Literature My
Dear
The
loving are the daring. ~ Bayard Taylor
Jumat, 22 Juni 2012
CHAPTER
I
INTRODUCTION
1.1
Background of Choosing the Topic
M.R James was the notable writer was an English mediaeval scholar and provost of King's College,
Cambridge (1905–1918), and of Eton College (1918–1936). He is best remembered
for his ghost stories, which are regarded as among the
best in the genre. James is best known for his ghost stories,
but his work as a mediaeval scholar was prodigious and remains highly respected
in scholarly circles. Indeed, the success of his stories was founded on his
antiquarian talents and knowledge. From the Wikipedia the writer find
that M.R James is discovery of a manuscript fragment led to excavations in the
ruins of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds,
West Suffolk, in 1902, in which the graves of several twelfth-century abbots
described by Jocelyn de Brakelond
(a contemporary chronicler) were rediscovered, having been lost since the Dissolution.
His 1917 edition of the Latin Lives of Saint Aethelberht, king and martyr (English
Historical Review 32), remains authoritative.
According to Wikipedia, He catalogued many of the manuscript libraries of the Cambridge
colleges. Among his other scholarly works, he wrote The Apocalypse in Art,
which placed illuminated
Apocalypse manuscripts into families. He also translated the New Testament
Apocrypha and contributed to the Encyclopaedia Biblica
(1903). His ability to wear his learning lightly is apparent in his Suffolk
and Norfolk (Dent, 1930), in which a great deal of knowledge is presented
in a popular and accessible form, and in Abbeys (Great Western Railway,
1925).
Wikipedia also said that James also achieved a great deal during his
directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum
in Cambridge [1893–1908]. He managed to secure a large number of important
paintings and manuscripts, including notable portraits by Titian. He have written so many ghost stories, one of his
ghost stories is A School Story . It is a different story,
because James explain the setting very clear. So, the readers can feel join to
that sphere of the story.
Due to the
explanations above, the writer conducts analysis A School Story based on
the setting that the author showed.
1.2
Objective of the study
The primary objective
of this analysis is revealing the setting of the short story. The setting of A
School Story is has a connected with the culture that makes the readers
easy to follow the story in this short story. The culture is appear from the socio
culture that happen in the London, the place of the story.
1.3
Statement of Problem
Based on the previous
background of the choosing the topic, the statement of problem can be
formulated as follows, how the author shows the setting in detail?
1.4
Scope of the Study
This paper is devoted
to the aspect of setting in revealing the setting of which explicitly was
showed by M.R James. This paper will analyze the aspect of setting.
1.5
Theoretical Approach
The study is
attempting to explicate the aspect of setting in revealing the short story,
A School Story, It is applied as the efforts for the writer to consider
settings with the culture in the London, it is the country which the story
happens. It has connected with Marxist theories. Marx was arguing the culture
is not an independent reality but it inspirable from the historical conditions
in which human being create their material lives. The relation of dominance and
subordination which govern the social and economic order of particular phase of
human being will in some sense determine the whole cultural life of society. On
the other hand, in a famous series of letters written in the 1890s English
insists that, while Marx always regarded the economic aspect of society as the
ultimate determinant of other aspects, they also recognized that art,
philosophy, and other. Raman Selden also said in his book that the
problem for Marx was to explain how art and literature produced in a
long-obsolete social organization can still give aesthetic pleasure and
regarded as standard and unattainable ideal. So, the Marxist theory is about
the real social and economic existence.
1.6
Method of the Study
This study is
classified to the library research; it focuses on the content of the source and
the analyzing from the writer. Some data sources, such as biography and the
theoretical approach is from the internet data which are relevant to the topic
that the writer analyze. To analyze the setting in detail, the writer uses the
descriptive analysis method since it tries to give the better understanding and
explanation about the literary work.
CHAPTER
II
DISCUSSION
2.1
Analyze
A School Story is a kind of ghost story that writes by M.R James. In this short
story show there is a physical and social setting. In this short story showed
the physical and social setting. The physical setting was showing well by
James. For example in the sentence: “The school I mean was near London. It was
established in a large and fairly old house --a great white building with very
fine grounds about it; there were large cedars in the garden, as there are in
so many of the older gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in
the three or four fields which we used for our games”. It really can
imagine the readers where the story took place. It showed the place and the
sphere. On the other hand, it showed that school was a special school for the
rich children. The writer analyze that the school is for the high class social
economic children. Then, there are also many physical setting, such as: place,
time, and environment that explain the sphere in that short story. For example:
dormitory at right angels to the main building”. At that time, Sampson was
sleeping in the main building on the first floor when “there was very bright
full moon”. Two students saw there was wet dressed man “sitting or knelling on
Sampson’s window”. At the next day Sampson was gone and no one can find him. It
became a mystery at the school because “the students who seen the tragedy nor
they ever mentioned what he had seen to any third person whatever”. The event
of that short story was scary because it happens at night when everyone was asleep.
Therefore, the time in the night and the bright full moon showed that the story
happen in a frightened night. So, those setting were explained the condition in
that short story. Not only to provide a background for the events and
characters or to help the readers can understand the characters and their
conflicts, but also to create problems for the characters.
3.1
Quotation
The short story A School Story is a ghost story that has many settings.
The settings divide in to two kinds of settings. It is social and physical
setting. In the first paragraph we can
find the physical setting:
“Two men in a
smoking-room were talking of their private-school days.”
It showed the place
in a smoking room that builds in a school.
We can also know a physical
setting from the two men conversation. It is also make a scary sphere, because
the two men tell a scary story.
“the house with a
room in which a series of people insisted on passing a
night; and each of
them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and”
had just time to say,
'I've seen it,' and died.
"Wasn't that
the house in Berkeley Square?"
"I dare say it was.
It showed that the men
tell a story that takes place in a house, and then the time is in the night and
morning. In the night the people of that house insisted on passing a
night and in the morning was found kneeling in a corner. The story that the men
have told was located in Berkeley Square.
”Then there was the man
who heard a noise in the
passage at night, opened
his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on
all fours with his eye
hanging out on his cheek.”
From that sentence we can
also know that the story was happen at night.
"The school I
mean was near London. It was established in a large and
fairly old house - a
great white building with very fine grounds about it;
there were large cedars
in the garden, as there are in so many of the older
gardens in the Thames
valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields
which we used for our
games. I think probably it was quite an attractive
place, but boys seldom
allow that their schools possess any tolerable
features.”
It means that the school
was near London, and it was a wonderful school that was really large.it showed
that school was a special school for the rich children. The writer analyze that
the school is for the high class social economic children. Then, there are also
many physical setting, such as: place, time, and environment that explain the
sphere in that short story.
"I came to the school
in a September, soon after the year 1870”
It was show the time of
the first character that he came to the school after year 1870.
I will call McLeod. I
needn't spend time in describing him: the main
thing is that I got to
know him very well. He was not an exceptional boy in
any way - not
particularly good at books or games - but he suited me.
It showed the social
setting. McLeod is not really special but the first character feel that he
suited him. So, McLeod is a kind person for the first character.
"The school was a large one: there must
have been from 120 to 130 boys
there as a rule, and so a
considerable staff of masters was required, and
there were rather
frequent changes among them.
It means that the place
of that school is very large and it has many students. On the other side, the
student are just boys.
Sampson was too good a
disciplinarian for us to think of trying that on with
him. Now, on this
occasion he was telling us how to express remembering in
Latin: and he ordered us
each to make a sentence bringing in the verb
memini, 'I remember.'
Well, most of us made up some ordinary sentence such
as 'I remember my
father,' or 'He remembers his book,' or something equally
uninteresting: and I dare
say a good many put down memino librum meum, and
so forth: but the boy I
mentioned - McLeod - was evidently thinking of
something more elaborate
than that.
He started and seemed to
wake up, and then very quickly he scribbled about a
couple of lines on his
paper, and showed it up with the rest.
From that sentence we can
get information that Sampson is a disciplinarian person. It is a kind of social
setting.
“It turned out that the
clock struck twelve before he had got to McLeod”
It showed the time in the
story.
"I don't remember any more that was said
by either of us about this. Next
day McLeod took to his
bed with a chill or something of the kind, and it was
a week or more before he
was in school again. And as much as a month went by
without anything
happening that was noticeable.
It was showed the
time that McLeod took his bed with a chill or something of the kind, and
it was
a week or more before
he was in school again.
I am pretty
sure, of course, now,
that there was something very curious in his past
history, but I'm not
going to pretend that we boys were sharp enough to
guess any such thing.
It showed the
setting of condition in his past history.
That same
afternoon I took it out
of my locker - I know for certain it was the same
bit, for I made a
finger-mark on it and no single trace of writing of any
kind was there on it.
It showed the time in
the afternoon and the place in the first character locker.
"That day was
a half-holiday, and next day Sampson was in school again,
much as usual. That night
the third and last incident in my story happened.
It showed the time was
happened in a half-holiday and it was at night.
One evening his host was
turning over a drawer full of odds and ends in
the smoking-room.
It showed the place of
his host was turning over a drawer full of odds and ends is in
the smoking-room.
3.2 The Short
Story
A SCHOOL STORY
by M. R. James
www.world-english.org
Two men in a smoking-room
were talking of their private-school days. "At our
school," said A.,
"we had a ghost's footmark on the staircase. "
" What was it
like?"
"Oh, very
unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I
remember right. The
staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about
the thing. That seems
odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn't somebody
invent one, I
wonder?"
"You never
can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own.
There's a subject for
you, by the way - "The Folklore of Private Schools."
"Yes; the
crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to
investigate the cycle of
ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at
private schools tell each
other, they would all turn out to be
highly-compressed
versions of stories out of books."
"Nowadays the
Strand and Pearson's, and so on, would be extensively drawn
upon."
"No doubt:
they weren't born or thought of in my time. Let's see. I
wonder if I can remember
the staple ones that I was told. First, there was
the house with a room in
which a series of people insisted on passing a
night; and each of them
in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and
had just time to say,
'I've seen it,' and died."
"Wasn't that
the house in Berkeley Square?"
"I dare say
it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the
passage at night, opened
his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on
all fours with his eye
hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me
think - Yes! the room
where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe
mark on his forehead, and
the floor under the bed was covered with marks of
horseshoes also; I don't
know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking
her bedroom door in a
strange house, heard a thin voice among the
bed-curtains say, 'Now
we're shut in for the night.' None of those had any
explanation or sequel. I
wonder if they go on still, those stories."
"Oh, likely
enough - with additions from the magazines, as I said. You
never heard, did you, of
a real ghost at a private school? I thought not,
nobody has that ever I
came across."
"From the way
in which you said that, I gather that you have."
"I really
don't know, but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my
private school thirty odd
years ago, and I haven't any explanation of it.
"The school I
mean was near London. It was established in a large and
fairly old house - a
great white building with very fine grounds about it;
there were large cedars
in the garden, as there are in so many of the older
gardens in the Thames
valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields
which we used for our
games. I think probably it was quite an attractive
place, but boys seldom
allow that their schools possess any tolerable
features.
"I came to
the school in a September, soon after the year 1870; and among
the boys who arrived on
the same day was one whom I took to: a Highland boy,
whom I will call McLeod.
I needn't spend time in describing him: the main
thing is that I got to
know him very well. He was not an exceptional boy in
any way - not
particularly good at books or games - but he suited me.
"The school
was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130 boys
there as a rule, and so a
considerable staff of masters was required, and
there were rather
frequent changes among them.
"One term -
perhaps it was my third or fourth - a new master made his
appearance. His name was
Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale,
black-bearded man. I
think we liked him: he had travelled a good deal, and
had stories which amused
us on our school walks, so that there was some
competition among us to
get within earshot of him. I remember too - dear me,
I have hardly thought of
it since then - that he had a charm on his
watch-chain that
attracted my attention one day, and he let me examine it.
It was, I now suppose, a
gold Byzantine coin; there was an effigy of some
absurd emperor on one
side; the other side had been worn practically smooth,
and he had had cut on it
- rather barbarously - his own initials, G.W.S.,
and a date, 24 July,
1865. Yes, I can see it now: he told me he had picked
it up in Constantinople:
it was about the size of a florin, perhaps rather
smaller.
"Well, the
first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing
Latin grammar with us.
One of his favourite methods - perhaps it is rather a
good one - was to make us
construct sentences out of our own heads to
illustrate the rules he
was trying to make us learn. Of course that is a
thing which gives a silly
boy a chance of being impertinent: there are lots
of school stories in
which that happens - or any-how there might be. But
Sampson was too good a
disciplinarian for us to think of trying that on with
him. Now, on this
occasion he was telling us how to express remembering in
Latin: and he ordered us
each to make a sentence bringing in the verb
memini, 'I remember.'
Well, most of us made up some ordinary sentence such
as 'I remember my
father,' or 'He remembers his book,' or something equally
uninteresting: and I dare
say a good many put down memino librum meum, and
so forth: but the boy I
mentioned - McLeod - was evidently thinking of
something more elaborate
than that. The rest of us wanted to have our
sentences passed, and get
on to something else, so some kicked him under the
desk, and I, who was next
to him, poked him and whispered to him to look
sharp. But he didn't seem
to attend. I looked at his paper and saw he had
put down nothing at all.
So I jogged him again harder than before and
upbraided him sharply for
keeping us all waiting. That did have some effect.
He started and seemed to
wake up, and then very quickly he scribbled about a
couple of lines on his
paper, and showed it up with the rest. As it was the
last, or nearly the last,
to come in, and as Sampson had a good deal to say
to the boys who had
written meminiscimus patri meo and the rest of it, it
turned out that the clock
struck twelve before he had got to McLeod, and
McLeod had to wait
afterwards to have his sentence corrected. There was
nothing much going on
outside when I got out, so I waited for him to come.
He came very slowly when
he did arrive, and I guessed there had been some
sort of trouble. 'Well,'
I said, 'what did you get?' 'Oh, I don't know,'
said McLeod, 'nothing
much: but I think Sampson's rather sick with me.'
'Why, did you show him up
some rot?' 'No fear,' he said. 'It was all right
as far as I could see: it
was like this: Memento - that's right enough for
remember, and it takes a
genitive, - memento putei inter quatuor taxos.'
'What silly rot!' I said.
'What made you shove that down? What does it
mean?' 'That's the funny
part,' said McLeod. 'I'm not quite sure what it
does mean. All I know is,
it just came into my head and I corked it down. I
know what I think it
means, because just before I wrote it down I had a sort
of picture of it in my
head: I believe it means "Remember the well among the
four" - what are
those dark sort of trees that have red berries on them?'
'Mountain ashes, I s'pose
you mean.' 'I never heard of them,' said McLeod;
'no, I'll tell you -
yews.' 'Well, and what did Sampson say?' 'Why, he was
jolly odd about it. When
he read it he got up and went to the mantel-piece
and stopped quite a long
time without saying anything, with his back to me.
And then he said, without
turning round, and rather quiet, "What do you
suppose that means?"
I told him what I thought; only I couldn't remember the
name of the silly tree:
and then he wanted to know why I put it down, and I
had to say something or
other. And after that he left off talking about it,
and asked me how long I'd
been here, and where my people lived, and things
like that: and then I
came away: but he wasn't looking a bit well.'
"I don't
remember any more that was said by either of us about this. Next
day McLeod took to his
bed with a chill or something of the kind, and it was
a week or more before he
was in school again. And as much as a month went by
without anything
happening that was noticeable. Whether or not Mr. Sampson
was really startled, as
McLeod had thought, he didn't show it. I am pretty
sure, of course, now,
that there was something very curious in his past
history, but I'm not
going to pretend that we boys were sharp enough to
guess any such thing.
"There was
one other incident of the same kind as the last which I told
you. Several times since
that day we had had to make up examples in school
to illustrate different
rules, but there had never been any row except when
we did them wrong. At
last there came a day when we were going through those
dismal things which
people call Conditional Sentences, and we were told to
make a conditional
sentence, expressing a future consequence. We did it,
right or wrong, and
showed up our bits of paper, and Sampson began looking
through them. All at once
he got up, made some odd sort of noise in his
throat, and rushed out by
a door that was just by his desk. We sat there for
a minute or two, and then
- I suppose it was incorrect - but we went up, I
and one or two others, to
look at the papers on his desk. Of course I
thought someone must have
put down some nonsense or other, and Sampson had
gone off to report him.
All the same, I noticed that he hadn't taken any of
the papers with him when
he ran out. Well, the top paper on the desk was
written in red ink -
which no one used - and it wasn't in anyone's hand who
was in the class. They
all looked at it - McLeod and all - and took their
dying oaths that it
wasn't theirs. Then I thought of counting the bits of
paper. And of this I made
quite certain: that there were seventeen bits of
paper on the desk, and
sixteen boys in the form. Well, I bagged the extra
paper, and kept it, and I
believe I have it now. And now you will want to
know what was written on
it. It was simple enough, and harmless enough, I
should have said.
"'Si tu non veneris
ad me, ego veniam ad te,' which means, I suppose, 'If
you don't come to me,
I'll come to you.'"
"Could you
show me the paper?" interrupted the listener.
"Yes, I
could: but there's another odd thing about it. That same
afternoon I took it out
of my locker - I know for certain it was the same
bit, for I made a
finger-mark on it and no single trace of writing of any
kind was there on it. I
kept it, as I said, and since that time I have tried
various experiments to
see whether sympathetic ink had been used, but
absolutely without
result.
"So much for
that. After about half an hour Sampson looked in again: said
he had felt very unwell,
and told us we might go. He came rather gingerly to
his desk, and gave just
one look at the uppermost paper: and I suppose he
thought he must have been
dreaming: anyhow, he asked no questions.
"That day was
a half-holiday, and next day Sampson was in school again,
much as usual. That night
the third and last incident in my story happened.
"We - McLeod
and I - slept in a dormitory at right angles to the main
building. Sampson slept
in the main building on the first floor. There was a
very bright full moon. At
an hour which I can't tell exactly, but some time
between one and two, I
was woken up by somebody shaking me. It was McLeod,
and a nice state of mind
he seemed to be in. 'Come,' he said, - 'come
there's a burglar getting
in through Sampson's window.' As soon as I could
speak, I said, 'Well, why
not call out and wake everybody up? 'No, no,' he
said, 'I'm not sure who
it is: don't make a row: come and look.' Naturally I
came and looked, and
naturally there was no one there. I was cross enough,
and should have called McLeod
plenty of names: only - I couldn't tell why -
it seemed to me that
there was something wrong - something that made me very
glad I wasn't alone to
face it. We were still at the window looking out, and
as soon as I could, I
asked him what he had heard or seen. 'I didn't hear
anything at all,' he
said, 'but about five minutes before I woke you, I
found myself looking out
of this window here, and there was a man sitting or
kneeling on Sampson's
window-sill, and looking in, and I thought he was
beckoning.' 'What sort of
man?' McLeod wriggled. 'I don't know,' he said,
'but I can tell you one
thing - he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he
was wet all over: and,'
he said, looking round and whispering as if he
hardly liked to hear
himself, 'I'm not at all sure that he was alive.'
"We went on
talking in whispers some time longer, and eventually crept
back to bed. No one else
in the room woke or stirred the whole time. I
believe we did sleep a
bit afterwards, but we were very cheap next day.
"And next day
Mr. Sampson was gone: not to be found: and I believe no
trace of him has ever
come to light since. In thinking it over, one of the
oddest things about it
all has seemed to me to be the fact that neither
McLeod nor I ever
mentioned what we had seen to any third person whatever.
Of course no questions
were asked on the subject, and if they had been, I am
inclined to believe that
we could not have made any answer: we seemed unable
to speak about it.
"That is my
story," said the narrator. "The only approach to a ghost
story connected with a
school that I know, but still, I think, an approach
to such a thing."
* * * * *
The sequel to this
may perhaps be reckoned highly conventional; but a
sequel there is, and so
it must be produced. There had been more than one
listener to the story,
and, in the latter part of that same year, or of the
next, one such listener
was staying at a country house in Ireland.
One evening his
host was turning over a drawer full of odds and ends in
the smoking-room.
Suddenly he put his hand upon a little box. "Now," he
said, "you know
about old things; tell me what that is." My friend opened
the little box, and found
in it a thin gold chain with an object attached to
it. He glanced at the
object and then took off his spectacles to examine it
more narrowly.
"What's the history of this?" he asked. "Odd enough," was
the
answer. "You know
the yew thicket in the shrubbery: well, a year or two back
we were cleaning out the
old well that used to be in the clearing here, and
what do you suppose we
found?"
"Is it
possible that you found a body?" said the visitor, with an odd
feeling of nervousness.
"We did that:
but what's more, in every sense of the word, we found two."
"Good
Heavens! Two? Was there anything to show how they got there? Was
this thing found with
them?"
"It was.
Amongst the rags of the clothes that were on one of the bodies.
A bad business, whatever
the story of it may have been. One body had the
arms tight round the
other. They must have been there thirty years or more -
long enough before we
came to this place. You may judge we filled the well
up fast enough. Do you
make anything of what's cut on that gold coin you
have there?"
"I think I
can," said my friend, holding it to the light (but he read it
without much difficulty);
"it seems to be G.W.S., 24 July, 1865."
www.world-english.org
CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
From the analysis
conducted, it can be concluded that A School Story is a short story that
has so many settings. The settings show the story that happens in that short
story. The settings have created problem for the character. We can prove it
from the character which made by the setting that appeared in that story. The
setting also showed the economic condition all of the characters, we can know
from their school which is a exclusive school. The settings also provide a
background for the events and characters, because the setting opened the
situation that will be held in that short story.
The author also
showed the detail setting to help understand the characters and their
conflicts. The settings explain in every condition that the characters have
felt. Therefore, the readers can easy to follow the plot in this story by the
detail settings.
So, setting is the
most important aspect in this short story. It give affected to the plot,
character and the ability of the readers to understand well about A School
Story.
BIBLIOGHRAPHY
Selden, Raman. A
Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory .Great Britain: The
Harvester Press Limited Press, 1985
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. M.R James.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._R._James accessed on June 21, 2008
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