A short story: The Hare
Personajes:
Tema: Narration of past events. Past simple
Competencias
Competencia en Comunicación Lingüística
Competencia Plurilingüe
Competencia en conciencia y expresiones culturales
Materias y cursos por Sistema Educativo
España > Inglés > 2º ESO > Comunicación
España > Inglés > 2º ESO > Interculturalidad
Enunciado
Write the past simple of the verbs in brackets in this short story from Angela Carter:
The Hare
(Swahili)
One day the hare ____ (go) to the house of the hunter who was away hunting. He _____ (say) to the hunter’s wife: ‘Come to my house and live with me; we have meat and vegetables every day.’ The woman ______ (go) with him, but when she _____ (see) the lair of the hare and had eaten grass with him and ______ (sleep) in the open with him, she was not satisfied. She said ‘I want to go back.’ The hare ____ (say): ‘You came here by your choice.’ The woman did not know the road in the bush, so she said: ‘Come with me and I will cook a nice dinner.’ The hare _____ (take) her to her house. Then she said: ‘Get me some firewood.’
The hare ____ (go) to the forest and ______ (collect) a load of firewood. The woman ___ (light) a fire and ____ (put) a pot on it. When the water was boiling she ____ (put) the hare into the pot. When the hunter _____ (come) home she said: ‘I ______ (catch) a hare for dinner.’ The hunter never _____ (know) what happened.
- Write a short story of 200 words with one animal personified.
Observaciones y contexto
- Once we have worked through the reading, we can reflect on the fable and the moral, and think of different folk stories that our students might know.
Angela Carter resisted being identified with any one group. Carter was interested in deconstructing the typical roles and structures that mark our existences, especially those of gender.
Her innovative narrative procedures and frequent intertextual references link her to Anglo-Saxon postmodernism, as well as to French authors such as Sade and Bataille. She is often associated with magical realism, but this does not really make much sense outside South America.
She was influenced by cinema, psychoanalysis, surrealism, the second wave of feminism and Japan, among others. In The Bloody Chamber (1979) she revisits fairy tales in a way that might remind us of Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (Beauty and the Beast).
In Spain, other authors have done similar things, such as Carmen Martín Gaite and Ana María Matute.
Other contemporaries of Carter's are, for example, Doris Lessing, who received the same prize as Carter ten years earlier and whom she admired.
Another important writer who worked with fantasy combined with subversion at the same time was Margaret Atwood. In her feminist thinking, she can be linked to Simone de Beauvoir, as both saw femininity as a social construct.
Descripción
- This is a reading comprehension activity.
In this activity we use a short story by Angela Carter inspired by a traditional Swahili tale to work on simple pasts, taken from her work Fairy Tale. Afterwards, our students can practise creative writing and write a short story similar to this one including the personification of an animal.
- The objectives of this activity are: to understand a story written in the simple past and to learn the use of the simple past.