"The Poet"は「難しい」のか : William Faulkner, Henry Jamesの文体との比較

概要

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The purpose of this paper is to look into the features that make a literary text "difficult", when used in classrooms of English as a foreign language. The language of Somerset Maugham's short story "The Poet" was considered to be difficult by the students. But is it really so? In order to investigate what makes some literary texts difficult, and where complexity lies, passages from William Faulkner and Henry James are analyzed as the models of style that causes difficulties. Then lexical and grammatical features of "The Poet" are compared with those of the two authors. The study shows that, although on the surface, "The Poet" shares the lexical and grammatical features with the two authors, it is not as difficult as it seems, because Maugham's use of "fine sentences" and "purple phrases" in "The Poet" is the writer's deliberate stylistic device to make the literary effect, a device for comedy and mockery. It is also shown that the grammatical analysis of literary texts helps us to see the relationship between authors' choice of language and the artistic effect of the passages.