题目内容
In 1990, William Deresiewicz was on his way to gaining a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. Describing that time in the opening pages of his sharp, endearingly selfeffacing new book, A Jane Austen Education, Deresiewicz explains that he faced one crucial obstacle. He loathed not just Jane Austen but the entire gang of 19th-century British novelists ~ Hardy, Dickens, Eliot ... the lot. At 26, Deresiewicz wasn’t experiencing the hatred born of surfeit that Mark Twain described when he told a friend, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone. " What Deresiewicz was going through was the rebel phase in which Dostoyevsky rules Planet Gloom, that stage during which the best available image of marriage is a prison gate. Sardonic students do not, as Deresiewicz points out, make suitable shrine-tenders for a female novelist whose books, while short on wedding scenes, never skimp on proposals. Emma Bovary fulfilled all the young scholar’s expectations of literary culture at its finest; Emma Woodhouse left him cold. "Her life," he lamented, "was impossibly narrow. " Her story, such as it was, "seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village. " Hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, garrulous Miss Bates -weren’t these just the sort of bores Deresiewicz had spent his college years struggling to avoid Maybe, he describes himself conceding, the sole redeeming feature of smug Miss Woodhouse was that she seemed to share his distaste for the dull society of Highbury. The state of outraged hostility is, of course, a setup. Many of Deresiewicz’s readers will already know him as the author of the widely admired Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. One of the novelist’s most appreciative critics isn’t about to knock Austen off her plinth. Nevertheless, a profound truth lies embedded in Deresiewicz’s witty account of his early animosity. He applies that comic narrative device to her six completed novels. Considered so, each work reveals itself as a teaching tool in the painful journey toward becoming not only adult but useful. The truth is that young readers don’t easily attach themselves to Austen. Mr. Darcy, "haughty as a Siamese cat," isn’t half as appealing on the page as Colin Firth stalking across the screen in Andrew Davies’s liberty-taking film. Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland seems coltish and naive to readers of her own age today, while Emma Woodhouse, all of 20, appears loud, vain and bossy. And who, at 27 or thereabouts, now feels sympathy for the meekness of Anne Elliot, a young woman who has allowed a monstrous father and a persuasive family friend to ruin her chances of happiness with the engaging Captain Wentworth Deresiewicz’s emphasis on Austen’s lack of appeal to young readers struck a chord. The memory still lingers of being taken to lunch by my father to meet a cultured man who might, it must have been hoped, exert a civilizing influence on a willful 20-year-old. We’d barely started on the appetizers before Jane Austen’s name came up. "I hate her," I announced, brandishing my scorn as a badge of pride. Invited to offer reasons, I prattled on, much like Deresiewicz’s younger self, about her dreary characters: all so banal, so unimportant. Glancing up for admiration, I caught an odd expression on our guest’s face, something between amusement and disgust. I carried fight on. It was another five years before I comprehended the shameless depths of my arrogance. I had matched Emma -at her worst. It happens that Emma at her worst is the turning point in Deresiewicz’s account of his own conversion. The fictional scene that taught him to understand the subtlety of Austen’s manipulation of the reader was the picnic at which Emma, cocksure as ever, orders gentle Miss Bates to restrict her utterance of platitudes during the meal. Miss Bates blushes painfully, and yet accepts the truth of Emma’s critique. The reader has no option but to admire, however grudgingly, such quiet humility. Although he’s a shrewd critic of Austen’s work, Deresiewicz is less at ease when entering the genre of memoir. Girlfriends come and go; a controlling father is described without ever being quite brought to life; personal experiences of community in a Jewish youth movement are awkwardly yoked to the kindly naval group evoked by Austen in the Harville-Benwick household of Persuasion. Very occasionally, as in a startling passage that offers a real-life analogy to the socially ambitious Crawfords of Mansfield Park, a sentence leaps free of Deresiewicz’s selective recollections. "You guys are lunch meat now," a friend’s rich wife advises both him and her husband. "Wait a few years -you’ll be sirloin steak. " Here, slicing up through the text like a knife blade, surfaces a statement to match Austen’s own scalpel-wielding. Teaching became Deresiewicz’s chosen vocation. And Austen, he claims, taught him the difficult art of lecturing without beingdidactic, in just the way that Henry Tilney instructs a wide-eyed Catherine Morland -and that Austen herself lays down the law to her readers. Rachel M. Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen offers a different approach. Excellent in her overview of Austen’s ascent of the Olympian literary slope, Brownstein speaks down to her readers from an equally dizzy height. Pity the "smart, eloquent and clubbable" former pupil Brownstein names and thanks for having, at the end of the term, "helpfully clarified things by telling me what I had been saying. " Ouch. Students, Brownstein loftily declares, are best introduced to Austen’s novels by being informed, for example, that the title "Mr. Knightley of Donwell Abbey" conceals the code words "knightly" and "donewell. " No indication is given that this formidable tutor would embrace the collaborative observations from her pupils that Deresiewicz has learned to welcome and enjoy. Brownstein remains, however, a superb critic, seen at her best when illuminating Austen’s mastery of significant detail -a quality, she reminds us, Walter Scott was quick to discern and praise. Exasperated though I was when Brownstein remarked that partaking of the daily feasts at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center presented her with a "moral" obligation, I’d gladly forgive worse for the pleasure of learning how artfully Austen sows our mistrust of her nastier characters. I have, however, one suggestion. Brownstein, almost as socially obsessed as her elegant scapegoat of choice, Lionel Trilling, dithers over exactly where to place Austen. Snobs, she declares, without much evidence, are among the novelist’s firmest fans. But Austen belonged neither to the aristocracy nor to the rising middle class. There’s no need for her to be pigeonholed, but if a place must be granted, how about "vicarage class" -for the position from which a parson’s clever daughter could observe the mannered comedy of all walks of life "Struck a chord" in the sixth paragraph is closest in meaning to______
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In America retail banking is still a local business. Around 95% of the country’s deposittakers are "community" banks, and more than 90% have assets of less than $1 billion. Even Bank of America, which comes closest to having a national network, has branches in only 29 of the 50 states. Nevertheless, banking is much less local than it used to be. Advances in technology have made it far easier to offer banking services regionally or nationally. And deregulation has swept away restrictions that once prevented banks from extending their branch networks across state boundaries (even, in some states, within them). Thanks mainly to a wave of mergers, but also to a spate of bank failures in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of banks in America has fallen by half in the past 20 years. Big banks have some obvious advantages over small ones. They can raise money more cheaply than smaller banks, notably in the financial markets, and can therefore offer keener lending rates. Their assets are more diversified and therefore less risky when taken as a group. They may be able to supply a broader range of services for which fees can be charged. That said, the small fry are not helpless when bigger fish swim into their pool. Precisely because of big banks’ easier access to financial markets, they rely less on deposits for their funding. There is evidence that they offer customers meaner deposit rates -and hence make local banks’ life easier in this respect. They also tend to offer all savers the same rate, at least within one state, whereas local banks react more nimbly to local economic conditions. Research also suggests that multi-market banks charge higher fees than local banks do. And diseconomies as well as economies of scale can come into play. Frequently, merging banks lose some deposits, as customers disgruntled by a big, impersonal institution take their money elsewhere -sometimes to one of the 100-odd new banks set up in America each year. In a forthcoming paper,Allen Berger, of the Federal Reserve, Astrid Dick, of the New York Fed, the late Lawrence Goldberg, of the University of Miami, and Lawrence White, of New York University’s Stern School of Business, weigh two hypotheses about banking mergers. On the one hand, consolidation may have been born of efficiency, as technological progress improved the profitability of large institutions serving several markets faster than that of small, local banks. On the other, mergers may have been the children of hubris, as chief executives sought scale for its own sake. Efficiency-based mergers should have made life harder for small, single-market banks; hubris should have helped them. The authors compare the profitability of small banks operating in only one local market in two periods, 1982 1990 and 1991 2000. They find that in the first period, competition from out of town did them more good than harm; their returns on equity were higher if they were up against banks that were big, served many markets or both. In the second period, though, the effect was reversed. In other words, between the 1980s and 1990s bank consolidation became less hubristic and more efficient, to the detriment of small, local banks -thanks, say the authors, largely to developments in technology. It appears that local banks suffered both lost revenues, as the interlopers stole their fees and interest on loans, and also higher costs, as they offered higher deposit rates or spent more on advertising or service to keep hold of their customers. Looking at an alternative measure of local banks’ profitability, the authors suggest that their competitors became sharper at serving several markets, rather than exploiting sheer scale. The sentence "Around 95% of the country’s deposit-takers are ’community’ banks ... " (Para.1) most probably means______
Water shortages plague a fifth of southern Europe. And with temperatures in the region forecast to rise several degrees this century -reducing rainfall another 30% -things will only get worse. Several thousand miles to the northwest, however, global warming is increasing the number of icebergs calving off Greenland; they now number about 15,000 a year. An iceberg is a floating reservoir. Water from icebergs is the purest water, which was formed some 10,000 years ago. All those bergs eventually dissolve in the ocean’s brine. Why not capture and haul some of them to Europe’s arid south The idea of towing icebergs to the world’s thirstiest regions goes back to the 1950s. Georges Mougin, a French engineer and eco-entrepreneur, began looking seriously at the concept in the mid-1970s. Technologies to handle such a massive undertaking didn’t exist then. But they do now, thanks to Mougin, who at 86 is still working full tilt. A few years ago, he came up with the idea to enclose the bottom half of an iceberg with a skirt fashioned from insulating geotextile material to reduce melting en route. Then he imagined a scenario in which ocean currents could be used to help steer the tugboat pulling the iceberg and drastically reduce fuel consumption -a principle Mougin calls assisted drift. But a trial tow of a 7 million-ton iceberg would cost about $10 million -a sum that chilled investors. The problem was that he couldn’t show them his vision -until now. Thanks to a virtualreality boost from French software company Dassault Syst~mes, he can simulate an iceberg’s entire journey from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands. The collaboration is part of an effort by Dassault, which sells high-end product-testing software to such companies as Boeing and Toyota, to offer modeling expertise to researchers like Mougin whose lofty ideas often dwarf their budgets. Two years ago, Dassault placed its 3-D-imaging technologies and 15 of its engineers at Mougin’s disposal. Many hours and algorithms later, the team concluded recently that Mougin’s big idea would work. One standard-size tug traveling at 1 knot, using assisted drift, could get a skirted 7 miUion-ton berg to the Canaries in about 141 days with only 38% of it melting. Better yet, larger bergs would lose proportionately less, because the amount of ice that melts off the sides is fairly static. Mougin was inspired to approach Dassault after watching a documentary that used the company’s 3-D modeling to bring to life architect Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory on how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Dassault believes sharing the modeling software is a highprofile way to show off the cool things its products can do while simultaneously supporting scientific inquiry. "It’s a way to contribute to the community of innovators," says Crdric Simard, project director. Aside from supporting innovators, Dassault gives the software to French and U. S. programs aimed at improving science, technology and engineering education in schools. Engineers on the iceberg project charted the journey under numerous scenarios. The model relied heavily on historical meteorologic and oceanographic data as well as forecasts in real time culled from satellites, buoys and balloons. Temperature, salinity, winds, swells, currents and eddies were all calculated; the model even factored in a fierce storm on day 22 of a trip. The model was also able to track the melt rate and the tugboat’s fuel consumption. Using 3-D glasses, Mougin’s team virtually examined the berg from all angles and inspected both the insulation skirt and the seine used to capture and tow it. While ultimately proving Mougin’s theories were correct, the simulation wasn’t without drama. Indeed, the first trial was a disaster, which confirmed the wisdom of modeling. The simulated tug hit a huge eddy and spent a month circling in place before moving on, resulting in too much melting and heavy fuel consumption. Despite some initial hand-wringing, the necessary fix proved quite simple: moving the departure date from mid-May to mid-June. The next step for Mougin is to secure funding -from $ 2.96 million to $ 4.44 million -for a pilot study using a smaller fragment of ice to give the theory a real-world test. He and Wadhams got an encouraging response but no money when they sought a European Union grant a few years ago, but that was before the Dassault simulation. They expect the 3-D visuals will improve their chances of landing a grant or a commercial partner. Mougin hopes to launch the pilot test next year and advance to a full-scale trial a year or two later. He’s also confident of the gambit’s commercial potential and has formed a company called WPI to exploit it. After nearly 40 years of effort, Mougin anticipates serving frozen drinks en masse soon. The fix to the first trial was moving the departure date from mid-May to mid-June because______.
Sally wants to increase the
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