Чет тиллар факультети инглиз тили ўҚитиш методикаси кафедраси

From Blackout by Campbell Armstrong
1. Read the extract below and say what it is about.
2. Do the first and the following paragraphs of the extract stand in contrast? What is described in each of them?
3. What can you say about Samsa’s imagination? What techniques does the author use to depict his flow of thoughts?
4. What ruins the serene picture in Samsa’s mind? What stylistic device is it?
5. Is the simile used in the third paragraph powerful? Why couldn’t Samsa grasp the message of the letter judging by Brodsky’s words?
6. Do you share Brodsky’s stateme? Are you a fatalist?
Samsa went out into the corridor. He walked a few yards, paused a moment to drink from a water fountain. Bending to the spout, he closed his eyes and imagined himself drinking from a mountain stream, the air around him chill and clear and his heart filled with the joy of being, and if he opened his eyes he’d see mountains, deep green valleys, a hawk circling freely and full-winged in the sky. But the water tasted of the chemicals the city treatmentplant pumped int it.
He splashed his face, let water spill down his shirt, then went back to his ffice.
Brodsky tossed a sheet of paper on the desk. Samsa picked up the sheet. He stared at the handwriting and somehow couldn’t get beyond iit to the message it cntained, as if the meanings of the words were imprisoned within the letters.
“Life’s a bitch sometimes,” Brodsky said.
From Blackout by Campbell Armstrong
1. Read the extract bellow and say what it is about.
2. What mood is set in by the first paragraph?
3. Is the first paragraph suggestive of the mood, which is enhanced in the second and the third paragraphs? Give your reasons. Here you may speak on the role of segmentation in the description of the man's anxiety.
4. What tropes and figures of speech help the author to depict the man's hallucinatory mind?
5. Speak on the rhythm created by the paralle constructions in the closing paragraph. What stylistic devices follow them? Dwell upon their role.
They walked downstairs to the living room. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a large cognac, noticing the Scrabble game on the coffee table. "Nick gone home?" He needed to make small talk. Where you didn't have to think. As if you were concussed.
"A few minutes ago."
He swallowed some of the brandy. He sat down, and the room rushed at him all at once as if he had turned over just like the Chrysler. He was dizzy and faint and felt like an astronaut inside a space capsule. There were inversions, strange flips, optical illusions. A voltage spike on the graph of perception. Photographs turning over, Harriet's lovely face upside down on the mantelpiece, the hands of the clock hurrying backwards.
His fingers shook. The brandy in the glass rippled. He closed his eyes. What he saw behind his eyelids was shallow pool of water and the broken branch and something black flapping in the air like a predatory bird, eyes lethal.