The study of the human mind and behavior has had many prominent practitioners, but no one is more revered than Sigmund Freud. An Austrian physician, he is said to be the father of psychoanalysis. He taught that man has a subconscious mind in which he keeps repugnant memories which come to the surface surreptitiously and …
Penulis: Kang Ridwan
The Good Life
Thoreau’s book about the austere but happy life at Walden Pond propagated his fame around the world. He built a small hut and began living an ascetic existence. He found it to be a felicitous experience. In this idyllic setting he was able to spend his time reading, studying nature, writing and thinking. Far from …
A Man of Nature
Henry Thoreau attempted to confront the problem and solve the enigma of how one might earn a living and yet not become an ignominious slave to the task. He viewed the industrial revolution with antipathy. Man in a servile role to extraneous possessions was a main target of his writings. He believed that one could …
A Scheeming Heroine
William Makepeace Thackeray was known for his moralistic study of upper and middle class English life. His best known work, VANITY FAIR, has its central character Becky Sharp. She is a perfidious woman who has an insatiable desire to get ahead in the world. She covets the wealth of one man, but when marriage is …
An English Realist
The movement towards realism in the English novel of the nineteenth century reached its acme with the works of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thakeray. Charles Dicken was a prolific writer. Among his copious works are Oliver Twist, a candid exposure of the poor laws; Nicholas Nicklebery, in which the life of boys in a …
Victor Hugo
The epitome of Frech romantic writers in the nineteenth century was Victor Hugo. With the most utmost dexterity he wrote poetry, novels, and drama. His highly popular novels, NOTREDAME DE PARIS and LES MISERABLES, are replete with melodramatic situations and grotesque characters. He had a profound sense of social justice and a compassion for the …
A Lady Novelist
The nineteenth century saw the woman novelist attain the same prestige as men. England was prolific in producing woman’s writer. One of the in this genre was Charlotte Bronte. In Jane Eyre she presented a portrait of a woman caught up in a clandestine affair with a married man. Miss Bronte’s reader were engrossed in …
Another Surprise
Thurber’s stories are written in a jocose manner, but they contain enough serious matter to make one pensive. He tells us some builders who left a pane of glass standing upright in across the field, struck the glass and knocked inert. He rushed back and divulged to his friends that the air had crystallized. The …
Things Have Changed
Thurber modernizes an old story that everyone has read or heard. It has to do with a nefarious wolf who kept a vigil in an ominous forest until a little girl came along carrying a basket of food for her grandmother. With alacrity, this vivacious youngster told the wolf the address to which she was …
Modernizing a Parable
Thurber punctures in an incisive way the platitudes that come from stories handed down through the generations. These old saws are accepted by everyone. One such tale is about a tortoise who had read in an ancient book that a tortoise who had read in ancient book that a tortoise had beaten a hare in …