Two impenetrable sentences
1. A person who agrees to serve as mediator between two warring factions at the request of both abandons by so agreeing the right to take sides later.
2.Many critics of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights see its second part as a coun- terpoint that comments on, if it does not reverse, the first part, where a romantic read- ing receives more confirmation. Seeing the two parts as a whole is encouraged by the novel’s sophisticated structure, revealed in its complex use of narrators and time shifts. Granted that the presence of these elements need not argue for an authorial awareness of novelistic construction comparable to that of Henry James, their presence does encourage attempts to unify the novel’s heterogeneous parts...
The last sentence is quite hard to understand.
Search from various English teachers...
Answers · 10
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1. .A person who agrees to serve as mediator between two warring factions at the request of both is obliged to remain neutral.
I will leave the second part to someone with a far stronger constitution that mine - I really can't face it!
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1: If you agree to mediate between two 'enemies', when both ask you to, by agreeing, you accept that you can't then 'take sides' with one of them later.
2: I _think_ that it means something like: The fact that Austen used those elements does not necessarily mean she knew that they were clever constructions at the time. They did however serve to make the two parts seem less disjoint.
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I'll explain the first one for you:
[A person (who agrees to serve as mediator between two warring factions at the request of both) ] = Subject
[abandons] = Verb
[the right to take sides later] = Object
(by so agreeing) = Subordinate clause - referring back to the agreement
Let's say that two friends of yours are having an argument. They ask you - as an unbiased judge - to decide who is right. If you agree to do this, it means that you should not then join the argument by taking sides with one of your friends against the other. A person who agrees to be impartial has to remain impartial.
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I find your explanation really helpful, thank you!
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I think the writer is of the opinion that
* the novel is complex because characters and locations appear and reappear and time changes back and forward
* the "romantic" aspect of the first part of the novel is balanced in the second half by a more realistic or practical approach to characters and events
* the author unifies these two parts by her clever use of narrators and her ability to keep the coherence of the story despite the changes of time and period
The writer suggests in the last sentence that despite the author's clever construction of the novel, she is not as clever as Henry James but clever enough to present a her story coherently and well.
At least that is what I think, in a rather patronising way, the writer is suggesting.
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