Haruki Murakami (* 12. Januar 1949 in Kyoto) ist ein japanischer Autor von Romanen, Erzählungen und Sachbüchern. Sein Stil zeichnet sich durch surrealistische Elemente und Anspielungen auf die Popkultur aus. Obgleich seine Erzählungen in Japan spielen, sind sie durch Vorbilder westlicher Literatur geprägt. Von Rezensenten wurde Murakami wiederholt zu den populärsten und einflussreichsten japanischen Autoren seiner Generation gezählt. Seine Bücher erhielten zahlreiche Literaturpreise, wurden in rund 40 Sprachen übersetzt und zum Teil zu Filmen oder Bühnenstücken adaptiert. Der Autor führte darüber hinaus eine Jazzbar in Tokio, betätigte sich als Übersetzer amerikanischer Literatur und hatte vier Jahre lang Gastprofessuren an US-amerikanischen Universitäten inne.
Kenneth Duva Burke (* 5. Mai 1897 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; † 19. November 1993 in Andover) war ein amerikanischer Schriftsteller, Literatur- und Kommunikationstheoretiker.
Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Furthermore, he was one of the first individuals to stray away from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action." Burke was unorthodox, concerning himself not only with literary texts, but with the elements of the text that interacted with the audience: social, historical, political background, author biography, etc. For his career, Burke has been praised by The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism as "one of the most unorthodox, challenging, and theoretically sophisticated American-born literary critics of the twentieth century." His work continues to be discussed by rhetoricians and philosophers.
John Peter Berger (born 5 November 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text. He has resided in France for over 50 years.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (* 24. September 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota; † 21. Dezember 1940 in Hollywood, Los Angeles) war ein US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller. Sein erster Roman This Side of Paradise (Diesseits vom Paradies), den er als 23-Jähriger Ende März 1920 veröffentlichte, machte ihn in kurzer Zeit berühmt. Gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Zelda Sayre führte er in den 1920er Jahren ein exzessives Leben. Das Ehepaar wurde in der US-amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit als typische Vertreter ihrer Generation wahrgenommen. Bereits in den 1930er Jahren war F. Scott Fitzgerald jedoch weitgehend in Vergessenheit geraten. Dazu trugen auch sein Alkoholismus und die psychische Erkrankung seiner Frau bei. F. Scott Fitzgerald starb 1940 im Alter von nur 44 Jahren in der Überzeugung, sein Lebensziel verfehlt zu haben, sich als bedeutender Autor seiner Zeit zu beweisen.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (* 24. September 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota; † 21. Dezember 1940 in Hollywood, Los Angeles) war ein US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller. Sein erster Roman This Side of Paradise (Diesseits vom Paradies), den er als 23-Jähriger Ende März 1920 veröffentlichte, machte ihn in kurzer Zeit berühmt. Gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Zelda Sayre führte er in den 1920er Jahren ein exzessives Leben. Das Ehepaar wurde in der US-amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit als typische Vertreter ihrer Generation wahrgenommen. Bereits in den 1930er Jahren war F. Scott Fitzgerald jedoch weitgehend in Vergessenheit geraten. Dazu trugen auch sein Alkoholismus und die psychische Erkrankung seiner Frau bei. F. Scott Fitzgerald starb 1940 im Alter von nur 44 Jahren in der Überzeugung, sein Lebensziel verfehlt zu haben, sich als bedeutender Autor seiner Zeit zu beweisen.
John Dos Passos (* 14. Januar 1896 in Chicago; † 28. September 1970 in Baltimore) war ein amerikanischer Schriftsteller. Er gilt neben Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner und F. Scott Fitzgerald als einer der Hauptvertreter der amerikanischen Moderne.
Susan Sontag, geborene Rosenblatt (* 16. Januar 1933 in New York City, New York; † 28. Dezember 2004 ebenda) war eine amerikanische Schriftstellerin, Essayistin, Publizistin und Regisseurin. Sie war bekannt für ihren Einsatz für Menschenrechte sowie als Kritikerin der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse und der Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika.
John Peter Berger (born 5 November 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text. Wikipedia
Photography from Wikipedia
Octavio Paz Lozano (* 31. März 1914 in Mixcoac, heute Mexiko-Stadt; † 20. April 1998 in Mexiko-Stadt) war ein mexikanischer Schriftsteller und Diplomat. Er erhielt 1990 den Nobelpreis für Literatur.
Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, Communist and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department.
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine. Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years".[1] With his suicide, he left behind an unfinished novel, The Pale King, which was subsequently published in 2011, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which was not awarded that year.
William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After graduating from Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Conrad Potter Aiken (* 5. August 1889 in Savannah, Georgia; † 17. August 1973 ebenda) war ein US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller, ein Verfasser von Gedichten, Romanen, Erzählungen, eines Dramas und einer Autobiographie.
Peter Gay (* 20. Juni 1923 in Berlin als Peter Joachim Fröhlich) ist ein US-amerikanischer Historiker, Psychoanalytiker und Autor. 1939 emigrierte Gay aufgrund seiner jüdischen Herkunft über Kuba in die USA und lebt seit 1941 in New York City. Seit 1969 war Gay Professor für Geschichte an der Yale University (emeritiert seit 1993) und Direktor des Dorothy and Lewis B. Calman Centers für Wissenschaftler und Schriftsteller an der New York Public Library.
Sir William Gerald Golding (* 19. September 1911 in St. Columb Minor, Cornwall; † 19. Juni 1993 in Perranarworthal, Cornwall) war ein britischer Schriftsteller und 1983 der Träger des Nobelpreises für Literatur.
Octavio Paz Lozano * 31. März 1914 in Mixcoac, heute Mexiko-Stadt; † 20. April 1998 in Mexiko-Stadt) war ein mexikanischer Schriftsteller und Diplomat. Er erhielt 1990 den Nobelpreis für Literatur.
Chinua Achebe (born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, 16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. He was best known for his first novel and magnum opus Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Novelist Chinua Achebe dies, aged 82 Nigerian author recognised for key role in developing African literature has died in Boston, where he was working as a professor Alison Flood, The Guardian, 22 Marchj 2013
Raymond Williams (* 31. August 1921 in Llanfihangel Crucorney, Wales; † 26. Januar 1988) war ein äußerst einflussreicher marxistischer Wissenschaftler, Autor und Kritiker.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, also known as Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Tess of the d'Urbervilles or just Tess, is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper, The Graphic. Though now considered an important work of English literature, the book received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardy's day. The original manuscript is on display at the British Library, showing that it was originally titled "Daughter of the d'Urbervilles." In 2003, the novel was listed at number 26 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
Wikipedia
Read here the chapter XIX:
TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES
A Pure Woman
Faithfully presented by
Thomas Hardy
XIX
In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without fancy
or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a particular pair of
hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to refuse to stand at all
except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being unceremoniously kicked
over.
It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these partialities
and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise, in the event of a
milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was placed in a difficulty. The
maids' private aims, however, were the reverse of the dairyman's rule, the
daily selection by each damsel of the eight or ten cows to which she had grown
accustomed rendering the operation on their willing udders surprisingly easy
and effortless.
Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a preference
for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having become delicate from the
long domiciliary imprisonments to which she had subjected herself at intervals
during the last two or three years, she would have been glad to meet the
milchers' views in this respect. Out of the whole ninety-five there were eight
in particular—Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and
Loud—who, though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots, gave down to
her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the fingers.
Knowing, however, the dairyman's wish, she endeavoured conscientiously to take
the animals just as they came, expecting the very hard yielders which she could
not yet manage.
But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly chance
position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she felt that their
order could not be the result of accident. The dairyman's pupil had lent a hand
in getting the cows together of late, and at the fifth or sixth time she turned
her eyes, as she rested against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.
"Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said, blushing; and in
making the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper lip in spite
of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip remaining severely
still.
"Well, it makes no difference," said he. "You will always be
here to milk them."
"Do you think so? I hope I shall! But I don't know."
She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her
grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her meaning. She
had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were somehow a factor in her
wish. Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when the milking was over, she
walked in the garden alone, to continue her regrets that she had disclosed to
him her discovery of his considerateness.
It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such
delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed endowed
with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction between the
near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the horizon.
The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the mere
negation of noise. It was broken by the strumming of strings.
Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened,
constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as now, when
they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that of nudity. To
speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were poor; but the relative is
all, and as she listened Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not leave the
spot. Far from leaving she drew up towards the performer, keeping behind the
hedge that he might not guess her presence.
The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left
uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which
sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting
offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome
as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through
this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking
snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and
slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though
snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she
drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.
Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had
described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now without any
determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand
harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into
her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the
dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility. Though near
nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for
intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.
The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the
western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by accident, dusk
having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive melody, a very simple
performance, demanding no great skill; and she waited, thinking another might be
begun. But, tired of playing, he had desultorily come round the fence, and was
rambling up behind her. Tess, her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if
hardly moving at all.
Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low tones reaching
her, though he was some distance off.
"What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?" said he. "Are
you afraid?"
"Oh no, sir—not of outdoor things; especially just now when the
apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green."
"But you have your indoor fears—eh?"
"Well—yes, sir."
"What of?"
"I couldn't quite say."
"The milk turning sour?"
"No."
"Life in general?"
"Yes, sir."
"Ah—so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather
serious, don't you think so?"
"It is—now you put it that way."
"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see
it so just yet. How is it you do?"
She maintained a hesitating silence.
"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."
She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and
replied shyly—
"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?—that is, seem as if
they had. And the river says,—'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you
seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the
biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand
farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm
coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!' … But you, sir, can raise up dreams
with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"
He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but a milkmaid had just
that touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied of her
housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her own native
phrases—assisted a little by her Sixth Standard training—feelings which might
almost have been called those of the age—the ache of modernism. The perception
arrested him less when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are
really in great part but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate
expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and
women have vaguely grasped for centuries.
Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so young;
more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not guessing the
cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and
not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal blight had been her mental
harvest.
Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and
good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap to be
alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good reason. But how
could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the Valley of Humiliation,
have felt with the man of Uz—as she herself had felt two or three years
ago—"My soul chooseth strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe
it; I would not live alway."
It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that was
only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard, he was studying what
he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was obliged to milk cows,
but because he was learning to be a rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner,
agriculturist, and breeder of cattle. He would become an American or Australian
Abraham, commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and
his ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids. At times, nevertheless, it
did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young
man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like
his father and brothers.
Thus, neither having the clue to the other's
secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new
knowledge of each other's character and mood without attempting to pry into
each other's history.
Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature,
and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she
little divined the strength of her own vitality.
At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as
a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every discovery of the
abundance of his illuminations, of the distance between her own modest mental
standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean altitude of his, she became quite
dejected, disheartened from all further effort on her own part whatever.
He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned something
to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was gathering the buds
called "lords and ladies" from the bank while he spoke.
"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.
"Oh, 'tis only—about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of
sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile. "Just a
sense of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted
for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen,
and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I'm like the poor Queen of Sheba who
lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in me."
"Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that! Why," he said with
some enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to
anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like to take
up—"
"It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the bud she had
peeled.
"What?"
"I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to
peel them."
"Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any
course of study—history, for example?"
"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I
know already."
"Why not?"
"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—finding
out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know
that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to
remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands'
and thousands', and that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands's
and thousands'."
"What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"
"I shouldn't mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the
unjust alike," she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice. "But
that's what books will not tell me."
"Tess, fie for such bitterness!" Of course he spoke with a
conventional sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been
unknown to himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth
and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have caught up
the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and ladies till Clare,
regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her lashes as they dropped with
her bent gaze on her soft cheek, lingeringly went away. When he was gone she
stood awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud; and then, awakening from her
reverie, flung it and all the crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the
ground, in an ebullition of displeasure with herself for her niaiserie,
and with a quickening warmth in her heart of hearts.
How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for his good opinion
she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to forget, so
unpleasant had been its issues—the identity of her family with that of the
knightly d'Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was, disastrous as its discovery
had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student of
history, would respect her sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the
lords and ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in
Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no
spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at
Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.
But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly
sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by asking the
former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county families when they had
lost all their money and land.
"Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of the
most rebellest rozums you ever knowed—not a bit like the rest of his family;
and if there's one thing that he do hate more than another 'tis the notion of
what's called a' old family. He says that it stands to reason that old families
have done their spurt of work in past days, and can't have anything left in 'em
now. There's the Billets and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St Quintins
and the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down this
valley; you could buy 'em all up now for an old song a'most. Why, our little
Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the Paridelles—the old family that used
to own lots o' the lands out by King's Hintock, now owned by the Earl o' Wessex, afore
even he or his was heard of. Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke quite
scornful to the poor girl for days. 'Ah!' he says to her, 'you'll never make a
good dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a
thousand years to git strength for more deeds!' A boy came here t'other day
asking for a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname
he said he'd never heard that 'a had any surname, and when we asked why, he
said he supposed his folks hadn't been 'stablished long enough. 'Ah! you're the
very boy I want!' says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi'en; 'I've
great hopes of you;' and gave him half-a-crown. O no! he can't stomach old
families!"
After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor Tess was glad that she
had not said a word in a weak moment about her family—even though it was so
unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and become a new one.
Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that respect. She
held her tongue about the d'Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror
whose name she bore. The insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to
her that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she
had won interest in his eyes.
Haruki Murakami (* 12. Januar 1949 in Kyoto) ist ein japanischer Autor von Romanen, Erzählungen und Sachbüchern. Sein Stil zeichnet sich durch surrealistische Elemente und Anspielungen auf die Popkultur aus. Obgleich seine Erzählungen in Japan spielen, sind sie durch Vorbilder westlicher Literatur geprägt. Von Rezensenten wurde Murakami wiederholt zu den populärsten und einflussreichsten japanischen Autoren seiner Generation gezählt. Seine Bücher erhielten zahlreiche Literaturpreise, wurden in rund 40 Sprachen übersetzt und zum Teil zu Filmen oder Bühnenstücken adaptiert. Der Autor führte darüber hinaus eine Jazzbar in Tokio, betätigte sich als Übersetzer amerikanischer Literatur und hatte vier Jahre lang Gastprofessuren an US-amerikanischen Universitäten inne.
