Sunday, 12 October 2014
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Monday, 31 March 2014
Friday, 14 March 2014
"John Robert Fowles (/faʊls/; 31 March 1926 – 5 November 2005) was an English novelist who earned an international reputation, with his books translated into numerous languages, and several adapted as films. He was considered much influenced by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism.
After leaving Oxford University, Fowles taught English at a school on the Greek island of Spetses, a sojourn that inspired The Magus, his third novel and an instant best-seller that was directly in tune with 1960s "hippie" anarchism and experimental philosophy. This was followed by The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a Victorian-style romance set in Lyme Regis, Dorset, where Fowles lived for more than 30 years. Later fictional works include The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot.
Fowles was named by the Times newspaper of UK as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Birth and family
1.2 Early life and education
1.3 Teaching career
1.4 Literary career
2 Major works
3 List of works
4 References
5 External links
Biography[edit]
Birth and family[edit]
Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles.[2] Robert Fowles came from a family of middle-class merchants of London. Robert's father Reginald was a partner of the firm Allen & Wright, a tobacco importer. Robert's mother died when he was 6 years old. At age 26, after receiving legal training, Robert enlisted in the Honourable Artillery Company and spent three years in the trenches of Flanders during World War I. Robert's brother Jack died in the war, leaving a widow and three children. During 1920, the year Robert was demobilised, his father Reginald died. Robert became responsible for five young half-siblings as well as the children of his brother. Although he had hoped to practise law, the obligation of raising an extended family forced him into the family trade of tobacco importing.
Gladys Richards belonged to an Essex family also originally from London. The Richards family moved to Westcliff-on-Sea in 1918, as Spanish flu swept through Europe, for Essex was said to have a healthy climate. Robert met Gladys Richards at a tennis club in Westcliff-on-Sea in 1924. Though she was ten years younger, and he in bad health from the war, they were married a year later on 18 June 1925. Nine months and two weeks later, Gladys gave birth to John Robert Fowles.
Early life and education[edit]
New College, Oxford, where Fowles attended university.
Fowles spent his childhood attended by his mother and by his cousin Peggy Fowles, 18 years old at the time of his birth. She was his nursemaid and close companion for ten years. Fowles attended Alleyn Court Preparatory School. The works of Richard Jefferies and his character Bevis were Fowles's favourite books as a child. He was an only child until he was 16 years old.
In 1939, Fowles won a place at Bedford School, a two-hour train journey north of his home. His time at Bedford coincided with the Second World War. Fowles was a student at Bedford until 1944. He became head boy and was an athletic standout: a member of the rugby-football third team, the fives first team, and captain of the cricket team, for which he was a bowler.
After leaving Bedford School in 1944, Fowles enrolled in a Naval Short Course at Edinburgh University and was prepared to receive a commission in the Royal Marines. He completed his training on 8 May 1945—VE Day and was assigned instead to Okehampton Camp in the countryside near Devon for two years.[3]
In 1947 after completing his military service, Fowles entered New College, Oxford, where he studied both French and German, although he stopped studying German and concentrated on French for his BA. Fowles was undergoing a political transformation. Upon leaving the marines, he wrote, "I ... began to hate what I was becoming in life—a British Establishment young hopeful. I decided instead to become a sort of anarchist."[4]
It was also at Oxford that Fowles first considered life as a writer, particularly after reading existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Though Fowles did not identify as an existentialist, their writing was motivated from a feeling that the world was absurd, a feeling he shared.[5]
Teaching career[edit]
Fowles spent his early adult life as a teacher. His first year after Oxford was spent at the University of Poitiers. At the end of the year, he received two offers: one from the French department at Winchester, the other "from a ratty school in Greece," Fowles said: "Of course, I went against all the dictates of common sense and took the Greek job."[6]
In 1951, Fowles became an English master at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on the Peloponnesian island of Spetses (also known as Spetsai). This opened a critical period in his life, as the island was where he met his future wife Elizabeth Christy, née Whitton, wife of fellow teacher Roy Christy. Inspired by his experiences and feelings there, he used it as the setting of his novel, The Magus (1968). Fowles was happy in Greece, especially outside the school. He wrote poems that he later published, and became close to his fellow expatriates. But during 1953, Fowles and the other masters at the school were all dismissed for trying to institute reforms, and Fowles returned to England.[7]
On the island of Spetses, Fowles had developed a relationship with Elizabeth Christy, then married to another teacher. Christy's marriage was already ending because of Fowles. Although they returned to England at the same time, they were no longer in each other's company. It was during this period that Fowles began drafting The Magus.
His separation from Elizabeth did not last long. On 2 April 1954, they were married. Fowles became stepfather to Elizabeth's daughter from her first marriage, Anna. For nearly ten years, Fowles taught English as a foreign language to students from other countries at St. Godric's College, an all-girls in Hampstead, London.[8]
Literary career[edit]
Belmont House – home in Lyme Regis
In late 1960, though he had already drafted The Magus, Fowles began working on The Collector. He finished his first draft in a month, but spent more than a year making revisions before showing it to his agent. Michael S. Howard, the publisher at Jonathan Cape was enthusiastic about the manuscript. The book was published in 1963 and when the paperback rights were sold in the spring of that year, it was "probably the highest price that had hitherto been paid for a first novel," according to Howard. British reviewers found the novel to be an innovative thriller, but several American critics detected a serious promotion of existentialist thought.
The success of his novel meant that Fowles could stop teaching and devote himself full-time to a literary career. The Collector was also optioned and was adapted as a feature film by the same name in 1965.[9] Against the counsel of his publisher, Fowles insisted that his second book published be The Aristos, a non-fiction collection of philosophy essays. Afterward, he set about collating all the drafts he had written of what would become his most studied work, The Magus, based in part on his experiences in Greece.[9]
In 1965 Fowles left London, moving to Underhill, a farm in Dorset. The isolated farm house became the model for The Dairy in the book Fowles was writing: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Finding the farm too remote, as "total solitude gets a bit monotonous," Fowles remarked, in 1968 he and his wife moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset. They lived much of the time in Belmont House (formerly owned by Eleanor Coade), which Fowles used as a setting for parts of The French Lieutenant's Woman.[10]
In the same year, he adapted The Magus for cinema, and the film was released in 1968.[11] The film version of The Magus (1968) was generally considered awful; when Woody Allen was later asked whether he would make changes in his life if he had the opportunity to do it all over again, he jokingly replied he'd do "everything exactly the same, with the exception of watching The Magus."[12]
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) was released to critical and popular success. It was eventually translated into more than ten languages, and established Fowles' international reputation. It was adapted as a feature film in 1981 with a screenplay by the noted British playwright Harold Pinter, and starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. It and Streep were nominated for Oscars; the film and lead actress won BAFTA and Golden Globe awards.
Fowles lived the rest of his life in Lyme Regis. His works The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1981), and A Maggot (1985) were all written from Belmont House.
Joining the comunity, Fowles served as the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1979–1988, retiring from the museum after having a mild stroke. Fowles was involved occasionally in politics in the town He occasionally wrote letters to the editor advocating preservation. Despite this involvement, he was generally considered reclusive.[13]
In 1998, he was quoted in the New York Times Book Review as saying, "Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation."[14]
His first wife Elizabeth died in 1990. With his second wife Sarah by his side, Fowles died 5 miles from Lyme Regis in Axminster Hospital on 5 November 2005.
Major works[edit]
Many critics now consider his work on the cusp between modernism and postmodernism.[15]
List of works[edit]
(1963) The Collector
(1964) The Aristos, essays (ISBN 0-586-05377-8)
(1966) The Magus (revised 1977)
(1969) The French Lieutenant's Woman
(1973) Poems by John Fowles
(1974) The Ebony Tower
(1974) Shipwreck
(1977) Daniel Martin
(1978) Islands
(1979) The Tree
(1980) The Enigma of Stonehenge
(1982) A Short History of Lyme Regis
(1982) Mantissa
(1985) A Maggot
(1985) Land (with Fay Godwin)
(1990) Lyme Regis Camera
(1998) Wormholes - Essays and Occasional Writings
(2003) The Journals – Volume 1
(2006) The Journals – Volume 2"
[Wikipedia.org]
Thursday, 13 March 2014
Bourgeoisie
"The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie":
"In the Middle Ages (AD 500–1500), the bourgeois usually was a self-employed businessman — such as a merchant, banker, or entrepreneur — whose economic role in society was being the financial intermediary to the feudal landlord and the peasant who worked the fief, the land of the lord. Yet, by the 18th century, the time of the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850) and of industrial capitalism, the bourgeoisie had become the economic ruling class who owned the means of production (capital and land), and who controlled the means of coercion (armed forces and legal system, police forces and prison system). In such a society, the bourgeoisie’s ownership of the means of production enabled their employment and exploitation of the wage-earning working class (urban and rural), people whose sole economic means is labour; and the bourgeois control of the means of coercion suppressed the socio-political challenges of the lower classes, and so preserved the economic status quo; workers remained workers, and employers remained employers.[11]
In the 19th century, the German economist Karl Marx distinguished two types of bourgeois capitalist: (i) the functional capitalist, the business administrator of the means of production; and (ii) the rentier capitalist whose livelihood derives either from the rent of property or from the interest-income produced by finance capital, or both.[12] In the course of economic relations, the working class and the bourgeoisie continually engage in class struggle, wherein the capitalists exploit the workers, whilst the workers resist their economic exploitation, which occurs because the worker owns no means of production, and, to earn a living, he or she seeks employment from the bourgeois capitalist; the worker produces goods and services that are property of the employer, who sells them for a price. The money generated by the sale of the goods and services yields three sums (i) the wages of the worker, (ii) the costs of production, and (iii) profit (surplus value). Thereby, the capitalist profits (makes extra money) by selling the surplus value of the labour of the workers; hence is new wealth created through work.
Besides describing the social class who own the means of production, the Marxist usage of the term "bourgeois" also describes the consumerist style of life derived from the ownership of capital and real property. As an economist Karl Marx acknowledged the bourgeois industriousness that created wealth, yet criticised the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie when they ignored the true origins of their wealth — the exploitation of the proletariat, the urban and rural workers. Further sense denotations of “bourgeois” describe ideologic concepts such as “bourgeois freedom”, which is opposed to substantive forms of freedom; “bourgeois independence”; “bourgeois personal individuality”; the “bourgeois family”; etcetera, all derived from owning capital and property. (See: The Communist Manifesto, 1848.)"
[Wikipedia.org]
Besides describing the social class who own the means of production, the Marxist usage of the term "bourgeois" also describes the consumerist style of life derived from the ownership of capital and real property. As an economist Karl Marx acknowledged the bourgeois industriousness that created wealth, yet criticised the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie when they ignored the true origins of their wealth — the exploitation of the proletariat, the urban and rural workers. Further sense denotations of “bourgeois” describe ideologic concepts such as “bourgeois freedom”, which is opposed to substantive forms of freedom; “bourgeois independence”; “bourgeois personal individuality”; the “bourgeois family”; etcetera, all derived from owning capital and property. (See: The Communist Manifesto, 1848.)"
[Wikipedia.org]
Tuesday, 11 March 2014
Friday, 7 March 2014
Monday, 3 March 2014
THE ROLLING STONES
THE ROLLING STONES
I'm listening to THE ROLLING STONES' "Sympathy For The Devil" Live---> Bárbara!XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
"12 YEARS A SLAVE" film by STEVE McQUEEN
"12 YEARS A SLAVE" film by STEVE McQUEEN:
I wanted the film, "12 Years A Slave", by Steve McQueen, won more Oscars, because I think that the argument of "12 Years A Slave" is much more interesting than the "Gravity"'s film theme.
Friday, 21 February 2014
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