Arakin 4 kurs new 001 176. indd

a) Express briefly in your own words what the interview is about
b) What does Martin Amis emphasize about his style of writing? What does 
he say about modern literary genres? Do you agree that “comedy is the only form 
left”? Is it really impossible to separate “the good from the bad when it comes to 
literature or art in general”? How do you understand the sentence “all we have 
is a history of taste”?
9. a) Read the following extract and observe the way literary criticism is 
written:
Graham Greene
. No serious writer of the XX
th
century has more 
thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than did 
Graham Greene. His first published novel 
The Man Within
(1929) 
enjoyed a modest success and was made into a film. This pattern was 
to be repeated throughout his career, for Greene and the movies vir-
tually grew up together. He learned the economies of filmed narra-
tion — the quick cuts, the disembodied perspective, the interpolated 
conversations — used them in his books and then saw them re-em-
ployed in adaptations of his own work on the screen. His greatest 
fiction spanned the years 1938 to 1951: 
Brighton Rock
(1938), 
The 
Heart of the Matter
(1948), 
The End of the Affair
(1951) and, most 

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hauntingly, 
The Power and the Glory
(1940). The pilgrimage of the 
nameless “whiskey priest”, on the run in a Mexican state from a sec-
tarian tyranny, remains a thrilling adventure of despair and irrational 
redemption.
Martin Amis
is the most important novelist of his generation and 
probably the most influential prose stylist in Britain today. The son 
of Kingsley Amis, considered Britain’s best novelist of the 1950s, at 
the age of 24 Martin won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first 
novel 
The Rachel Papers
(his father had won the same prize 20 years 
earlier). Since 1973 he has published seven more novels, plus three 
books of journalism and one of short stories. Each work has been well 
received, in particular 
Money
(1984), which was described as “a key 
novel of the decade.” His latest book is 
The Information
(1995). It has 
been said of Amis that he has enjoyed a career more like that of a pop 
star than a writer.