British Culture - User contributions [en]

A Room of One's Own

2012-01-18T18:50:32Z

ElizaDoolittle:

Essay by the famous British writer [[Virginia Woolf]] first published in 1929.

It is not Virginia Woolf's only work of literary criticism but her longest. It is based on lectures on women and fiction held by Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University in October 1928 and an essay entitled ‘Women and Fiction’. The drafts already contained the central ideas which will later become ''A Room Of One's Own''. The sales of ''A Room of One's Own'' were extremely good. The essay was published in 1929 and by December of the same year more copies had been sold than of Woolf's ''[[Orlando]]'', published in 1928.

''A Room of One's Own'' is the starting point for many debates not only about literary criticism and modernity but also about issues dealt with in the feminist movement such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy. The controversies caused by Woolf’s essay were not only due to the topicality of her ideas but also to the contradictions in her theses.

In this essay, Woolf elaborates on the conditions which are necessary for women to write. By doing that, she identifies three spheres of obstacles:

1. Material: A woman needs money, education and the time to write. Domestic commitments also prevent her from writing. Additionally, she needs a room of her own where she can work. Woolf claims that writing is a physical process and not divinely given. This means that one has not necessarily to be male and white in order to write. The problem is, as she explains, that Judith Shakespeare, an imaginary sister of Shakespeare having the same faculties as him, would not have had the same opportunities as him in a society dominated by men.

2. Cultural and paedagogical: A woman, in order to write, must give up cultural artefacts and role models like the Victorian ‘Angel of the House’. Sex is an impediment. She develops a concept of androgyny which is based on Coleridge, saying that a good writer does not think of his or her sex at all. In order to use all his or her faculties, the writer has to fuse woman and man in his or her mind. This is then called state of androgyny.

3. Tradition: According to Woolf, there is no tradition of female writers in the 19th century. Uncovering and acknowledging the canon of women’s writing is a precondition for women writing poetry. She also criticises the representation of women in literature, arguing for a representation which is not determined by male writers.

----
Sources:

Mephem, John. ''Virginia Woolf. A Literary Life.'' London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.

Goldman, Jane. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf.'' Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

A Room of One's Own

2012-01-16T22:11:01Z

ElizaDoolittle:

Essay by the famous British writer [[Virginia Woolf]] first published in 1929.

It is not Virginia Woolf's only work of literary criticism but her longest. It is based on lectures on women and fiction held by Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University in October 1928 and an essay entitled ‘Women and Fiction’. The drafts already contained the central ideas which will later become ''A Room Of One's Own''. The sales of ''A Room of One's Own'' were extremely good. The essay was published in 1929 and by December of the same year more copies had been sold than of Woolf's ''[[Orlando]]'', published in 1928.

''A Room of One's Own'' is the starting point for many debates not only about literary criticism and modernity but also about issues dealt with in the feminist movement such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy. The controversies caused by Woolf’s essay were not only due to the topicality of her ideas but also to the contradictions in her theses.

In this essay, Woolf elaborates on the conditions which are necessary for women to write. By doing that, she identifies three spheres of obstacles:

1. Material: A woman needs money, education and the time to write. Domestic commitments also prevent her from writing. Additionally, she needs a room of her own where she can work. Woolf claims that writing is a physical process and not divinely given. This means that one has not necessarily to be male and white in order to write. The problem is, as she explains, that Judith Shakespeare, an imaginary sister of Shakespeare having the same faculties as him, would not have the same opportunities as him in a society dominated by men.

2. Cultural and paedagogical: A woman, in order to write, must give up cultural artefacts and role models like the Victorian ‘Angel of the House’. Sex is an impediment. She develops a concept of adrogynity which is based on Coleridge, saying that a good writer does not think of his or her sex at all. In order to use all his or her faculties, the writer has to fuse woman and man in his or her mind. This is then called state of androgynity.

3. Tradition: According to Woolf, there is no tradition of female writers in the 19th century. Uncovering and acknowledging the canon of women’s writing is a precondition for women writing poetry. She also criticises the representation of women in literature, arguing for a representation which is not determined by male writers.

----
Sources:

Mephem, John. ''Virginia Woolf. A Literary Life.'' London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.

Goldman, Jane. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf.'' Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

A Room of One's Own

2012-01-16T22:10:15Z

ElizaDoolittle:

Essay by the famous British writer [[Virginia Woolf]] first published in 1929.

It is not Virginia Woolf's only work of literary criticism but her longest. It is based on lectures on women and fiction held by Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University in October 1928 and an essay entitled ‘Women and Fiction’. The drafts already contained the central ideas which will later become ''A Room Of One's Own''. The sales of ''A Room of One's Own'' were extremely good. The essay was published in 1929 and by December of the same year more copies had been sold than of Woolf's ''Orlando'', published in 1928.

''A Room of One's Own'' is the starting point for many debates not only about literary criticism and modernity but also about issues dealt with in the feminist movement such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy. The controversies caused by Woolf’s essay were not only due to the topicality of her ideas but also to the contradictions in her theses.

In this essay, Woolf elaborates on the conditions which are necessary for women to write. By doing that, she identifies three spheres of obstacles:

1. Material: A woman needs money, education and the time to write. Domestic commitments also prevent her from writing. Additionally, she needs a room of her own where she can work. Woolf claims that writing is a physical process and not divinely given. This means that one has not necessarily to be male and white in order to write. The problem is, as she explains, that Judith Shakespeare, an imaginary sister of Shakespeare having the same faculties as him, would not have the same opportunities as him in a society dominated by men.

2. Cultural and paedagogical: A woman, in order to write, must give up cultural artefacts and role models like the Victorian ‘Angel of the House’. Sex is an impediment. She develops a concept of adrogynity which is based on Coleridge, saying that a good writer does not think of his or her sex at all. In order to use all his or her faculties, the writer has to fuse woman and man in his or her mind. This is then called state of androgynity.

3. Tradition: According to Woolf, there is no tradition of female writers in the 19th century. Uncovering and acknowledging the canon of women’s writing is a precondition for women writing poetry. She also criticises the representation of women in literature, arguing for a representation which is not determined by male writers.

----
Sources:

Mephem, John. ''Virginia Woolf. A Literary Life.'' London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.

Goldman, Jane. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf.'' Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

A Room of One's Own

2012-01-16T22:09:56Z

ElizaDoolittle:

Essay by the famous British writer [[Virginia Woolf]] first published in 1929.

It is not Virginia Woolf's only work of literary criticism but her longest. It is based on lectures on women and fiction held by Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University in October 1928 and an essay entitled ‘Women and Fiction’. The drafts already contained the central ideas which will later become ''A Room Of One's Own''. The sales of ''A Room of One's Own'' were extremely good. The essay was published in 1929 and by December of the same year more copies had been sold than of Woolf's ''Orlando'', published in 1928.

''A Room of One's Own'' is the starting point for many debates not only about literary criticism and modernity but also about issues dealt with in the feminist movement such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy. The controversies caused by Woolf’s essay were not only due to the topicality of her ideas but also to the contradictions in her theses.

In this essay, Woolf elaborates on the conditions which are necessary for women to write. By doing that, she identifies three spheres of obstacles:

1. Material: A woman needs money, education and the time to write. Domestic commitments also prevent her from writing. Additionally, she needs a room of her own where she can work. Woolf claims that writing is a physical process and not divinely given. This means that one has not necessarily to be male and white in order to write. The problem is, as she explains, that Judith Shakespeare, an imaginary sister of Shakespeare having the same faculties as him, would not have the same opportunities as him in a society dominated by men.

2. Cultural and paedagogical: A woman, in order to write, must give up cultural artefacts and role models like the Victorian ‘Angel of the House’. Sex is an impediment. She develops a concept of adrogynity which is based on Coleridge, saying that a good writer does not think of his or her sex at all. In order to use all his or her faculties, the writer has to fuse woman and man in his or her mind. This is then called state of androgynity.

3. Tradition: According to Woolf, there is no tradition of female writers in the 19th century. Uncovering and acknowledging the canon of women’s writing is a precondition for women writing poetry. She also criticises the representation of women in literature, arguing for a representation which is not determined by male writers.

----
Sources:

Mephem, John. ''Virginia Woolf. A Literary Life.'' London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.
Goldman, Jane. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf.'' Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

Ferdinand de Saussure

2011-11-28T20:39:03Z

ElizaDoolittle:

== Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) ==

== Biography ==

Saussure was a Swiss linguist who was born into a family of intellectuals primarily devoted to the natural sciences such as physics and chemistry. Following the family tradition, he started studying chemistry and physics but soon gave preference to philosophy and philology, i.e. Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, whose discovery by Sir William Jones in 1876 was a sensation. In 1876, at the age of 19, he was admitted access to Societé Linguistique de Paris, an elitist circle where linguistic matters were presented and discussed. He studied in Berlin and Leipzig under August Leskien and Friedrich Zarncke who were the leading linguists at that time; he also published his first book “Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes” at the age of 21. In 1880 he finished working on his dissertation entitled “De l’emploi du Genitif absolu en Sanskrit”. After ten years of teaching at “École pratique des hautes Études” in Paris he finally returned to Geneva where he was offered an associate professorship for the history and comparison of Indoeuropean languages. In the academic year of 1906/1907 he took the chair of general linguistics at the University of Geneva and held his famous lectures which would later be published as “Course in General Linguistics” by his successors Charles Bally and Albert Sechaye after his death in 1916. It is interesting to note that he did not study linguistics but later held the chair of general linguistics.

== Course in General Linguistics: History of Origin and Basic Ideas ==

From 1906 to 1911 Saussure held three lectures on linguistic matters. He never prepared a fully enunciated manuscript so that when Sechaye and Bally decided to make his findings available to the public, they needed to reconstruct the lectures through notes made by Saussure's students. They collected fragments and compared notes in order to build a whole image of Saussure's thought.

Saussure's ideas, although not all of them completely new, became fundamental elements of modern linguistics.

* The Nature of Signs: Signifiant, Signifié and Arbitrariness
* Langage, Langue, Parole
* Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations
* Synchronic and diachronic axes
* Valeur

== Selected Works ==
* “Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes” (1878/79)
* “De l’emploi du Genitif absolu en Sanskrit” (1880)
* “Course in General Linguistics" (1916)

== Sources ==
* Amsterdamska, Olga. Schools of thought: the development of linguistics from Bopp to Saussure. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987.
* Arens, Hans. Sprachwissenschaft. Der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969.
* Helbig, Gerhard. Geschichte der neuen Sprachwissenschaft. Unter dem besonderen Aspekt der Grammatik-Theorie. München: Huber, 1973.
* Yule, George. The Study of Language. Third Edition. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

A Room of One's Own

2011-11-28T10:49:50Z

ElizaDoolittle:

''A Room of One's Own'' (1929) is an essay by the famous British writer [[Virginia Woolf]].

A Room of One's Own

2011-11-28T10:43:03Z

ElizaDoolittle: Created page with '''A Room of One's Own'' (1929) is an essay by the famous British writer Viginia Woolf.'

''A Room of One's Own'' (1929) is an essay by the famous British writer Viginia Woolf.

George Bernard Shaw

2011-11-28T10:21:05Z

ElizaDoolittle: /* Significance for 19th-century British culture */

1856-1950. Highly influential dramatist, novelist, and music critic.

== Life ==

Shaw was born in 1856 in Dublin. Having spent a somewhat unfulfilled youth in Ireland, Shaw moved to London in 1876. He had started writing a few years earlier, but was unable to have any of his first five novels published.
In 1884 he joined the [[Fabian Society]], for which he wrote many well-known socialist essays. Furthermore, he began to make a name for himself by writing music reviews for ''Star Magazine'' in 1888, as well as drama reviews for the ''Saturday Review'' in 1895. Towards the turn of the century, he then began to focus more intensively on writing plays, with which he ultimately made his name. In turn, this led to his earlier works becoming more widely known, too.

Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. And died in 1950.

== Significance for 19th-century British culture ==

Though he hardly ever addressed them explicitly, Shaw indubitably touches upon many cultural issues of the 19th century in his plays. He reflects upon topics such as socialism, class struggle, family structures, prostitution, and vaccination. As his publications cover such a wide variety of subject matter and a lengthy time span, he is said to have influenced the mentality of several generations.

Some of his best-known works:

''[[Mrs Warren's Profession]]'' (1898)

''Arms and the Man'' (1898)

''Man and Superman'' (1903)

''[[Pygmalion]]'' (1916)

''The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism'' (1928)

== Sources ==

Encyclopaedia Britannica: George Bernard Shaw. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc: 1976.

Magnusson, Magnus (Ed): ''Chambers Biographical Dictionary.'' 5th ed. Edinburgh: W&R Chambers, 1990.