Friday, 23 January 2015

January 23rd 2015 Nobel Laureate week on Arthur book JB

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Thursday, 22 January 2015

Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott.jpg
Walcott at an honorary dinner in Amsterdam, 20 May 2008
BornDerek Alton Walcott
23 January 1930 (age 84)
Castries, Saint Lucia
OccupationPoet, playwright, professor
NationalitySaint Lucian
GenrePoetry and plays
Notable worksOmeros
Notable awardsNobel Prize in Literature
1992
T. S. Eliot Prize
2011
ChildrenPeter Walcott, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Anna Walcott-Hardy
Signature
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC (born 23 January 1930) is a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1] He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros(1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement."[2][3] In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, aMacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature[4] and the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets.[5]

Early life and education[edit]

Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies with a twin brother, the future playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of African and European descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island which he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house.[6] His father, who painted and wrote poetry, died at age 31 from mastoiditis while his wife was pregnant with the twins Derek and Roderick, who were born after his death.[6] Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule.
As a young man Walcott trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons, whose life as a professional artist provided an inspiring example for him. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them.[6]
He studied as a writer, becoming “an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English” and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.[3] Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. In the poem "Midsummer" (1984), he wrote:
Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that
the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,
that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.[6]
At 14, Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem in the newspaper, The Voice of St Lucia. An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper.[6] By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs.[7] He later commented,
I went to my mother and said, 'I’d like to publish a book of poems, and I think it’s going to cost me two hundred dollars.' She was just a seamstress and a schoolteacher, and I remember her being very upset because she wanted to do it. Somehow she got it—a lot of money for a woman to have found on her salary. She gave it to me, and I sent off to Trinidad and had the book printed. When the books came back I would sell them to friends. I made the money back.[6]
The influential Bajan poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.[6]
With a scholarship, he studied at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.[8]

Career[edit]

After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist.[8] Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remains active with its Board of Directors.[7]
Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962) attracted international attention.[3]His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. In 1971 it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Companyoff-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play".[9] The following year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government for his work.[10]
He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis and retiring in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including the Russian Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the US after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irish Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.
His epic poem, Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from The Iliad, has been critically praised "as Walcott's major achievement."[2] The book received praise from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose the book as one of its "Best Books of 1990".
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the first Caribbean writer to receive the honor. The Nobel committee described his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”[3] He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[11] for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.
His later poetry collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolors;[12] The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the T.S. Eliot Prize.[3][8]
In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex.[13]

Oxford Professor of Poetry candidacy[edit]

In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. He withdrew his candidacy after reports of documented accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996.[14] (The latter case was settled by Boston University out of court.)[15] When the media learned that pages from an American book on the topic were sent anonymously to a number of Oxford academics, their interest was aroused in the university decisions.[16][17]
Ruth Padel, also a leading candidate, was elected to the post. Within days, The Daily Telegraph reported that she had alerted journalists to the harassment cases.[18][19] Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned.[18][20] Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and journalists including Libby Purves, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the American Macy Halford and the Canadian Suzanne Gardner attributed the criticism of her to misogyny[21][22] and a gender war at Oxford. They said that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported published information, not rumor.[23][24]
Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez, published a letter of support for Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furore.[25] Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair, because the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination".[26] Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation.[27][28]

Writing[edit]

Wall poem Omeros in Leiden
Wall poem Midsummer, Tobago in The Hague

Themes[edit]

Methodism and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work. He commented, "I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation." Describing his writing process, he wrote, "the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the ecstasy...Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature."[6] He also notes, "if one thinks a poem is coming on...you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity."[6]

Influences[edit]

Walcott has said his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who were also friends.[6]

Playwriting[edit]

He has published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them address, either directly or indirectly, the liminal status of the West Indies in the post-colonial period. Through poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.

Essays[edit]

In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: “We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another". The epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers. Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonised person.
Walcott notes of growing up in West Indian culture:
"What we were deprived of was also our privilege. There was a great joy in making a world that so far, up to then, had been undefined... My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and, simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done—by a Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson." [6]
Walcott identifies as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage.[6] In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later work as well. He writes, "If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a non-existent past, then time passes us by."[6]

Omeros[edit]

Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters fromThe Iliad. Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen, the blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself.
Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts(where Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition) and the character Achille imagines a voyage from Africa onto a slave ship that's headed for the Americas; also, in Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities around the world, including Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome, andToronto.
Composed in a variation on terza rima, the work explores the themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in a post-colonial world.[29]

Criticism and praise[edit]

Walcott's work has received praise from major poets including Robert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries",[30] and Joseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."[31] Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience".

Awards and honours[edit]

List of works[edit]

Poetry collections
  • 1948 25 Poems
  • 1949 Epitaph for the Young: Xll Cantos
  • 1951 Poems
  • 1962 In a Green Night: Poems 1948—60
  • 1964 Selected Poems
  • 1965 The Castaway and Other Poems
  • 1969 The Gulf and Other Poems
  • 1973 Another Life
  • 1976 Sea Grapes
  • 1979 The Star-Apple Kingdom
  • 1981 Selected Poetry
  • 1981 The Fortunate Traveller
  • 1983 The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden
  • 1984 Midsummer
  • 1986 Collected Poems, 1948-1984, featuring "Love After Love"
  • 1987 "Central America"
  • 1987 The Arkansas Testament
  • 1990 Omeros
  • 1997 The Bounty
  • 2000 Tiepolo's Hound, includes Walcott's watercolors
  • 2004 The Prodigal
  • 2007 Selected Poems (edited, selected, and with an introduction by Edward Baugh)
  • 2010 White Egrets
  • 2014 The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
Plays
Other books
  • (1950) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes, Barbados Advocate (Barbados)
  • (1990) The Poet in the Theatre, Poetry Book Society (London)
  • (1993) The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory Farrar, Straus (New York)
  • (1996) Conversations with Derek Walcott, University of Mississippi (Jackson, MS)
  • (1996) (With Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney) Homage to Robert Frost, Farrar, Straus (New York)
  • (1998) What the Twilight Says (essays), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY)
  • (2002) Walker and Ghost Dance, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY)
  • (2004) Another Life: Fully Annotated, Lynne Rienner Publishers (Boulder, CO)

Further reading

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Arthur Lewis

Sir Arthur Lewis
Arthur Lewis (Nobel photo).jpg
Sir William Arthur Lewis, official Nobel Prizephoto
BornWilliam Arthur Lewis
January 23, 1915
Castries, Saint Lucia, British Windward Islands
DiedJune 15, 1991 (aged 76)
Saint Michael, Barbados
NationalitySaint Lucia, United Kingdom
FieldsEconomics
InstitutionsLSE (1938–1948)
University of Manchester (1948–1958)
University of West Indies (1959–1963)
Princeton University (1963–1991)
Alma materLSE
ThesisThe economics of loyalty contracts (1940)
Doctoral advisorSir Arnold Plant
Known forDevelopment Economics
Industrial structure
History of the World Economy
Notable awardsNobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1979)
SpouseGlady Jacobs Lewis(m. 1947), 2 daughters[1]

Biography

Arthur Lewis was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, then still part of the British Windward Islands federal colony, as the fourth of five children of George and Ida Lewis. His parents had migrated from Antigua shortly after the turn of the century.[2] George Lewis died when Arthur turned seven, and Ida raised their five children alone. Arthur was a gifted student and was promoted two classes ahead of his age.[3] After finishing school at the age of fourteen, Lewis worked as a clerk, while waiting to take his university entrance exam. During this time he became friends with Eric Williams, the future first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, and the two remained lifelong friends.[4]
After gaining his Bachelor of Science degree in 1937 and a Ph.D. degree in 1940 at the London School of Economics, Lewis worked as a member of the staff at the LSE until 1948. In 1947, he married Gladys Jacobs, and they had two daughters together.
That year he was selected as a lecturer at the University of Manchester, and moved there with his family. He taught at Manchester until 1957. During this period, he developed some of his most important concepts about the patterns of capital and wages in developing countries. He particularly became known for his contributions to development economics, of great interest as former colonies began to gain independence from European nations.
When Ghana gained independence in 1957, its government appointed Lewis as their first economic advisor. He helped draw up its first Five-Year Development Plan (1959–1963).[5]
In 1959 Lewis returned to the Caribbean region when appointed Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. In 1963 he was knighted for his contributions to economics.
That year, he was also appointed a University Professor at Princeton University and moved to the United States. Lewis worked at Princeton for the next two decades, teaching generations of students until his retirement in 1983. In 1970 Lewis also was selected as the first president of the Caribbean Development Bank.
Lewis received the Nobel prize in Economics in 1979, sharing it with Theodore Schultz.[2]
He died on June 15, 1991 in Bridgetown, Barbados. He was buried in the grounds of the St Lucian community college named in his honour. He is survived by his wife, Gladys Jacobs Lewis of Barbados and Princeton, N.J.; two daughters, Elizabeth Lewis of Cranbury, N.J., and Barbara Lewis of Brooklyn; and four brothers, Stanley Lewis of Ghana, Earl Lewis of Trinidad, Allen Lewis, a former Governor General of St. Lucia, and Victor Lewis of St. Lucia.

Legacy and honours

  • Arthur Lewis Community College, St. Lucia, was named in his honour.
  • The Arthur Lewis Building (opened in 2007) at the University of Manchester was named for him, as he had lectured there for several years before entering governmental positions.

Key works

The "Lewis Model"[edit]

Lewis published in 1954 what was to be his most influential development economics article, "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour" (Manchester School). In this publication, he introduced what came to be called the Dual Sector model, or the "Lewis Model."
Lewis combined an analysis of the historical experience of developed countries with the central ideas of the classical economists to produce a broad picture of the development process. In his theory, a "capitalist" sector develops by taking labour from a non-capitalist backward "subsistence" sector. At an early stage of development, the "unlimited" supply of labour from the subsistence economy means that the capitalist sector can expand for some time without the need to raise wages. This results in higher returns to capital, which are reinvested in capital accumulation. In turn, the increase in the capital stock leads the "capitalists" to expand employment by drawing further labor from the subsistence sector. Given the assumptions of the model (for example, that the profits are reinvested and that capital accumulation does not substitute for skilled labor in production), the process becomes self-sustaining and leads to modernization and economic development.[6][7]
The point at which the excess labor in the subsistence sector is fully absorbed into the modern sector, and where further capital accumulation begins to increase wages, is sometimes called the Lewisian turning point. It has recently been widely discussed in the context of economic development in China.[8]

The Theory of Economic Growth[edit]

Lewis published The Theory of Economic Growth in 1955 in which he sought to “provide an appropriate framework for studying economic development,” driven by a combination of “curiosity and of practical need.” [7]
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)