William Golding

Introduction

William Golding

Imagine a man who embraced solitude as a child but who became famous for writing about group dynamics. Imagine a man who enjoyed the benefits of a peaceful adolescence, complete with private schooling, but who spent his adult years writing about the inherent violent nature of humans. Imagine a man who was groomed by his parents to be a scientist but who ended up as one of the greatest writers of his time. Imagine William Golding. Raised by educated parents who supported rational thought, Golding used his experiences from World War II to create novels of dark human action. Nothing in Golding’s past suggests that he should become the foremost author of the twentieth century to write about the conflict between barbaric human nature and civil reasoning; his novels, however, continue to entertain and raise those same questions today.

Essential Facts

1. During his five-year military career, Golding was a participant in both the sinking of the great German battleship, the Bismarck, and in the allied invasion of Normandy.
2. Golding’s most famous novel, The Lord of the Flies, was originally titled The Strangers Within and was published twenty-nine years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
3. Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers before acceptance by Faber and Faber.
4. One of Golding’s hobbies was researching and exploring the myth of the Loch Ness monster.
5. Golding was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.

http://www.enotes.com/authors/william-golding

Harold Pinter

Introduction

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter began his career as an actor, but he quickly turned his attention to writing and became one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and important playwrights. Pinter loves to play with words, and many of his works feature witty banter between characters interspersed with long pauses. Pinter did not originally want to be categorized as a political writer, but in the 1980s, his work took on a decidedly leftist tone. Pinter’s personal life has been as stormy as that of many of his characters. He was married to actress Vivien Merchant for several years, and they had one son. He then embarked on several long affairs, which cost him his marriage and the love and respect of his son.

Essential Facts

1. Harold Pinter’s stage name as an actor was David Baron.
2. Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the Legion d’honneur in 2007.
3. Pinter is a huge cricket fan. He has said, “One of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket—I play and watch and read about it all the time.”
4. Pinter has been vocal about his politics and was once thrown out of the U.S. embassy in Turkey.
5. Pinter publicly announced in 2005 that he was retiring from playwriting. Since then, he has written a screenplay, short dramatic sketches, and a great deal of poetry.

http://www.enotes.com/authors/harold-pinter

James Joyce

Introduction

James Joyce

One of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century, James Joyce suffered from an incurable case of wanderlust. During his 58 years, he lived in many different parts of the world. He began his life in Dublin, Ireland, which was the setting for most of his great fiction. In 1903, he moved to Paris, but returned to Dublin a year later when his mother was dying. He remained in Dublin long enough to marry Nora Barnacle, a maid at a Dublin hotel. Shortly thereafter, Joyce moved to Zurich and then on to Trieste where he stayed for a decade teaching English and writing. Joyce’s life was a troubled one with bouts of alcoholism, depression, and poverty. Despite his problems, he managed to write many influential pieces of literature: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, the short story collection Dubliners, and a somewhat autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Essential Facts

1. Joyce was attacked by a dog as a young boy and ended up with a severe canine phobia that persisted throughout his life. He was also afraid of thunderstorms because his grandmother once told him storms were a sign of God’s wrath.
2. Dedham, Massachusetts, hosts an annual James Joyce Ramble, which is a 10K race. Each mile is dedicated to one of Joyce’s works, and actors in period costumes line the streets and read from his novels as the runners pass.
3. The last story in Joyce’s Dubliners collection, “The Dead,” was made into a film in 1987 by director John Huston. It was Huston’s last major film before he died.
4. Joyce’s grandson, Stephen, has supposedly destroyed many letters written by his grandfather. He has also blocked what he considers “inappropriate” adaptations of his grandfather’s work.
5. The library at the University College in Dublin is named after James Joyce.

http://www.enotes.com/authors/james-joyce

mashhad

Mashhad (Persian: مشهد from Arabic: مشهد‎, ‹Mašhad›, literally the place of martyrdom)^[3][4] is the second largest city in Iran and one of the holiest cities in the Shia Muslim world. It is also the only major Iranian city with an Arabic name. It is located 850 kilometres (530 mi) east of Tehran, at the center of the Razavi Khorasan Province close to the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Its population was 2,427,316 at the 2006 population census.^[1]

Now Mashhad is notably known as the resting place of the Imam Reza. A shrine was later built there to commemorate the Imam, which in turn gave rise to increasing demographic development.

Mashhad is also known as the city of Ferdowsi, the eminent Iranian poet of Shahnameh, which is considered to be the national epic of Iran.

tabriz

Tabriz (Persian/Azerbaijani:تبریز) is the most populated city in Iranian Azerbaijan, it is fourth largest city in Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quri River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former capitals, and residence of the crown prince under the Qajar dynasty. The city has proven extremely influential in the country’s recent history. Tabriz is located in a valley to the north of the long ridge of the volcanic cone of Sahand, south of the Eynali mountain. The valley opens out into a plain that slopes gently down to the northern end of Lake Urmia, 60 km to the west. With cold winters and temperate summers the city is considered a summer resort.

The estimated population of the city is around 1,400,000^[1] based on results of the Iranian census bureau. Tabriz is the fourth most populated city in Iran after Tehran, Mashhad, and Esfahan, while also being a major Iranian heavy industrial and manufacturing center. Some of these industries include automobile, machine tools, oil and petrochemical and cement production.^[2]

With a rich history, Tabriz contains many historical monuments, which repeated devastating earthquakes have substantially damaged. Monuments date back to the Ilkhanid, Safavid, and Qajar periods^[3][4][5], with the large Tabriz Historic Bazaar Complex being named as a World Heritage Site in 2010.

tabriz

Tabriz (Persian/Azerbaijani:تبریز) is the most populated city in Iranian Azerbaijan, it is fourth largest city in Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quri River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former capitals, and residence of the crown prince under the Qajar dynasty. The city has proven extremely influential in the country’s recent history. Tabriz is located in a valley to the north of the long ridge of the volcanic cone of Sahand, south of the Eynali mountain. The valley opens out into a plain that slopes gently down to the northern end of Lake Urmia, 60 km to the west. With cold winters and temperate summers the city is considered a summer resort.

The estimated population of the city is around 1,400,000^[1] based on results of the Iranian census bureau. Tabriz is the fourth most populated city in Iran after Tehran, Mashhad, and Esfahan, while also being a major Iranian heavy industrial and manufacturing center. Some of these industries include automobile, machine tools, oil and petrochemical and cement production.^[2]

With a rich history, Tabriz contains many historical monuments, which repeated devastating earthquakes have substantially damaged. Monuments date back to the Ilkhanid, Safavid, and Qajar periods^[3][4][5], with the large Tabriz Historic Bazaar Complex being named as a World Heritage Site in 2010

Formalism

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.

In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.

Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead placed the text itself back into the spotlight, to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1948, 1955, 1962).

Beginning in the late 1970s, formalism was substantially displaced by various approaches (often with political aims or assumptions) that were suspicious of the idea that a literary work could be separated from its origins or uses.^{[citation needed]} The term has often had a pejorative cast and has been used by opponents to indicate either aridity or ideological deviance.^{[citation needed]} Some recent trends in academic literary criticism suggest that formalism may be making a comeback

Schools of Criticism

Schools of Criticism

Suppose we bear that question in mind in surveying the various schools of criticism. There are many, but could perhaps be grouped as:

Traditional

Though perhaps Edwardian in style, this approach — essentially one of trying to broaden understanding and appreciation — is still used in general surveys of English literature. There is usually some information on the writer and his times, and a little illustration, but no close analysis of the individual work or its aims.

New Criticism

The poem (the approach works best for poetry, and especially the lyric) is detached from its biographical or historical context, and analyzed thoroughly: diction, imagery, meanings, particularly complexities of meaning. Some explanation of unfamiliar words and/or uses may be allowed, but the poem is otherwise expected to stand on its own feet, as though it were a contemporary production.

Rhetorical

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and the rhetorical approach attempts to understand how the content of the poem, which is more than intellectual meaning, is put across. How arguments are presented, attitudes struck, evidence marshalled, various appeals made to the reader — all are relevant.