Kazuo Ishiguro "The Remains of the Day" - warsztat literacki

Wielu nauczycieli języka angielskiego spotyka na swojej drodze ambitnych uczniów pragnących poszerzyć wiedzę dotyczącą kultury krajów anglojęzycznych. Po przyznaniu Nagrody Nobla brytyjskiemu pisarzowi Kazuo Ishiguro w 2017 roku, zrealizowałam z grupą humanistów krótki warsztat dotyczący jednej z jego powieści: „Okruchy dnia” (‘’The Remains of the Day”). Poniżej znajduje się plan tego wydarzenia.

1. Rozgrzewka: kim jest Kazuo Ishiguro, należy dopasować daty do wydarzeń życia pisarza (na podstawie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazuo_Ishiguro).

Kazuo Ishiguro - a Nobel Prize-winning English novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer.
born in Nagasaki
his family moved to England
graduated from the University of Kent with a bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy
master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course

Man Booker Prize for his novel "The Remains of the Day"

"Never Let Me Go" was named by Time as the best novel of the year
his seventh "The Buried Giant" published

Nobel Prize in Literature

8 November 1954, 1980, 1960, 2017, 1989, 1978, 2005, 2015

2. Krótka dyskusja na temat wpływu pochodzenia pisarza na jego styl literacki. Cytat: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/kazuo-ishiguro

"I'm not entirely like English people because I've been brought up by Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home. My parents didn't realize that we were going to stay in this country for so long, they felt responsible for keeping me in touch with Japanese values. I do have a distinct background. I think differently, my perspectives are slightly different."

3. Omówienie siły wartości wyznawanych przez bohaterów powieści. Cytat: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/kazuo-ishiguro

"I tend to be attracted to pre-war and postwar settings because I'm interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren't quite what they thought they were before the test came."

4. Refleksja na temat kolei życia Stevensa, głównego bohatera powieści. Cytat: https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/853-remains-of-the-day-ishiguro?start=1 :

“Ishiguro's novels often end without any sense of resolution. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past and remain unresolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation. His characters accept their past and who they have become, typically discovering that this realisation brings comfort and an ending to mental anguish. This can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware.”
The Remains of the Day – how to waste your life?
What is a great butler?
Dignity, selfless service, lost sense of humanity, total devotion to the master.

5. Who is Who: bohaterowie powieści, krótka charakterystyka postaci na podstawie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remains_of_the_Day

Characters of the story: Miss Kenton, William Stevens (Mr Stevens senior), Dupont, Lord Darlington, Mr Stevens, Senator Lewis, Mr Farraday, Young Mr Cardinal
• ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬........................................ – the narrator, an English butler who serves at Darlington Hall; a devoted butler with high standards and particularly concerned with dignity, exemplified by the fact that the reader never learns his first name
• ........................................– housekeeper at Darlington Hall, later married as Mrs Benn
• ........................................– the owner of Darlington Hall, whose failed efforts toward talks between English and German diplomats caused his political and social decline
• ........................................ – the 72-year-old father of Stevens, serving as under-butler; Stevens senior suffers a severe stroke during a conference at Darlington Hall; his son was divided between serving and helping him
• ........................................– An American senator who criticises Lord Darlington as being an "amateur" in politics
• ........................................– the new American employer of Stevens
• ........................................– a journalist; he is the son of one of Lord Darlington's closest friends and is killed in Belgium during the Second World War
• ........................................– a high-ranking French politician who attends Darlington's conference

6. Kontekst historyczny wydarzeń powieści oraz ocean zachowań głównych bohaterów. Cytaty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remains_of_the_Day, http://www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/ishiguro/kiself.html

The pro-German stance of Lord Darlington has parallels in the warm relations with Germany favoured by some British aristocrats in the early 1930s, such as Lord Londonderry and Oswald Mosley.

''Lord Darlington wasn't a bad man. He wasn't a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. . . . He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted that I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?''

7. Zakończenie zajęć i wyrażenie własnej opinii na temat przeczytanej powieści.