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WILLIAM
GOLDING
(1911-93) |
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National
Players
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National
Players
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BACKGROUND
- born in
Cornwall, England
- father:
- Alec,
schoolteacher
- radical
political views
- strong faith in
science
- mother:
- Mildred,
British suffragette
- education:
- forced by
parents (esp,. father) to study science
- natural
science
- switched
after 2 years
- to
English
- at
Oxford U.
-
Anglo-Saxons
-
Classical Greeks (Euripides)
- writing:
- began at @ 7
- 1934: 1st
book (poetry collection)
- 1935-39:
- settlement house
worker
- writer, actor,
producer
- 1939:
- teacher
(English, philosophy)
- @ Bishop
Wordsworth's School
- marriage:
- Ann Brookfield
- 2 children
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BACKGROUND
- WW II:
- joined the Royal
Navy
- sinking of the
Bismarck
- landing at
Normandy (D-Day)
- reached rank of
lieutenant
- commanded rocket
ship
- battleships,
aircraft, submarine battles
- effect -
- negative view of
humanity (European civilization)
- "man
produces evil, as a bee produces honey"
- return to
teaching & writing after 1945
- 1954:
-
Lord of the Flies
- rejected by 21
publishers
- WG = 44
- ironic spin on
RM Ballantyne's Coral Island
- 1961:
- retired from
teaching
- $$ from Flies
- full-time writer
- reclusive,
eccentric
- 1965:
CBE
- 1983:
Nobel Prize for Literature
- 1988:
knighted
-
Lord of the Flies
-
The
Inheritors
-
Pincher Martin
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THEMES
- themes:
- humanity's
"heart of darkness"
- spiritual,
ethical questions
- Lord of the
Flies:
- group of school children
- evacuated from England
- due to nuclear war
- plane is shot down
- escape, land on uninhabited island
- no adults ("grown-ups")
- boys cerate their own society based on
adult model
- degeneration:
- from democratic, moral, rational
- to tyrannical, cruel, irrational
- Symbols in
Lord of the Flies:
- Ralph, Piggy, Jack
- twins (Samneric)
- Littluns
- pigs (boars & sows)
- "lord of the flies"
- fire
- meat
- spears
- island
- conch shell
- glasses
- Writing
Assignments:
- court room trial
- letters home (Piggy)
- modern adaptation
- who's the "chief"
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Lord of the
Flies
- Themes of Lord of the Flies:
- WG: "to
trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature"
- WG: "the
shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual, not
on any political system..."
- society as a reflection of its
individuals (their ethics)
- civilization vs. savagery
- loss of innocence
- humanity's heart of darkness
- human evil (not supernatural)
- survival of the fittest, mastery
(Darwinism)
- religion
- group mentality/mob mentality
- desire to belong
- theater
- Psycho-Social
Theories & Lord of the Flies:
- Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
- Freud's Id, Ego, Superego
- Freud's Oedipal Complex
- Freud's Defense Mechanisms
- Nietzsche's will to power, to be
overpowered
- Conrad's Heart of Darkness
- The Other
- Girard's Sacrificial Crisis
- Hierarchy & Deconstructionism
- Movies &
Lord of the Flies:
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LINKS
LINKS
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