教材习题
Exercises
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Make a five-minute presentation in class based on your research or close reading of the text.
Suggested topics:
1. James Baldwin
2. What is the theme of the essay “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an
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Il. Questions
A. Questions on the Content
1. Why did the writer leave America?
2. What does the writer mean when he says he found himself to be as American as any Texas G. I.? Why was he astonished at this?
3. Why did the writer go to Switzerland? In what way did Bessie Smith’s songs help him?
4, What does the writer say about “social status” in Europe and America?
5. Why did people feel differently about being a writer in Europe and America according to the writer?
6. Why did the writer mention Little Rock?
What, according to the writer, does the life of a writer depend on? What should be
the task of writers?
. Questions on Structure and Style What is the central thesis? Where is it stated? How is the essay organized?
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Comment on the first sentence of the essay. Is it an effective way of beginning this
essay? Give your reasons.
4. In Paragraph 2 the writer states: “I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.” Did he succeed in his quest? What were some of the things he found he had in common with others?
5. What is the paradox mentioned in Paragraph 13? How does the writer explain this
paradox?
6. Do you find it easy to understand what the writer is saying? Why?
Ill. Paraphrase
Explain the following sentences in your own words, bringing out any implied meanings.
It is a complex fate to be an American... (Para. 1) 2. ...they were no more at home in Europe than I was. (Para. 3) 3. ...we were both searching for our separate identities. (Para. 4) 4, I do not think that I could have made this reconciliation here. (Para. 8) 5, ...it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. (Para. 13) 6. A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as of being a good actor, and in neither case feel threatened. (Para. 14) 7. Iwas born in New York, but have lived only in pockets of it. (Para. 17) 8. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable. (Para. 18) 9. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends. (Para. 22) 10. American writers do not have a fixed society to describe. (Para. 25) 11. Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people... (Para. 27)
IV. Practice with Words and Expressions
A. Look up the dictionary and explain the meaning of the italicized words and phrases. . ...She helped to reconcile me to being a “nigger.” (Para. 7) . ..-illustrates, in some relief, what can happen to any American writer there. (Para. 9) ...for Europe can be very crippling too... (Para. 9) ...of intellectual activity, of letters—and his choice of a vocation... (Para. 11)
1 2 3 4 5. ...that myth of America to which we cling so desperately. (Para. 12) 6. ...though American society is more mobile than Europe's... (Para. 13) 7. It was borne in on me... (Para. 16) 8. ...he passes a café terrace... (Para. 20) 9. ...regardless of their station. (Para. 22) 10. ...the book is more likely to be a symptom of our tension... (Para. 26)
11. ...who is our strongest arm. (Para. 29)
. Discriminate between the following synonyms. complex, complicated delusion, illusion
intellectual, intelligent, clever
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probable, likely, possible
C. Replace the italicized words with simple, everyday words or expressions. 1. ...and the principal discovery an American writer makes in Europe... (Para. 1)
2. ...not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans. (Para. 1) ( ) 3. ...suffered a species of breakdown and was carried off... (Para. 6) ( ) 4. ...for the artist does not encounter in Europe the same suspicion he encounters
here. (Para. 10) ( )
...and it did not make me feel melancholy... (Para. 16) ( )
...the day to which his entire sojourn has been tending. (Para. 21) ( )
...but nothing will efface his origins... (Para. 22) ( )
...because Tolstoy was able to fathom, and make us see, the hidden laws... (Para. 24)
9. He needs sustenance for his journey and the best models he can find. (Para. 28)
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10. Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life... (Para. 28) ( )
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D. Explain the meaning of the following sentences in plain, non-figurative language.
1. When it did I, like many a writer before me upon the discovery that his props have all been knocked out from under him, suffered a species of breakdown and was carried off to the mountains of Switzerland. (Para. 6)
2. ...a writer, when he has made his first breakthrough, has simply won a crucial skirmish in a dangerous, unending and unpredictable battle. (Para. 9)
3. It is not until he is released from the habit of flexing his muscles and proving that he is just a “regular guy” that he realizes how crippling this habit has been. (Para. 10)
4. An American writer fights his way to one of the lowest rungs on the American social ladder by means of pure bull-headedness and an indescribable series of odd jobs. (Para. 12)
5. He probably has been a “regular fellow” for much of his adult life, and it is not easy for him to step out of that lukewarm bath. (Para. 12)
6. It is as though he suddenly came out of a dark tunnel and found himself beneath the open sky. (Para. 16)
7. In this endeavor to wed the vision of the Old World with that of the New, it is the
writer, not the statesman, who is our strongest arm. (Para. 29)
V. Translation
A. Translate the following sentences into Chinese.
1. America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar
10.
defeats, and her position in the world—yesterday and today—are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. (Para. 1)
In my necessity to find the terms on which my experience could be related to that of others, Negroes and whites, writers and non-writers, I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G. I. (Para. 3)
The fact that I was the son of a slave and they were the sons of free men meant less, by the time we confronted each other on European soil, than the fact that we were both searching for our separate identities. (Para. 4)
Once I was able to accept my role—as distinguished, I must say, from my “place’— in the extraordinary drama which is America, I was released from the illusion that I hated America. (Para. 8)
It is not until he is released from the habit of flexing his muscles and proving that he is just a “regular guy” that he realizes how crippling this habit has been. (Para. 10)
A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition— of intellectual activity, of letters—and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. (Para. 11) We must, however, consider a-rather serious paradox; though American society is more mobile than Europe’, it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. (Para. 13)
A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as of being a good actor, and in neither case feel threatened. (Para. 14)
This perpetual dealing with people very different from myself caused a shattering in me of preconceptions I scarcely knew I held. (Para. 18)
It is the day he realizes that there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself for anything in Europe, he had been preparing himself—for America. (Para. 21)
B. Translate Paragraphs 27-29 into Chinese.
Read, Think and Comment
Below is an excerpt from James Baldwin’s non-fiction book Notes of a Native Son. Read it and be prepared to respond to the following questions: What did James and his white friend do one night in New Jersey? What happened to him? What conclusion did he arrive at about himself?
My last night in New Jersey, a white friend from New York took me to the nearest big town, Trenton, to go to the movies and have a few drinks. As it turned out, he also saved me from, at the very least, a violent whipping. Almost every detail of that night stands out very clearly in my memory. | even remember the name of the movie we saw because its title impressed me as being so partly ironical. It was a movie about the German occupation of France, and called This Land Is Mine. | remember the name of the diner we walked into when the movie ended: it was the “American Diner.” When we walked in the counterman asked what we wanted and | remember answering with the casual sharpness which had become my habit: “We want a hamburger and a cup of coffee, what do you think we want?” | do not know why, after a year of such rebuffs, | so completely failed to anticipate his answer, which was, of course, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” This reply failed to discompose me, at least for the moment. | made some sardonic comment about the name of the diner and we walked out into the streets. :
This was the time of what was called the “brown-out,” when the lights in all American cities were very dim. When we reentered the streets something happened to me which had the force of an optical illusion, or a nightmare. The streets were very crowded and | was facing north. People were moving in every direction but it seemed to me, in that instant, that all of the people | could see, and many more than that, were moving toward me, against me, and that everyone was white. | remember how their faces gleamed. And | felt, like
a physical sensation, a click at the nape of my neck as though some interior string connecting my head to my body had been cut. | began to walk. | heard my friend call after me, but | ignored him. Heaven only knows what was going on in his mind, but he had the good sense not to touch me—| don’t know what would have happened if he had—and to keep me in sight. | don’t know what was going on in my mind, either; | certainly had no conscious plan. | wanted to do something to crush these white faces, which were crushing me. | walked for perhaps a block or two until I came to an enormous, glittering, and fashionable restaurant in which | knew not even the intercession of the Virgin would cause me to be served. | pushed through the doors and took the first vacant seat | saw, at a table for two, and waited.
| do not know how long | waited and | rather wonder, until today, what | could possibly have looked like. Whatever | looked like, | frightened the waitress who shortly appeared, and the moment she appeared all my fury flowed towards her. | hated her for her white face, and for her great, astounded, frightened eyes. | felt that if she found a black man so frightening | would make her fright worthwhile.
She did not ask me what | wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. | felt I had to do something with my hands. | wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands.
So | pretended not to have understood her, hoping to draw her closer. And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil poised incongruously over her pad, and repeated the formula: ”...don’t serve Negroes here.”
Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, which was already ringing in my head like a thousand bells of a nightmare, | realized that she would never come any closer and that | would have to strike from a distance. There was nothing on the table but an ordinary water-mug half full of water, and | picked this up and hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And, with that sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed, | returned from wherever I had been, | saw, for the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and | realized what I had done, and where | was, and |
was frightened. | rose and began running for the door. A round, potbellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck just as | reached the doors and began to beat me about the face. | kicked him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered, “Run!” and | ran.
My friend stayed outside the restaurant long enough to misdirect my pursuers and the police, who arrived at once. | do not know what | said to him when he came to my room that night. | could not have said much. | felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him. | lived it over and over again, the way one relives an automobile accident after it has happened and one finds oneself alone and safe. | could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that | could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. | saw nothing very clearly but | did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred | carried in my own heart.
学习指南参考答案
A.
1. He left America because he was afraid he might not be able to survive the fury of the color problem there. He wanted to prevent himself from becoming merely a Negro or even just a Negro writer. And he also wanted to find out how his special experience as a Negro could help to connect him with other people instead of dividing him from them.
2. He found himself to be as patriotic as the most patriotic Americans. He was discriminated against and persecuted in America so he was very eager to leave it. But when he left it he was surprised to find that he loved America as much as any other white American.
3. He suffered a kind of nervous breakdown in Europe when he found many of his preconceptions and beliefs to be false and ungrounded. He went to Switzerland to recuperate from his breakdown. Bessie Smith through her beautiful singing of Negro folk music helped him remember and accept his Negro origins.
4. Europeans have lived with the idea of social status for a long time. European society has always been divided into classes, so people there accept the idea of status very easily and naturally. Whereas in America, a mobile society, a kind of social paranoia exists, because no one is certain what his status in society is. In America everyone thinks he has status and at the same time everyone becomes uneasy as to just what his status is.
5. Because the cultural traditions in the two places are different. Classes are very obvious in the European society. A European writer is usually a part of an old honorable tradition of intellectual activity. American people have a very deep-rooted distrust of real intellectual efforts and they cling desperately to the myth of America. An American writer has the lowest status in American society.
6. The city of Little Rock became the focus of world attention in 1957 when Federal troops were sent there to enforce a 1954 US Supreme Court ruling against segregation in the public schools. The mention of this shows that the writer is deeply concerned about racial problems in the United States.
7. 1) The life of a writer wholly depends on whether or not he accepts that he will always carry the marks of his origin.
2) American writers should find out the hidden laws and profound assumptions on the part of the people that govern American society. The American writers should also try to unite the old vision of Europe and the new vision of America.
B.
1. The central thesis of this exposition is the discovery of what it means to be an American. It is expressed by the title of the essay.
2. It states its central thesis in the very beginning, specifically in its title “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American”. Baldwin develops the thesis on three levels: what it means to be 1) an American, 2) an American writer and 3) a black American writer.
3. The first sentence of this essay is a quotation. Beginning an essay with a quotation injects the article authority and force to the following content. So, this apt and well-chosen quotation is very effective.
4. Yes, he did succeed. He found he loved America just as much as any other white Americans. He found that the origins of the black and the white Americans were not so important as the fact that they were searching for their separate identities. Finally he found that Europe had formed both the black and the white Americans, and this fact was part of their identity and inheritance.
5. The paradox is: though American society is more mobile than Europe’s, it is easier for different social and occupational groups to intermix in Europe than in America. It is difficult to intermix in America because everyone thinks he has status and yet no one is sure just what his status is. In Europe class lines are clear and everyone accepts naturally their social status, so intermixing without much
friction is possible.
6. No. The thesis doesn’t seem to have been fully developed, as the topic alternates among the meaning of being an American, American writer, American Negro writer and even American Negro.
1. The fate of an American is complicated and hard to understand.
2. They were uneasy and uncomfortable in Europe as I was.
3. They were all trying to find their own special individualities.
4. I don’t think I could have accepted in America my Negro status without feeling ashamed.
5. It is easier in Europe for people of different social groups and occupations to intermingle and have social intercourse.
6. In Europe a good waiter and a good actor are equally proud of their social status and position. They are not jealous of each other and do not live in fear of losing their position.
7. I was born in New York but have lived only in some small areas of the city.
8. The reconsidering of the significance and importance of many things that one had taken for granted in the past can be very painful, though very valuable.
9. The life of a writer really depends on his accepting the fact that no matter where he goes or what he does he will always carry the marks of his origins.
10. American writers live in a mobile society where nothing is fixed, so they do not have a fixed society to describe.
11. Every society is influenced and directed by hidden laws, and by many things deeply felt and taken for granted by the people, though not openly spoken about.
A.
1. reconcile: induce (someone) to accept something disagreeable
2. relief, sharp contrast; distinctness of outline
3. cripple: frustrate, hinder; make unable or unfit to act, function effectively, etc.
4. letters: the profession of a writer
5. myth: any fictitious story, or unscientific account, theory, belief, etc.
6. mobile: designating or of a society in which one may advance in social status and in which social groups mingle freely
7. borne in on: (formal English) (of a person affected) made to realize
8. terrace: an unroofed, paved area, immediately adjacent to a house, etc.
9. station: social standing, position or rank
10. symptom: any circumstance, event, or condition that accompanies something and indicates its existence or occurrence; sign; indication
11. arm: any combatant branch of the military forces
B.
1. complex暗指许多关联部分的组合。complicated强调各部分之间的细微关系，难于理解或分析的。
2. delusion指由于被蒙骗、误觉或者大脑神经不正常而产生的一种与现实或事实相反的对某事的信念。illusion表示由于视 觉、感觉的歪曲所造成的错觉。
3. intellectual指在更高层的知识领域内的一种敏锐的机智，这种机智往往集兴趣和能力于一体。intelligent暗示一种有效地运 用从经验获得的学习和解析能力来成功地处理新情况和新问题。clever指极富理解力的，强调反应迅速快或适应性强。
4. probable指可能发生的或成为事实的，但是不能肯定的。likely为常用词，指从表面迹象来看很有可能的，它的可能性比 possible更大。possible指由于有适当的条件和方法，某事可能发生或做到，强调客观上有可能，但常含有“实际希望很小”的 意思。
C.
1. major; most important
2. all kinds of; various
3. a kind of
4. meet (unexpectedly)
5. sad; depressed
6. (a brief) visit or stay
7. wipe out; rub off
8. get to the bottom of
9. food; nourishment
10. inescapable
D.
1. All the things he believed and had faith in all the things that gave him strength and courage to live his life now proved to be misconceptions, to be wrong.
2. A writer, when he discovers his specific identity in Europe, has only just managed to make a breakthrough, to win a small though crucial encounter, in the dangerous and unending struggle whose outcome one cannot yet foresee.
3. displaying his strength to defend himself or to avoid being attacked
4. remains in one of the lowest professions in American society, the writing profession
5. to change his habit
6. An American writer in Europe loses his doubts and fears and suddenly realizes who he is and what he can do. It is like a man suddenly coming out of a dark tunnel to find himself beneath the open sky.
7. In this attempt to unite the vision of Europe and that of America, it is the writer who can exert the strongest force and not the
statesman.
V. See the translation of the text.
READ, THINK AND COMMENT
1. One night, after watching a movie, Baldwin and a white friend had a few drinks in Trenton, New Jersey.
2. They went into a restaurant named “American Diner” for dinner. There they asked for a hamburger and a cup of coffee but were refused with the counterman answering “We don’t serve Negroes here.” Baldwin made some sarcastic comments about the name of the place and then they left. Then something happened to Baldwin which had the force of an optical illusion, or a nightmare. The streets became very crowded, and he got the illusion that all the white passengers were moving toward him. He wanted to defend himself by crushing these white faces which were crushing him. Then he walked for perhaps a block or two and walked into a big fashionable restaurant. Once again, he was refused with the waitress saying “We don’t serve Negroes here” somewhat apologetically and fearfully. Baldwin was so angry that he threw a water-mug at her. All the people in the restaurant were shocked and a round man grabbed him and beat him on the face when he ran and reached the doors. In the end, he managed to escape their chase with the help of his friend.
3. From this incident, Baldwin arrived at the conclusion about himself that he could have been murdered and he had been ready to commit murder. He saw that his life, his real life, was in danger, not from anything other people might do but from the hatred he carried in his own heart.