"How can I get better at the fiction passages?" he asked me.
"Well, do you mean the critical reading in general or..."
"No, the fiction. I have a really hard time with them."
"OK. Do you have one in particular?" Obviously he did, he had bookmarks sticking out of his book.
He opened the book to a passage.
"First off, do you read the part in italics at the beginning."
"Of course I do! It contains background information." he looked at me like I was crazy.
"I just wanted to make sure. I've heard from some students they've been told to skip it. Let me see it..." I paused to read the three-line introduction. "Well, based on this, it's a story about a newly rich woman, and she's not going to want to marry the man that her guardian wants her to marry. Now that's she's come into her inheritance, she's going to want to marry someone for love, probably someone poor, while he's going to want her to marry someone who will look good for the family and probably keep him rich." (All the introduction said was that it was 18th century fiction and it was a conversation between and heiress and the man who had been her guardian.)
He looked at me with amazement. Seriously, his jaw hung open and his eyes went wide. It was obvious that even I hadn't had enough time to read the entire thing, so how on earth did I know exactly what is was about.
"That's exactly what it's about. How did you know?"
"It's all right here. Based on what I know of 18th century literature, it's likely to be about families. And it says she's an heiress and something about her guardian. Novels at that time were largely based on who was going to marry whom, so the conflict revolved around the woman not wanting to marry whatever jerk happened to have the most money."
And then I read the passage. I was so right, it wasn't even funny.
- Do you really care this was posted using BlogPress from my iPad?
Location:Beijing, China
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