著者

西村 徹 Toru Nishimura

雑誌

英米評論 = English Review (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.3, pp.77-106, 1991-01-25

著者

岡田 章子 Akiko OKADA 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.9, pp.139-159, 1994-12-20

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Contemporary women novelists are interesting to me as my fellow travellers in the present-day society. Anita Brookner is particularly familiar and attractive because her novels deal with women who work in the universities and libraries. They seem to be my colleagues. Besides, the streets, the parks, and the shops which I saw in my recent visit to London are vividly described in her novels. These things stimulate me to imagine what England is and what British women are. Brookner's attractive appearance in her photograph also draws me into her world. Brookner's biography is not very well known. She withholds talking about herself and has stopped giving interviews because of the misunderstanding and defamation she had suffered. But in her novels, especially the first three, her life and character are living. Brookner's novels are permeated with profound loneliness. The first book, A Start in Life, is the most autobiographical. It opens with the striking sentence: "Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." Then she looks back at her unhappy life from childhood through her professional career. Meanwhile, the loneliness Ruth Weiss suffers is minutely expressed: how she hates to go home, how she sits alone at a coffee bar on the station platform, and how she stays up in the library until nine o'clock. This loneliness makes her devote herself excessively to her lover when she falls in love. She borrows a flat so that she can invite her lover to dinner at home. She prepares an elaborate dinner for him, which turns out to be meaningless, because he arrives hours late for a trivial reason. She marries her father's exmistress's nephew for convenience, but after six months he is killed in a traffic accident. This brief, loveless marriage gives her momentary security, which, Brookner says, all women need. In the end, she gets a position in a college and looks after her old father. The next novel, Providence, has autobiographical overlays and also reveals a lonely heroine. Kitty Maule is a visiting lecturer in a university. She falls in love with Maurice, her colleague. She, like Ruth, devotes herself entirely to him. Though she is an excellent teacher, her job is significant not for its own sake but for Maurice's sake. Staff meetings are great occasions to her, as she can see him there. She knows that "a man gets tired of a woman if she sacrifices everything for him," but she cannot get rid of her obsession because of loneliness. The description of the minutes waiting for her lover's message in a hotel is almost tragic. She has waited so keenly that when he appears, she is absent-minded. This love ends unfruitfully; after the lecture which she has to give to be promoted to a formal staff position, she finds that Maurice is going to marry one of her students, not very bright. Though she succeeds in getting the promotion, she is thrown into deeper solitude. The third novel, Look at Me, shows a slightly different approach. This time Francis Hinton tells her story in the first person. She works at a reference library in a medical research institute. Her daily life is lonely, especially on holidays. To herself, she names the melancholy feeling on holidays as the "Public Holiday Syndrome." To alleviate the feeling, she writes; she has already published two stories in an American journal. Francis is, in a way, a contrast to Ruth and Kitty; she has a lover named James for whom she does not have to wait. She knows when she can see him next time; she spends relaxing time with him. She does not write on these happy days. But the tragedy comes from her girlfriend whom she trusts. Her love is interfered with by the friend, and James falls in love with Maria, a flippant girl. Francis, in her unhappiness, starts to write again; the story ends with "I pick up my pen. I start writing." This is highly autobiographical, as Brookner says in an interview that she writes to remedy her neurosis. To Brookner, women cannot be happy with professional success; rather it is an outlet for frustrated feelings. She skillfully represents the solitude and the intimate thought processes of intellectual women. Generally they are old-fashioned and hardly seem to be the twentieth century's women. Brookner wants to say that women's loneliness, especially that of single women, cannot be changed, however the society changes. She does not write of men's solitude. Probably she writes only through her feelings.

著者

出原 博明 Hiroaki Dehara 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.8, pp.3-35, 1993-12-20

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Hemingway tried to pursue something truly universal in The Old Man And The Sea. Apparently the title is more equivocal, comprehensive, less particularized, than such titles as Santiago and the Sea or Santiago and the Marlin would be. This may be one of the reasons why there have been quite a few interpretations of Santiago as something other than the fisherman he is. For instance, according to Brenner, Santiago as King Oedupus commits incest with la mar as his mother, using the fish as his genital organ, and is punished. On the other hand, Price's interpretation is that Santiago is Hemingway himself as a writer, the fish being his work, and the sharks are critics. In another interpretation, Hogge sees the realization of medieval chivalry in Santiago. The story has also often been taken as an allegory. Hemingway, however, denies his intention of symbolism, saying that the old man (in the work) is the old man, and the fish is the fish. Santiago has been decorated by many critics with such splendid tags as 'superhuman', 'medieval knight', 'King Oedipus', and 'Jesus Chirist'. The purpose of this paper is to take the tags off him for a while and to try to read Santiago as a fisherman pure and simple. To do this, I picked out three refrains in the novella as cues. (As is well known, Hemingway learned the technique of 'refrain' or 'repetition' from Gertrude Stein in his writer's apprenticeship in Paris.) The refrains I have selected are as follows: 'he [Santiago] went too far out', 'I [Santiago] wish I had the boy here', and 'You're my friend but I [Santiago] must kill you, fish'. The old man commits a lot of errors in his pursuit of the fish. First of all, he goes too far out, where he is alone with no sight of land, and of any other fishermen. The marlin he has hooked, when it comes out of the water for the first time, tells Santiago that it is two feet longer than the skiff. That is, it is impossible to take the fish aboard. Then why doesn't he realze that it is bound to be attacked by sharks on his long voyage home? His justifying excuse, 'I must kill you, fish, because I am afisherman', changes into an apology, 'I shouldn't have hooked you. I'm sorry, fish', when he is exposed to the shark's forays. The old man fails more than twice in judging when the fish will come up, so his fight with it actually takes much longer than he expected. He repeatedly wishes the boy were with him during his fight with the fish, and that with the sharks, and he confesses to him, 'I missed you', after he returns home. That is, the old man needs the boy not only as a helper but also as company. The old man, Santiago, is more convincing as a human being than as a superhuman being. He commits a lot of mistakes-as A. Pope says 'To err is human, to forgive, divine.'-, and, alone on the sea, he misses the boy. His being typically human endorses that he is a human fisherman, not a superhuman being, nor a legendary king, nor Christ. It is true that Santiago is not as ordinary as other fishermen. First of all he is more ambitious for honour and applause, and adventurous. With more gifts and faith he makes every effort to be an ideal fisherman, though he is not always successful. He tries to endure till he is on the point of collapse. His sportsmanship is without question here, and meaningful. The old man's manly, stoic attitude toward the tragic result is quite contrary to that of the nameless Cuban fisherman who was crying in the boat when he was picked up, half crazy from the loss of his great marlin, eaten up by sharks. Though the latter's experience was the source of this literary masterpiece, the author apparently idealized his fisherman. However much as he may have idealized Santiago, he did not go so far as to make him anything other than a human fisherman. The old man, Santiago, is undoubtedly no more than human being, but in extreme situations, he fights, as a representative human being with excellent gifts and human defects as well, to the extent of going beyond his limits. And he also accepts the result of his fight with both grace and pride as a man. These are what make Santiago as well as the story itself so charming, moving, and encouraging to us.

著者

山科 美和子 釣井 千恵 Miwako Yamashina Chie Tsurii 桃山学院大学兼任講師 桃山学院大学兼任講師

出版者

桃山学院大学総合研究所

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.24, pp.237-260, 2010-03-19

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how lexical processing skills relate to the reading ability of EFL learners. Our KAKEN research group (supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), No. 19520532, from 2007 to 2009) has developed the CELP Test, Computer-Based English Lexical Processing Test, to measure English learners' ability to process words. The results in the CELP Test provide us with data on accuracy (the number of correct answers), and processing speed (reaction times in seconds). The present study concerns the following questions : 1) Can the higher score in the CELP Test predict potential extensive readers ? 2) Will the score in the CELP Test improve through reading extensively ? 3) Do the learners who gained higher scores in the CELP test perform better in the fast reading task? Results may be summarized as follows : 1) There seemed to be no correlation between the pre-test score in the CELP Test and the number of words the subjects read. The higher score in the CELP Test could not predict potential extensive readers. 2) Comparing the pre-test score with the post-test score, there was not much gain in accuracy, but reaction times improved. The speed of lexical access was correlated with the number of words the subjects read. The results suggested that the more the subjects read, the more lexical access may improve. 3) We may be able to say that some learners with higher CELP Test scores might process sentences faster.

著者

野原 康弘 Yasuhiro NOHARA 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.10, pp.41-65, 1995-12-20

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This article concerns the Numerals in Chaucer (1340?-1400), concentrating on the historical transition of the composite numerals. A numeral '24', for example. There used to be three types to read such a numeral 24: TYPE I: four and twenty, TYPE II: twenty and four, TYPE III: twenty-four. In Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) composite numerals from '21' to '99', the units came before tens. TYPE I and TYPE II were quite common at the age of Chaucer. TYPE III, which was completely unfamiliar to people in the later middle ages in England, is now familiar to the modern ear. TYPE I is the traditional way among Germanic Languages and TYPE III comes from French language. Although TYPE I was often used until the middle of this century, TYPE III has taken its place lately. The final aim of this article is to explain why this transition occurred. I believe that a great number of TYPE III set-phrases influenced its transition.