LESSON 1

The scheme of the Text Linguistic and Stylistic Analysis

Read the following scheme, which is essential for performing a comprehensive,
thorough and in-depth linguistic and stylistic analysis of prose fiction text:

1. The choice of the point of view and the form of speech.

The story is told from the point of view of
- the author;
- the chief character of the story;
- an outlooker who may be some minor participant in the action or some person
outside the group of characters.
A story is told
- in direct speech, the characters speaking for themselves;
- in indirect speech, the author describing the thoughts and feelings of his / her
characters;
- in non-personal direct speech.
2. Give a summary of the extract (or the story) under consideration (the gist, the
content of a story in a nutshell).
3. State the problem tackled by the author:
- the theme of the text;
- the message of the text.
4. Components of the text composition (mention the following elements):
- a piece of description (description of nature, a big city, a small village, etc.);
- a piece of character-drawing (description of people’s inner world, thoughts,
emotions, behaviour, etc.);
- a piece of portraiture (description of the appearance and traits of character/s);
- a dialogue.
5. The climax of the story (the moment of the highest interest or degree of tension).
6. The denouement / the anticlimax (the outcome of the story).
7. The tone of the story (humorous / dramatic / ironical / satirical / lyrical / matter-
of-fact and unemotional, etc. tone).
8. Author’s usage of stylistic devices and expressive means.
(The text is vivid, lively, interesting because the author used a number of rhetorical
devices / figures of speech / lexical and syntactical expressive means: … . They are
of great stylistic value; they make the text more interesting to read; they make the
readers feel as if they were in the middle of the events. Using … the author wanted to
emphasize/implied that …).

Paradox Definition
The term paradox is from the Greek word paradoxon, which means “contrary to
expectations, existing belief, or perceived opinion.”
 It looks like self-contradictory or silly, but usually includes a latent truth. It is also
used to illustrate an opinion or statement contrary to accepted traditional ideas. A
paradox is often used to make a reader think over an idea in innovative way.
There are some examples of paradox: Your enemy’s friend is your enemy. I am
nobody. “What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young” (George Bernard
Shaw). Wise fool. Truth is honey, which is bitter. “I can resist anything but
temptation” (Oscar Wilde). As you see, paradox creates a humorous effect on the
readers because of its ridiculousness.
In literature, paradox is not just a clever or comical statement or use of words.
Paradox has serious implications because it makes statements that often summarize the
major themes of the work, they are used in. Let us analyse some paradox examples
from some famous literary works:
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, one part of the cardinal rule is this statement:
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” This statement seems to
not make any sense. However, on closer examination, it becomes clear that Orwell
points out a political truth. The government in the novel claims that everyone is equal,
but it has never treated everyone equally. It is the concept of equality stated in this
paradox that is opposite to the common belief of equality.
In William Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet, the main character says: “I must
be cruel to be kind.” This announcement does not seem to make sense. How can an
individual treat other kindly even when he is cruel? However, Hamlet is talking about
his mother, and how he intends to kill Claudius to avenge his father’s death. Hamlet
does not want his mother to be the beloved of his father’s murderer any longer, and so
he thinks that the murder will be good for his mother.
From William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet: “The earth that’s
nature’s mother is her tomb; What is her burying grave, that is Rainbow in her
womb…” The contradictory ideas of the earth being the birthplace and a graveyard
make these lines paradoxical.
The above reading may bring out the question, “Why is paradox used when a
message can be conveyed in a straightforward and simple manner?” The answer lies in
the nature and purpose of literature. One function of literature is to make the readers
enjoy reading. Readers enjoy more when they extract the hidden meanings out of the
writing rather than something presented to them in an uncomplicated manner. Thus,
the chief purpose of a paradox is to give pleasure. Poets usually make use of paradox
to create a remarkable thought or image out of words.

Answer the questions:

1. What is paradox?
2. Why do authors use it?
3. The main function of paradox in literature?
4. Why do we speak about paradox while studying Oscar Wilde’s writing style?
5. Do you know any paradoxes? Explain their meaning.
Translate into elegant Ukrainian and give literary analysis of some famous
paradoxes given below following the given example:
Fair is Foul, Foul is Fair. It Was the Best of Times; It Was the Worst of Times.
Ignorance is Strength.
Example of paradox’s analysis: War is Peace.
1. Origin. It is one of the slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s novel “1984.”.
The Party believed that they could endlessly engage in a war to keep peace in
the country. This slogan describes the reality of accepting two mutually
opposing beliefs simultaneously as correct. This was also a major program of
the Party to promote “double thinking.” Hence, it is a good example of double
thinking, though contradictory, but the people of Oceania accepted both ideas
as correct.
2. Meaning. This slogan simply means that, though Oceania is perpetually going
through a war situation, and people are behaving like peace is everywhere, they
could easily change from one state of emotion to another state according to the
demands of the Party. It underlines that during wars nations unite and people
focus on their common enemy, and less on how unhappy they are with their
own lives. Hence, this makes less trouble for the ruling party or the
government.
3. Usage. Today this paradoxical phrase may seem meaningless, but it does make
sense. This term is paradoxical, because one could not prevent war by starting
it. Any country by using war rhetoric, can divert the attention of the people
from its internal problems, and curtail popular opposition toward the
government.
4. Literary Source. This term is a slogan of the Party that appears in the first
chapter of George Orwell’s novel “1984.” By weakening strength and
independence of public minds, and forcing them to live in a continuous state of
propaganda-induced terror, the Party forced the people to accept anything, no
matter if that was entirely illogical.
5. Literary Analysis. In the novel, The Party forced the people to believe that
constant war is actually a good way to maintain peace. War brings forth
devotion and patriotism to the country, and promotes sacrifice for the
community. Constant war shows that people are sacrificing, pledging, and
giving devotion to the country and consequently to the government. As a
result, this keeps people under control and in check. That was how the Party
used this slogan.
6. Literary Devices Paradox. This term is a paradox, as it conveys a
contradictory idea.
“Oscar Wilde – A man of Paradoxes”
Read the text and answer the questions:
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900)
was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. He became one of London’s
most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.
 No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and
1890s in England than that of Oscar Wilde. This connection results as much from the
lurid details of his life as from his considerable contributions to English literature.
His lasting literary fame resides primarily in four or five plays, one of which – The
Importance of Being Earnest, first produced in 1895 – is a classic of comic theater.
His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is flawed as a work of art, but gained
him much of his notoriety. This book gives a particularly 1890s perspective on the
timeless theme of sin and punishment. Wilde published a volume of poems early in
his career as a writer. Some of these poems were successful, but his only enduring
work in this genre is The Ballad of Reading Gaol. On a curious but productive
tangent to his more serious work, Wilde produced two volumes of fairy tales that are
delightful in themselves and provide insight into some of his serious social and
artistic concerns.
Imprisonment for homosexuality was a particularly tragic end for an artist who
believed that style – in life as well as art – was of utmost importance. That Wilde
became a literary artist in the first place is not so surprising since, as H. Montgomery
Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, his mother was a poet and Irish
revolutionary who published under the name “Speranza,” and his father a successful
eye and ear surgeon in Dublin and “author of a work which remained the standard
textbook on aural surgery for many years.” Though his background was literary and
professional, it was anything but stable. His mother doted on him as a child and,
according to Hyde, “insisted on dressing him in girl’s clothes.” Dr. William Wilde
was a notorious philanderer, and, in an ironic foreshadowing of his son's famous
trials, suffered public condemnation when a libel case disclosed his sexual
indiscretions with a young woman named Mary Travers.
Oscar Wilde was a brilliant student in college, first at Trinity College, Dublin,
where he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, and later at Magdalen College,
Oxford, where his poem “Ravenna” captured the prestigious Newdigate Prize in
1878. It was at Oxford that Wilde came under the influences of John Ruskin, a critic,
writer, and professor, and Walter Pater, a critic and essayist whose Studies in the
History of The Renaissance legitimized Wilde’s nascent ideas on art and
individualism.
After taking his B.A. degree at Oxford, Wilde settled in London in 1879 and two
years later published his first book, Poems. Most of the poems in this volume had
been previously published in various Irish periodicals. The collection met with mixed
reviews, less favorable in England than in America.
Between the publication of Poems in 1881 and his next significant book in 1888,
Wilde went on a lecture tour of America, was married to Constance Lloyd, fathered
two sons, became editor of a fashionable magazine, Woman’s World, and continued
to build his reputation as the most sought-after dinner guest in the British Isles.
Oscar Wilde told his stories at dinner parties before they were published
illustrates an unusual fact about their intended audience: they were not composed for
children. A few of the stories in the first volume, particularly The Happy Prince and
The Selfish Giant, continually find their way into anthologies of fairy tales for
children, but most of the book’s nine tales do not appeal to young people. This is
particularly true of the stories in The House of Pomegranates, which generally have
more elaborate plots and a more mannered style than do those in The Happy Prince
and Other Tales. When asked if the tales of the second volume were intended for
children, Wilde replied in a typically flippant way: “I had about as much intention of
pleasing the British child as I did of pleasing the British public.”
In July of 1889 Wilde gave up the editorship of Women’s World and settled down
to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is Wilde’s only novel, a blend of French
decadence and English Gothicism. It is filled with genuinely witty dialogue and
beautiful descriptive passages, while sometimes descending to the level of slick
melodrama and ponderous theorizing. The novel details the life of a hedonistic
aristocrat, Dorian Gray.
At the time he was writing The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde became friendly
with Robert (“Robbie”) Ross, whom he had first met in 1886 at Oxford and who later
served as Wilde’s literary executor after faithfully standing by him through Wilde’s
trials and the horrors of Wilde’s two years in prison.
Though Wilde wrote nine plays in all between 1879 and 1894, his fame as a
dramatist rests entirely on four comedies – Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No
Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest – and the strange
and infamous Salomé. Written first, Salomé was composed in Paris in 1891 but not
performed in England until after Wilde’s death. Britain’s Lord Chamberlain,
responsible for licensing stage performances, banned the play on the technical
grounds that it portrayed biblical characters, which was forbidden since the days of
the Protestant Reformation. The play no doubt offended on other grounds as well,
such as those expressed by a critic in the London Times in 1893: “It is an
arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in
its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.”
George Woodcock, who in The Paradox of Oscar Wilde examined at length the
social ideas in Wilde’s other comedies, found “no explicit social theme” in The
Importance of Being Earnest. In Papers on Language and Literature, Dennis
Spininger concurred, explaining that Wilde “uses the tools of the satirist without
wanting to cure the follies and ills he criticizes.” Although Kate Matlock posited in
Journal of Irish Literature that Wilde makes an affirmation at the end of the play in
that it “asserts that marriage is a positive social element which reins in deceptive and
potentially corrupt bachelor tendencies,” such critics as Spininger and Morris
Freedman have moved away from such a conventional view of the comedy as a
reassertion of order and toward a perception of the play as anticipating the drama of
the absurd. Perhaps Freedman was correct when in The Moral Impulse he described
the play as “an account of the search of several young persons for meaning in a
society extraordinarily reluctant, even impotent, to assign importance to anything
except the superficial.” However, the second part of this statement is much easier to
accept than the first part, because the young people participate in this farcical society,
and they live by its rules – or break them in acceptable ways. If an element of
seriousness can be identified in this play, it may be what Eric Bentley in The
Playwright as Thinker called “a pseudo-irresponsible jabbing at all the great
problems.”
During his imprisonment Wilde continued to write as an essayist. He had been
writing critical essays since 1879, when he arrived in London from Oxford and began
to write on art for various London periodicals. In 1882 he lectured in America, and
these lectures were published after his death by his bibliographer Stuart Mason. His
most important critical essays were The Decay of Lying, The Critic as Artist, The
Truth of Masks, The Soul of Man Under Socialism etc.
Toward the end of his term, Wilde wrote the long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas
that has come to be called De Profundis. Events leading up to Wilde’s incarceration
began when Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, tried
unsuccessfully to end the relationship between his son and Wilde. Frustrated by his
lack of success, he went to Wilde’s club and left his card, which was inscribed “To
Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite [sic].” Against all advice, in early 1895 Wilde
decided to sue, Queensberry for libel. Wilde lost the case, and as a result of the
testimony against him at the trial, he was arrested and tried for homosexuality. Since
the jury could not agree on a verdict, Wilde was tried a second time and ultimately
convicted. The record of these trials, which was published by H. Montgomery Hyde
in 1948 as Trials of Oscar Wilde, makes fascinating reading, revealing as it does the
vanity of Wilde, the eccentricities of Queensbury, and exultation of the British public
at the verdict. Wilde was sentenced in May, 1895, to two years of hard labor, most of
which was spent at Reading Gaol.
Wilde eluded attention after his prison release. He wandered Europe for three and
a half years under an assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth, and died bankrupt in a Paris
hotel on November 30, 1900.

Learn the words and word-combinations by heart:

inextricably [ˌɪn.ɪkˈstrɪk.ə.bl̩i] нерозривно
lurid [ˈljʊə.rɪd] вогненний, грозовий, палаючий
notoriety [ˌnəʊ.tərˈaɪ.ə.ti] загальновідомість, знаменитість, недобра слава
notorious [nəʊˈtɔː.ri.əs] відомий, горезвісний, загальновідомий
a philanderer [fɪˈlæn.dər.ə] донжуан, розпусник
indiscretion [ˌɪn·dɪˈskreʃ·ən] нерозсудливість, нескромність, нечемність
nascent [ˈnæs.ənt] що народжується, незрілий
flippant [ˈflɪp.ənt] легковажний
an affirmation [æfɜːˈmeɪʃn] затвердження, запевнення, заява, підтвердження
incarceration [ɪnˈkɑː.sər.eɪʃn] ув’язнення, ущемлення, позбавлення волі
to sue [suː] просити, подавати скаргу
a libel [ˈlaɪ.bəl] наклеп
Answer the questions to the text:
1. What do you associate the name of Oscar Wilde with?
2. How many plays by Oscar Wilde are the best known in the world? Have you read
any of them? What do you like the best and the least? Why?
3. How many novels were written by the author?
4. What is the main theme of The Picture of Dorian Gray? Do you think this theme
is immoral? Why or why not? Do you know any other examples of proposed
theme in the world literature?
5. What genre did the author choose to create his literature works?
6. What role did Oscar’s Wilde parents play in his life?
7. How can you describe Oscar-student?
8. What were the first reviews to Oscar Wilde’s Poems?
9. What do you know about the author’s private life?
10. What was the main Oscar Wilde’s audience to create his stories for? Prove your
point of view.
11. Who was Robert Ross? What role did he play in author’s life?
12. Why was Salomé called “strange and infamous”?
13. Was Oscar Wilde’s career finished after his imprisonment?
14. How are two names Wilde and Alfred Douglas connected?
15. What did the author do after prison releasing?
16. What is the real name of Oscar Wilde?

Book
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174-h/174-h.htm
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde