors such as Tom Wolfe and Michael Crichton, points out: “There is a function the publisher serves in each market that is greater than disseminating the work and that is drawing attention to the work.”

In other words, publishers will continue to pub­lish books that look good on shelves and tables. And people will want to display those books, not merely as items that warm any house, but as proof of the reader's learning and intelligence. As soon as the Rocket eBook is switched off, there is no way of showing others that you had been reading Proust.

1. Pronounce the following words correctly.

Access, obstacle, route, eventually, entice, compact, margin, roughly-hewn, manual, allure, reluctant, sensitive, romance, swap, purchase, hurdle, hammock, coexist, disseminate.

2. Prove that:

1. The eBook has neither the romance nor the al­lure of a traditional book.

2. The idea of the eBook is attractive.

3. An eBook is easy to hold.

4. Readers will be willing to give up the page for the screen.

5. The eBook starts feeling heavy after 20 minutes or so.

6. Publishers will continue to publish books that look good on shelves and tables.

7. The appeal of electronic books will grow.

8. An eBook is easy to use.

3. Give your arguments for and against eBooks.

Unit 2

Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816, the year before Jane Austen died. Both these authors were the daughters of clergymen; both were fully aware of the difficulties a woman writer had to face when it came to publication. Jane Austen’s first novels were published anonymously; Charlotte Bronte’s, like those of her sisters, Emily and Anne, were published under a masculine pseudonym.

Now, I assume that so many people throughout the world are familiar with the story of Jane Eyre, that I can speak of it without too much explanation of events or situations. Again, it is now so generally acknowledged that the novel is largely autobiographical that I feel I can afford to draw no further attention to that aspect of the work, beyond saying that Charlotte Bronte and her sisters had attended a school similar to Lowood, and that they had all had the experience of working as governesses. For teaching, particularly private teaching, as governess in a family, was the only profession open to educated women, and the Bronte sisters needed to earn their living. Life in Haworth parsonage was a much more practical matter than it had been in Jane Austen’s Hampshire vicarage. And Charlotte, like the rest of her family, was a creature of passion, passion in whatever she had to do.

And so we find Jane Eyre, even as a child, being accused by her aunt Mrs Reed, of being “passionate” – passion­ate in the sense of determined, headstrong even. And it is thanks to her “passionate” hatred of her rela­tives at Gateshead House that Jane is sent away to Lowood school and where, after eight years, after what has indeed been a kind of imprisonment, she gives vent to another outburst of passion, typical, in its vehement, almost breathless expression, as much of the author herself as of the character she’s portraying.

“I went to my window, opened it, and looked out... An age seemed to have elapsed since the day which brought me first to Lowood, and I had never quitted it since... I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world; school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies,- such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough: tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon, I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: “Then,’ I cried, half-desperate, ‘grant me at least a new servitude! A new servi­tude!”

The new servitude she finds by practical action – advertising in the local paper for a post as governess, a post she acquires at Thornfield, the home of Mr Rochester. Even there, the passion for action again asserts itself, and again we hear, much more clearly this time, the determined nature of Charlotte Bronte expressing itself through the voice of Jane Eyre speaking as she looks over the countryside from the roof of Thornfield Hall:

“I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over the sequestered field and hill, and along the dim sky-line... I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit: which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen...

“Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature. It agitated me to pain sometimes... It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are con­demned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt: against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their facilities, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do... and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.”

That passage has been criticized for being too clearly an intervention on the part of Charlotte Bronte and not entirely “in character” so far as Jane Eyre is concerned. It can be considered “in character” if one takes it as a plea for a recognition of women’s emotional nature. Passionate though she may be, Jane Eyre can always stand up for her own rights as a person – not simply as a woman.

Unit 3

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 923