Discuss the following questions.

Year 5, Spoken and Written English

Long Story No. 2 THE LOTTERY

1 Listen to the story The Lottery and understand its content.

Translate the following WC which will be helpful while discussing it.

Proper names: Mr Summers (his name suggests that he has become a man of leisure through his wealth), Mr Graves (this name may suggest the gravity of officialism), Mr. Martin, Tessie Hutchinson, Old Man Warner (an alarmist name if there ever was one) , Mrs Delacroix, Clyde Dunbar

No	The word/word combination	Its U equivalent
1.	To portray an "average" New England village with "average" citizens
2.	to be engaged in a deadly rite
3.	the annual selection of a sacrificial victim by means of a public lottery
4.	to be stoned to death
5.	the pointless violence and general inhumanity in ones’ lives
6.	man's ineradicable primitive aggressivity
7.	all-too-human tendency to seize upon a scapegoat
8.	instill the villagers with an unconscious fear
9.	at the top of the social ladder
10.	to own the village's largest business (a coal concern)
11.	to devote time and energy to civic activities
12.	to control the town, economically as well as politically
13.	to administer the lottery, be the lottery official
14.	make up the lottery slips
15.	in the off season, the lottery box is stored either at … or
16.	to choose slips in the lottery's first, second and third rounds
17.	Power in the village is exclusively consolidated into the hands of male heads of families and households
18.	Women are disenfranchised
19.	to have a distinctly subordinate position
20.	to be treated by men as inferiors
21.	to rebel against male domination
22.	The selection of Tessie Hutchinson as the lottery's victim/scapegoat is not random
23.	Tessie’s rebellion is entirely unconscious
24.	to question the rules of the lottery which relegate women to inferior status as the property of their husbands

Discuss the following questions.

¨ 1 What does the author portray in the story THE LOTTERY?

2 What happens to the "winner" of the lottery?

3 What is the reader shocked with after reading The Lottery?

¨ 4 Is the lottery a kind of mechanism which serves to reinforce the village's hierarchical social order?

5 What kind of socio-economic stratification does the village in which the lottery takes place exhibit? Who is at the top of the social ladder in that village? Name the most powerful men and comment on their positions.

¨ 7 Who is the official of the lottery? What are the duties of Mr Graves and Mr Martin?

8 Is it a coincidence that the lottery takes place in the village square "between the post-office and the bank" – two buildings which represent government and finance?

9 What relationship is there between Mr Summer’s interests as the town's wealthiest businessman and his officiating the lottery?

¨ 10 What are the rules of the lottery?

11 Who emerges as an apologist for the lottery? How many times does Old Man Warner participate in the lottery ?

12 What is the position of women in the village?

13 Is the author’s selection of Tessie Hutchinson as the lottery's victim/scapegoat random? Give 3 faux pas that reveal Tessie’s unconscious rebellion against the lottery and set her up as the lottery's likeliest victim ?

¨ Do you agree with the following statements:

· Tessie does not object to the lottery per se, only to her own selection as its scapegoat. It would have been fine with her if someone else had been selected.

· In stoning Tessie, the villagers treat her as a scapegoat, they repress their own temptations to rebel.

· The lottery functions, then, to terrorize the village into accepting, in the name of work and democracy, the inequitable social division of labor and power on which its social order depends.

4. Make a summary of the story (wr+or)giving its most relevant events in a proper order (8-10 sent).

THE LOTTERY by Shirley Jackson:

SUMMARY

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Date: 2016-01-03; view: 1306

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