No Signposts in the Sea

Brief introduction about the author

Relative literary knowledge

Brief introduction about the text

Analysis of language in the text

Vita Sackville-West Born: 1892 Knole Castle

Died: 1962 aged70

Nationality: English

Occupation: poet

novelist

gardener

key words: Personal life

Marriage

Bisexuality

Honour

Honour• The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in

1927

• She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems.

• In 1946 Sackville-West was made a Companion of Honor 名誉勋爵士 for her services to literature.

She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life

Her strong marriage with Harold Nicolson

Her passionate affairs with women like novelist Virginia Woolf.

• Edmund Carr is at sea in more ways than one. An eminent journalist and self-made man, he has recently discovered that he has only a short time to live. Leaving his job on a Fleet Street paper, he takes a passage on a cruise ship where he knows that Laura, a beautiful and intelligent widow whom he secretly admires, will be a fellow passenger.

Exhilarated by the distant vista of exotic islands never to be visited and his conversations with Laura, Edmund finds himself rethinking all his values. A voyage on many levels, those long purposeless days at sea find Edumnd relinquishing the past as he discovers the joys and the pain of a love he is simultaneously determined to conceal.

She was born in

Knole Castle

Family • I don't remember either my father or my

mother very vividly at that time, except that Dada used to take me for terribly long walks and talk to me about science, principally Darwin, and I liked him a great deal better than mother, of whose quick temper I was frightened."

------ from Portrait of a Marriage

by Nigel Nicolson, 1973

Hawthornden Prize

霍桑登奖 • The Hawthornden Prize, the oldest of the famo

us British literary prizes, was founded in 1919 by Alice Warrender.

• It is awarded annually to an English writer for the best work of imaginative literature. It is especially designed to encourage young authors.

• the word 'imaginative' is given a broad interpretation. A panel of judges decides the winner.

Her best Known Novels Today

• The Edwardians All Passion Spent

Her best Known Poetry Today

• 弗吉尼亚 · 伍尔夫 Virginia Woolf

• 英国著名女作家，在小说创作和文学评论两方面都有卓越的贡献。世界三大意识流作家之一，女权主义运动的先驱人物。深受弗洛伊德心理学、女性主义及同性恋运动影响。她在文学上的成就和创造性至今仍然产生很大的影响。

Stream of Conscious

ness

• Phrase used by William James in 1890 to describe the unbroken flow of thought and awareness of the waking mind

• A special mode of narration that capture the continuous flow of a character's mental process

Stream of Consciousness

• Sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts and memories, experiences, feelings and random associations

• In a literary context used to describe the narrative method where novelists describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters without resorting to objective description or conventional dialogue

Bloomsbury Group• The Bloomsbury Group was an

English collectivity of loving friends and relatives who lived in or near London during the first half of the twentieth century. Their work deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.

• The Bloomsbury Group came from mostly upper middle-class professional families.

• Almost everything about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name.

Part OneAttitudes to different classes

Part TwoThe Rhetorics in the textPart ThreeRich use of colour-words

• …have made up a Bridge-four and thus beguile ourselves for an hour or so agter dinner while others dance on deck.(upper class)

• He is by no means stupid or ill-informed;a little opinionated perhaps… (colonel)

• Sometimes these untaught scribblers have a way of putting things.(soldiers)

• Etc.

Hateful ,Satiric

Inclined ,favored• Most people would think him crazy,but I

must say I find it refreshing to think there are still a few odd fish left in the world.(lighthouse keeper)

• …she takes his catch from.In their plaited hut there is nothing but health and love.(fishman)

• Etc.

Brief Introduction

原文作者在文章中使用修辞手法，是为了使语言更加形象生动，鲜明突出；或者使语言更加整齐匀称，音调铿锵，以便更深入地阐明事件的意义或刻画人物的性格。

Simile ( 明喻 )

• a comparison between two distinctly different things and the comparison is indicated by the word as or like.

Examples• as busy as bee 像蜜蜂一样忙碌

• as brave as lion 像狮子一样勇猛

• as black as crow 像乌鸦一般黑

• as sharp as knife 像刀一样锋利

Similes in the text

• It’s as a moving picture that I can note the grace of her gestures

• Dismissive as Pharisee• As sentimental and sensitive as any old m

aid doing water-colour of sunsets• My imagination…so austere in the foregro

und but nurturing what treasures of tenderness, like delicate flowers, for the discovery of the venturesome.

• …gives a cry like a sea-bird• …we are as pleased a children when our

game succeeds• I like the footfall of naked feet in the dus

t, silent as a cat passing.• The faint creaking, as of the saddle-leath

er to a horseman riding across turf.

Metaphors ( 隐喻 )

• It is the use of a word which originally denotes one thing to refer to another with a similar quality. It is also a comparison, but the comparison is implied, not expressed with the word as or like.

Examples

• as cunning as a dead pig

• as happy as a cow

• a fly in the ointment

• you can’t make bricks without straw

•像狐狸一样狡猾

•快乐得像只百灵鸟

•一只老鼠坏了一锅汤

•巧妇难为无米之炊

Metaphors in the text

• A new Clovis, loving what I have despised

• An Endy mion young and strong• The sea…with no ripples at all but only t

he lazy satin of blue• The red ball

transferred epithet 　（转移描述词，或移就修辞格）

• An epithet is an adjective or descriptive phrase that serves to characterize somebody or something. A transferred epithet is one that is shifted from the noun it logically modifies to a word associated with that noun.

Transferred epithet in the text

• And the cool support of the water• And the sky a tender palette of pink a

nd blue• I had no temptation to take a flying h

oliday to the South• But above all I love these long purpos

eless days in which I shed all that I have ever been.

Alliteration ( 头韵 )

• It refers to the appearance of the same initial consonant sound in two or more words.

Alliteration in the text

• On a less practical plane• And now see how I stand, as sentim

ental and sensitive as any old maid• Clear of cloud• I would never have believed in the si

mple bliss of being • The hiss of sudden spray.

• …in the evening she wears soft rich colours,dark red,olive green,midnight blue,always of the most supple flowing texture.

• …said an Australian,’Makes you long for a bit of green.’

• ‘Creme de menthe,’says Laura. ‘Jade,’I say. ‘Emerald,’says Laura.’Jade is too opaque.’ ‘Vocious viridian,’I say,not to be outdone. …More: grey, white, blacker, more golden, bleached,

yellow, golden-brown, red,a tender palette of pink and blue, purple, …

Group Members

•Mei Chan•Yan Sainan•Huang Yao•Zhan Shuyan•Qian Ying

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