443 research outputs found
Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria quartet: influences shaping his fiction.
No full textNot availabl
Art and the artists in Lawrence Durrell
No full textDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, 1976
Durrell, Daniel J.
No full textBody cremated. Lillie C. Durrell - wife.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cfm-ch-memoranda-1933/1432/thumbnail.jp
The crisis of modernity : culture, nature, and the modernist yearning for authenticity
No full textThe Crisis of Modernity: Culture, Nature, and the Modernist Yearning for Authenticity This dissertation is situated at the intersection of two critical traditions: the discussion about Modernist literature in English and ecocriticism. By viewing a certain strand of literary Modernism through an ecocritical lens, it tries to offer an investigation of salient aspects that arise out of the experience of modernity. In order to stress the relevance of ecocriticism when dealing with Modernist motifs and themes, I chose authors associated with the so-called vitalistic or primitivist side of Modernism. The condemnation of technological progress, the alienation of the individual living in urbanized societies, and the fear of the widening gap of what is natural and what is cultural in ourselves inspire the work of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay, and raise important questions for ecocritical consideration. Their severe critique of western civilization suggests that for these authors modernity constitutes a crisis of culture. One of the major aims of my work is to define the crisis of modernity as an environmental crisis. To gain recognition of the environmental aspects underlying this critique of modernity, I begin my analysis by focusing on the depiction of urban contexts as a source of profound conflict. The ensuing argument will center on the notion of the pastoral, which both Miller and Durrell recognize as the traditional mode to express an urban yearning for a utopian counterpoise to civilized life. But rather than promoting an idyllic return to nature, these authors primarily seek to unmask the artificiality of the pastoral enthrallment for the natural world. Instead, they try to revitalize their contact with nature by drawing attention to the individual’s physically embodied experience of his or her immediate environment. By focusing on the body as a medium to recuperate humankind’s original affinity with nature, Miller and Durrell represent a powerful alternative to the pastoral tradition. In my final chapter I extend my ecocritical reading of Modernist literature to Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay. Barnes’s struggle with the gendered landscapes of modernity and McKay’s thematization of ethnic difference offer alternative approaches to the crisis of modernity
Durrell Root Cellar 2, Twillingate, Newfoundland
No full textRoot Cellar in Durrell, Twillingate. Built by Ben Bulgin c. 1943. Currently Owned by Roy Bulgin
La función del mito de Sabiduría en Justine de Lawrence Durrell
No full textThe reception of the first part of the Gnostic myth (the fall), which narrates the degradation of Wisdom, is analyzed in Justine, by Lawrence Durrell. As soon as the myth is installed in a permanent circularity, which makes linearity illusory, the narrator resorts to the palimpsest to express the relativity of the stories, which islinked to the investigation on modern love that the author had begun in The Quartet of Alexandria. Wisdom, in love with the perfection of the Father, tries to understand the Incomprehensible; what is expressed in the deep loneliness and grief without redemption of the characters. Durrell, in his aesthetic quest, establishes this account as Justin’s hermeneutical principle, much like how it worked for the Gnostics in regard to Scripture.Se analiza la recepción de la primera parte del mito gnóstico (la caída), que narra la degradación de Sabiduría, en Justine, de Lawrence Durrell. En cuanto el mito se instala en una circularidad permanente, que torna ilusoria la linealidad, el narrador recurre al palimpsesto para expresar la relatividad de los relatos, lo que se vincula con la investigación sobre el amor moderno que el autor realiza en El cuarteto de Alejandría. Sabiduría, presa de amor por la perfección del Padre, intenta comprender al Incomprensible; lo que se expresa en la soledad profunda y desconsuelo sin redención de los personajes. Durrell, en su búsqueda estética, establece este relato como principio hermenéutico de Justine, de modo semejante a cómo funcionaba para los gnósticos respecto de las Escrituras
The Booster/Delta nexus : Henry Miller and his friends in the literary world of Paris and London on the eve of the Second World War.
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Parallel Women Characters and Femininity in Durrell\u27s and Kazantzakis\u27s Work
No full textIn her article Parallel Women Characters and Femininity in Durrell\u27s and Kazantzakis\u27s Work Helena González-Vaquerizo discusses Nikos Kazantzakis\u27s and Lawrence Durrell\u27s fiction with regard their narration of women protagonists. Further, considering both writers\u27 role in a modernist literature and issues of gender identity, González-Vaquerizo examines the special relationship women have with nature. For both writers, the female and the feminine seem to be the pagan descendant of a powerful goddess and women\u27s carnality is seen as key to man\u27s spiritual experience. González-Vaquerizo posits that a comparative approach to Durrell and Kazantzakis both with regard to their biographies and their novels can change our stereotypes concerning gender identity and the role of women in both author\u27s work and life showing unexpected parallels between their women characters
L’isola di Prospero. La Grecia di Lawrence Durrell
No full textThe aim of this paper is to reconstruct the image of Greece emerging from Lawrence Durrell’s travel writings. In particular, the analysis will focus on his works dedicated to Corfu. In line with the British literary tradition, Durrell perceived the Mediterranean Sea as an opportunity to escape from the English death that affected his time. Nevertheless, he is not driven by a mere interest in archaeology or history, but he looks for places of an artistic nature where “to put down roots and create” (Landscape and Character, 1960).
Durrell was born in India, as a “child of the jungle” (From the Elephant’s Back, 1982), thus his thinking is colored by the fact that he is a colonial. In England, where he moved at the age of twelve to attend established schools, he felt like an outsider. Hence, his journey to Greece, far from being a literary topos, is a sort of voluntary exile, a quest for a lost home. In 1935 Durrell persuaded his family to move to Corfu, safe in the knowledge that he could have regained a contact with nature and developed his literary talent in a place that offers “all the charms of seclusion”. This experience gave birth to the first of his island portraits, Prospero’s Cell (1945), which relates some of the events of those years adopting the fictitious technique of the diary. Actually, it was written in Alexandria, during the Second World War, as we learn from the epilogue.
Also his youngest brother, Gerald, wrote an account of that period, from the point of view of the scientist: the novel My Family and Other Animals (1956), conceived as a sort of “natural history”, combines fact and fiction harmoniously, juxtaposing landscape descriptions – especially animals and plants – and lively family life episodes. Lawrence Durrell’s portrait in the novel is close to reality, since his brother depicts him as an intellectual surrounded with books and points out ironically his restlessness, which leads him to move house frequently.
Prospero’s Cell has been defined a landscape with characters. Greece is perceived as a mysterious crystal that should be penetrated to ensure self-discovery, as a country with no geographical borders, which becomes the metaphor of a state of mind.
As a late Modernist, Durrell expands chronology and describes the landscape using an impressionistic technique: he focuses on colors, on the magic of Greek light, and on sounds and voices that create a hypnotic atmosphere. Corfu acquires a dreamlike dimension that recalls the description of Prospero’s island in The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Greece is rich in literary and mythological echoes that scholars and archaeologists try to recognize, in a vain attempt to trace the ancient sites and figures – take Odysseus for example. It is an unchanging land of “stone fables” (Delphi, 1965), where it is not possible to distinguish between truth and imagination, since legend is an intimate part of daily life, and people and their scenery retain a kind of mythological form. This dichotomy between history and conjecture is at the heart of Prospero’s Cell.
Lawrence Durrell will offer a more complete itinerary across the Ionian Sea in The Greek Islands (1978), hoping that a traveler may follow in his footsteps and, under the spell of Kardaki spring, may return to Corfu in the future
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