Somerset and Conrad - Курсовая работа

It is at this time that Maugham developed the stammer that would stay with him all his life, although it was sporadic and subject to mood and circumstance. Life at the vicarage was tame, and emotions were tightly circumscribed. Maugham was forbidden to lose his temper, or to make emotional displays of any kind - and he was denied the chance to see others express their own emotions. He was a quiet, private but very curious child, and this denial of the emotion of others was at least as hard on him as the denial of his own overwhelming emotions. Maugham was miserable both at the vicarage and at school. As a result, he developed a talent for applying a wounding remark to those who displeased him. This ability is sometimes reflected in the characters that populate his writings. At sixteen, Maugham refused to continue at The Kings School and his uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. It was during his year in Heidelberg that he met John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior. On his return to England his uncle found Maugham a position in an accountants office, but after a month Maugham gave it up and returned to Whitstable. His uncle was not pleased, and set about finding Maugham a new profession. Maughams father and three older brothers were all distinguished lawyers and Maugham asked to be excused from the duty of following in their footsteps [16, 58]. A career in the church was rejected because a stammering minister might make the family seem ridiculous. Likewise, the civil service was rejected - not out of consideration for Maughams own feelings or interests, but because the recent law requiring civil servants to qualify by passing an examination made Maughams uncle conclude that the civil service was no longer a career for gentlemen. The local doctor suggested the profession of medicine and Maughams uncle reluctantly approved this. Maugham had been writing steadily since the age of 20 and fervently intended to become an author, but because Maugham was not of age, he could not confess this to his guardian. So he spent the next five years as a medical student at Kings College London. 1.2 Biography of Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (of the Nalecz coat-of-arms) in Berdyczow (now Berdychiv, Ukraine) into a highly patriotic landowning noble family. Conrads father, a writer of patriotic tragedies and a translator from French and English, was arrested by the Russian authorities in Warsaw for his activities in support of the January Uprising, and was exiled to Siberia. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1865, as did his father four years later in Krakow, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. He was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, in Krakow-a more cautious figure than either of his parents. Bobrowski nevertheless allowed Conrad to travel to Marseille and begin a career as a seaman at the age of 17, after the failure to secure Conrad Austro-Hungarian citizenship made him liable for a 25-year conscription into the Russian army. During these early years Conrad learned English by reading the London Times and the works of Thomas Carlyle and William Shakespeare. In the mid-1870s Conrad joined the French merchant marines as an apprentice, and made three voyages to the West Indies. In 1878, after being wounded in what may have been a failed suicide attempt, Conrad took service in the British merchant navy, where rose through the ranks over the next 16 years [15, 27]. In 1886 he gained both his Master Mariners certificate and British citizenship and officially changed his name to Joseph Conrad. In the same year he took command of his own ship, the Otago. Conrad called on ports in Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, various stations throughout the Indian Ocean, South America, and the South Pacific. In 1890 he journeyed up the Congo River in west Africa, a journey that provided much material for his novella Heart of Darkness. However, the fabled East Indies particularly attracted Conrad and it became the setting of many of his stories. During these long years at sea Conrad began to write, and many of his greatest works, including Lord Jim, Nostromo, «Typhoon,» «The Nigger of the Narcissus, «and «The Secret Sharer,» drew directly from his maritime travels. Elemental nature profoundly impressed Conrad, and his experience of loneliness at sea, of the corruption inherent in intimate human relations in the microcosm of ship life, forged a coherent, if bleak, vision of the world. Like Herman Melvilles Billy Budd, Sailor, Conrads fiction explores the relentless progress of character flaws within the matrix of social relationships. Conrad expressed his deterministic view of the world in an 1897 letter: «What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is