Impact of Cultural Heritage on Bryce Courtenay and Ernest Hemingway :: Biography Biographies Essays

Impact of Cultural Heritage on Bryce Courtenay and Ernest Hemingway Throughout the world, there are many diverse cultures, each of these distinct cultures have different backgrounds, rituals and practices. These cultures have a profound effect on the minds of their inhabitants. It's a person's culture which effects their thoughts, beliefs and their outlook upon life. It doesn't matter where you are from or where you go to, you always have a piece of your culture with you wherever you are. It is your cultural heritage's and background which molds your mind, and your thoughts of how you perceive the world around you. In every culture different aspects of the society are viewed differently. Some cultures share similarities with other cultures about how they view things. In many cultures sports plays a key role in the society, and many times the whole community is based around the sports. No matter where you are from, sports will always play a role in the society. Many times in literature you can tell where the setting is or where the author is from by the way the community or society in the literature view sports. If you look at the literature that authors produce and where they are from, you will notice a common trend in all of their work. The cultural heritage of the writer affects the perspective in which they write from or about. The cultural heritage affects the writers perspective in many different ways, among them are stereotypes and the setting of the story and the everyday activities that the character go through. Two prime examples of how an authors cultural heritage affects the perspective that they write from is the South African author Bryce Courtenay and the American author Ernest Hemingway. Bryce Courtenay was born and raised in South Africa and received his early education there. He spend the majority of his adolescent life in South Africa and in his final year in Africa he spent it in the copper mines of Central Africa, before he moved to England to complete his education.1 Courtenay spent his early life in Africa, and the African culture had a profound affect him. His time in the copper mines also had a penetrating effect on him and it is visible in his writing, when he wrote about the mines in Africa.

English Doc

Heda Margolius Kovaly who wrote â€Å"Under a Cruel Star† writes about her horrible, suffering and tragedy life she endured first in the Nazi communist rule in her citizen Czechoslovakia. She was born in Prague to a Jewish family. She was young at the time when the Germany attacked Czechoslovakia during the World War II. Heda was in concentration camps during the World War II she escaped from the Nazi, she hardly survived, but her family died. At the end of the war; she returned to Prague and took part in uprising against the Germany in May 1945, she got married to an old friend, named Rudolf Margolius who is Jewish too.I will be writing about how Heda Kovaly suffered under the Nazism and had high hope for communism, how she view freedom and how it changed after her life changed too. Moreover, how Rudolf trial changed her life. Heda suffered a lot to escape from the camps, but her insists and demand to be free were more powerful than her fear of dead. â€Å"People often ask m e: How did you manage? To survive the camps! To escape! Everyone assumes it is easy to die but that the struggle to live requires a superhuman effort. Mostly it is the other way around. There is, perhaps, nothing harder than waiting passively for death.Staying alive is simple and natural and does not require any particular resolve. †(16). Towards the end of the war, Heda managed to escape from a death march to Bergen-Belsen and get to Prague. She fought for her personal freedom, but freedom perspective changed when she escaped from Nazi concentration then by joining the communist party thinking Friends were too scared of the punishments they would face if they helped her and she was wandered around the city for days trying to avoid arrest. After the end of World War II was ended the soviets had taken over Czechoslovakia Kovaly meaning of freedom change as her life changes.She united with her beloved Rudolph who got married and had son. They were struggling to find a house afte r they were sent to camps. At the end they were given a small apartment. Kovaly explains â€Å"although we continually hoped for freedom, our concept of freedom changed. † (60). Her concept of freedom before imprisonment was that it was â€Å"natural and self – evident. â€Å"By the end of their time in the camps, many prisoners came to accept the view that freedom is something that has to be earned and fought for, a privilege that is awarded, like a medal. (60-61). She clarified how it was impossible for the Czech people not to become â€Å"somewhat twisted†. Kovaly had fought for her personal freedom when she had escaped. From her experience and the problems she faced while she was escaping the camp, made her well aware of the politics around her. She was very intelligent and had her own opinion and she acknowledged the fact that â€Å"Our democracy had allowed the growth of the fascist and Nazi parties which in the end destroyed it† (57).She clarifie d that people were willing to work extremely hard to achieve their goal, that they want to rebuild the world. She always mentions how hard her husband worked to the party and many innocent people were thrown in jail. Heda’s life was different from all the other people in Czechoslovakia, because she was married to a man who was enrolled in the government administration. She had a unique point of view into the communist working government because her husband was a deputy minister in Czechoslovakian government. That helped Heda a lot to see the hypocrisies

Biography of Artist Louise Bourgeois

Second generation surrealist and feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois was one of the most important American artists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Similar to other second-generation Surrealist artists like Frida Kahlo, she channeled her pain into the creative concepts of her art. These highly charged feelings produced hundreds of sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings and fabric pieces in numerous materials. Her environments, or cells, might include traditional marble and bronze sculptures alongside common castoffs (doors, furniture, clothes and empty bottles). Each artwork poses questions and irritates with ambiguity. Her goal was to provoke emotional reactions rather than reference intellectual theory. Often disturbingly aggressive in her suggestive sexual shapes (a distressed phallic image called Fillette/Young Girl, 1968, or multiple latex breasts in The Destruction of the Father, 1974), Bourgeois invented gendered metaphors well before Feminism took roo t in this country. Early Life Bourgeois was born on Christmas Day in Paris to Josà ©phine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois, the second of three children. She claimed that she was named after Louise Michel (1830-1905), an anarchist feminist from the days of the French Commune (1870-71). Bourgeois mothers family came from Aubusson, the French tapestry region, and both her parents owned an antique tapestry gallery at the time of her birth. Her father was drafted into World War I (1914-1918), and her mother frantically lived through those years, infecting her toddler daughter with great anxieties. After the war, the family settled in Choisy-le-Roi, a suburb of Paris, and ran a tapestry restoration business. Bourgeois remembered drawing the missing sections for their restoration work. Education Bourgeois did not choose art as her vocation right away. She studied math and geometry at the Sorbonne from 1930 to 1932. After her mothers death in 1932, she switched to art and art history. She completed a baccalaureate in philosophy. From 1935 to 1938, she studied art in several schools: the Atelier Roger Bissià ¨re, the Acadà ©mie dEspagnat, the École du Louvre, Acadà ©mie de la Grande Chaumià ¨re and École Nationale Supà ©rieure des Beaux-Arts, the École Muncipale de Dessin et dArt, and the Acadà ©mie Julien. She also studied with the Cubist master Fernand Là ©ger in 1938. Là ©ger recommended sculpture to his young student. That same year, 1938, Bourgeois opened a print shop next to her parents business, where she met art historian Robert Goldwater (1907-1973). He was looking for Picasso prints. They married that year and Bourgeois moved to New York with her husband. Once settled in New York, Bourgeois continued to study art in Manhattan with Abstract Expressionist Vaclav Vytlacil (1892-1984), from 1939 to 1940, and at the Art Students League in 1946. Family and Career In 1939, Bourgeois and Goldwater returned to France to adopt their son Michel. In 1940, Bourgeois gave birth to their son Jean-Louis and in 1941, she gave birth to Alain. (No wonder she created a series Femme-Maison in 1945-47, houses in the shape of a woman or attached to a woman. In three years she became the mother of three boys. Quite a challenge.) On June 4, 1945, Bourgeois opened her first solo exhibition at Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York. Two years later, she mounted another solo show at Norlyst Gallery in New York. She joined the American Abstract Artists Group in 1954. Her friends were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, whose personalities interested her more than the Surrealist à ©migrà ©s she met during her early years in New York. Through these tempestuous years among her male peers, Bourgeois experienced the typical ambivalence of the career-minded wife and mother, fighting off anxiety-attacks while preparing for her shows. To restore equilibrium, she often hid her work but never destroyed it. In 1955, Bourgeois became an American citizen. In 1958, she and Robert Goldwater moved to the Chelsea section of Manhattan, where they remained to the end of their respective lives. Goldwater died in 1973, while consulting on the Metropolitan Museum of Arts new galleries for African and Oceanic art (todays Michael C. Rockefeller Wing). His specialty was primitivism and modern art as a scholar, teacher at NYU, and the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art (1957 to 1971). In 1973, Bourgeois began to teach at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Cooper Union in Manhattan, Brooklyn College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. She was already in her 60s. At this point, her work fell in with the Feminist movement and exhibition opportunities increased significantly. In 1981, Bourgeois mounted her first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Almost 20 years later, in 2000, she exhibited her enormous spider, Maman (1999), 30 feet high, in the Tate Modern in London. In 2008, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris exhibited another retrospective. Today, exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois work may occur simultaneously as her work is always in great demand. The Dia Museum in Beacon, New York, features a long-term installation of her phallic sculptures and a spider. Bourgeois Confessional Art Louise Bourgeois body of work draws its inspiration from her memory of childhood sensations and traumas. Her father was domineering and a philanderer. Most painful of all, she discovered his affair with her English nanny. Destruction of the Father, 1974, plays out her revenge with a pink plaster and latex ensemble of phallic or mammalian protrusions gathered around a table where the symbolic corpse lies, splayed out for all to devour. Similarly, her Cells are architectural scenes with made and found objects tinged with domesticity, child-like wonder, nostalgic sentimentality and implicit violence. Some sculptures objects seem strangely grotesque, like creatures from another planet. Some installations seem uncannily familiar, as if the artist recalled your forgotten dream. Important Works and Accolades Femme Maison (Woman House), ca. 1945-47.Blind Leading the Blind, 1947-49.Louise Bourgeois in costume as Artemis of Ephesus, 1970Destruction of the Father, 1974.Cells Series, 1990s.Maman (Mother), 1999.Fabric Works, 2002-2010. Bourgeois received numerous awards, including a Life Time Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award in Washington D.C. in 1991, the National Medal of Arts in 1997, the French Legion of Honor in 2008 and induction into the National Womens Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York in 2009.    Sources Munro, Eleanor. Originals: American Women Artists.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Cotter, Holland. Louise Bourgeois Influential Sculptor, Dies at 98, New York Times, June 1, 2010. Cheim and Read Gallery, bibliography. Louise Bourgeois (2008 retrospective), Guggenheim Museum, website Louise Bourgeois, exhibition catalogue, edited by Frank Morris and Marie-Laure Bernadac.  New York: Rizzoli, 2008. Film: Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine,  Produced and directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, 2008.