Kultur Gespräche

Wenn Sie an England denken, woran denken Sie dann als erstes? Ist Ihnen das Terrain, das Sie mit der englischen Sprache betreten bekannt, oder erschließen sich Ihnen bisher nur die touristischen Attraktionen entlang ausgetretener Pfade? 

Erfahren Sie mehr über Englands Geschichte, menschliche und kulturelle Prägung und Sie werden begreifen wie sehr die englische Sprache und englische Kultur verflochten sind. An zehn Nachmittagen haben Sie die Gelegenheit, in kurzen Vorträgen und im offenen Dialog mit Ihrem Dozent neue Sichtweisen auf England zu erlangen.

Iconic English Women of the 20^th Century

‘By nature we were explorers, revolutionists, reformers.
But our surroundings were at least fifty years behind the times.’

Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past.’

Mittwochs
Uhrzeit: 15 bis 17 Uhr

‘It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.’

The novelist Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, the literary critic. After his death in 1904, the house in the Bloomsbury district of London, which she shared with her sister, Vanessa Bell, became the centre of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, one of whom, Leonard Woolf, she married. Virginia suffered periods of depression throughout her life, and, in 1941, aged 59, drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in Sussex.

'There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.‘

Freya Stark was an Anglo-Italian explorer and travel-writer. She was the first woman to travel through the Southern Arabian Desert, parts of which no Westerner had ever visited.

English writer and illustrator, best known for her childrens’ books featuring animals, such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Also an ardent conservationist, she is credited with preserving much of the Lake District National Park in the north-west of England.

‘I was freed to be myself in the mountains.’

Dorothy Pilley was an outstanding woman climber in the male-dominated mountaineering fraternity of the early 20^th Century. Her ascent on July 20^th 1928 of the north ridge of the Dent Blanche in the Swiss Alps – ‘one of the last Alpine problems’ – was not repeated for the next 15 years.

Alison Hargreaves was seen by many as the finest female alpinist ever. She reached celebrity status when in 1995, she was only the second climber to reach the summit of Mt Everest alone and without supplementary oxygen. The first climber to do this was Reinhold Messner. Only 3 months later, she became the first woman to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world, again unaided. She died in a violent storm, on the descent, aged 33. The question arose of whether a mother of two small children should have been climbing at all.

‘The mother of the modern theatre’

Joan Littlewood was born into poverty in London’s East End, and into a family where neither of her parents could read or write. As a young woman, determined to enter the world of the theatre, she walked from London to Manchester, where she began an acting and, above all, a directing career that brought the theatre to the working-classes, as no one had done since Shakespeare.

‘One of the rarest women of our time.’

Sybil Thorndike was on the stage for 65 years, and played well over three hundred parts. She appeared in virtually every theatrical genre: Greek tragedy, drawing-room comedy, Shakespeare, farce and much else. Her dedication to her work and her profession was legendary, as were her socialist and pacifist beliefs.

English fashion designer and instrumental figure in 1960s Swinging London. The designer of the miniskirt and hot pants, attracting high praise and outrage simultaneously.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but not an angel.’

Doris Lessing, at the age of 88, was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature – ‘the epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.’ She was born in Persia in 1919 of British parents, who moved to the colonial life of Southern Rhodesia when she was six. On divorcing her second husband, the German, Gottfried Lessing, at the age of thirty, she left Africa for London, where she began a life-long career as a novelist.

‘An artist in a man’s world.’

Barbara Hepworth was a British sculptor who became a leading figure in the international art scene throughout a career spanning five decades. Though concerned with form and abstraction, her art was primarily about relationships, between the human figure and the landscape, but, more importantly, between people. She was a founding member of the artist colony at St Ives, Cornwall.

A young English aristocrat, notorious for her relationship with Adolf Hitler. A prominent supporter of Nazism and one of Hitler’s inner circle of friends. On 3^rd September 1939, the day war was declared, Mitford attempted suicide in Munich’s Englischer Garten.

‘Conversations are always dangerous if you have something to hide.’

Agatha Christie, the world’s best-selling writer, is a public institution. But although she lived to a great age, she remained elusively shy and determinedly private. Her private life, however, was not without the melodrama and mystery of her countless crime novels.

15.00 - 17.00 h
30 € pro Nachmittag
5 Nachmittage buchen und nur 4 zahlen
10 Nachmittage buchen und nur 7 zahlen
3 - 10 Teilnehmer
In englischer Sprache

Dozenten: Philip Moore, Theresa Jackson

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Cambridge Institut
Residenzstrasse 22
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