Comparative Commentary on ‘Oxford Blues’ in Prospect and Oxford: a Spring Day by David Gascoyne.

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Comparative commentary on ‘Oxford Blues’ in Prospect and Oxford: A Spring Day by David Gascoyne. In this essay I will be attempting to compare and contrast these two texts to each other on the basis of style, technique, purpose as well as other things. Text 2 is an article called ‘Oxford Blues’ from the Prospect magazine. From the title ‘Oxford Blues’ you can immediately grasp that the text has a bitter feel and is ones man’s tale of woe. The text does live up to the expectation of the title by giving a rather depressing view towards Oxford by using negative lexis consistently throughout the text. The text is mainly aimed at people who know Oxford or acknowledge the Oxford cliché because I believe he is trying to expose the real Oxford. The writer tends to speak in a much exaggerated tone clearly describing Oxford against the stereotypical logic of the masses. The writer uses quite a lot of negative vocabulary such as ‘infested’ and ‘traffic-swamped’ in the opening to express his utter displeasure with what Oxford has become. He also uses quite a few compound adjectives such as ‘gum-splattered’ and ‘traffic-swamped’ to describe Oxford; this could be linked to the state of Oxford for example, if he had used single adjectives it could be connected to Oxford having just started deteriorating, however using compound adjectives makes one wonder whether this has a link to the level of ‘destruction’ that Oxford has undergone. The writer uses a lot of paradox throughout this article. On the first line of the second paragraph he writes ‘Daylight comes and the scene is if anything more woeful’. This is rather baffling as daylight usually represents happiness or the break of something new and good. The writer also uses irony constantly throughout this article. On line 10 for example, he writes ‘Monoglot “language students” mill around MacDonald’s’. This expresses two views,

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