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I. Rencontres : Encounters

a.     Relations entre l'individu et le groupe = Relationships between the individual and the group

b.    La confrontation à la différence = Dealing with differences

c.     L'amour et l'amitié = Love and friendship

II. Imaginaires : Imaginary worlds

a.     L'imagination créatrice et visionnaire = Creative and visionary imagination

b.    Imaginaires effrayants = Dreadful imaginary worlds

c.     Utopies et dystopies = Utopias and dystopias

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LinguaCoach an English Phonetics Approach The best place to master english pronunciation

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Snow White And The Huntsman - Trailer/Bande-annonce VL/VF

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Edgar Allan Poe - Writer | Mini Bio | BIO

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Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Poe's father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old, and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and, later, to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe's gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems (George Redway), was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (Hatch & Dunning). Neither volume received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia, in Baltimore.

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Raven." After Virginia's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe's lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of "acute congestion of the brain." Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe's work as an editor, poet, and critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the "architect" of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the "art for art's sake" movement. French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Charles Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.

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Edgar Allan Poe - Born in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe had a profound impact on American and international literature as an editor, poet, and critic.

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Fahrenheit 451 - Official Trailer - Official HBO UK

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction - Modernity Begins - Extra Sci Fi

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McCarthyism, name given to the period of time in American history that saw U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin produce a series of investigations and hearings during the 1950s in an effort to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government. The term has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946 and rose to prominence in 1950 when he claimed in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that 57 communists had infiltrated the State Department, adding:

One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our government is that we are not dealing with spies who get thirty pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.

McCarthy's subsequent search for communists in the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and elsewhere made him an incredibly polarizing figure. After McCarthy's reelection in 1952, he obtained the chairmanship of the Committee on Government Operations of the Senate and of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. For the next two years he was constantly in the spotlight, investigating various government departments and questioning innumerable witnesses about their suspected communist affiliations. Although he failed to make a plausible case against anyone, his colourful and cleverly presented accusations drove some persons out of their jobs and brought popular condemnation to others.

McCarthyism both reached its peak and began its decline during the "McCarthy hearings": 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee's attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty Security Screening Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army's lawyer, Joseph Welch, had employed a man who at one time had belonged to a communist front group. Welch's rebuke to the senator-"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"-discredited McCarthy and helped to turn the tide of public opinion against him. Moreover, McCarthy was also eventually undermined significantly by the incisive and skillful criticism of a journalist, Edward R. Murrow. Murrow's devastating television editorial about McCarthy, carried out on his show, See It Now, cemented him as the premier journalist of the time. McCarthy was censured for his conduct by the Senate, and in 1957 he died. While McCarthyism proper ended with the senator's downfall, the term still has currency in modern political discourse.

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McCarthyism | Definition, History, & Facts

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McCarthyism, name given to the period of the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy produced a series of investigations and hearings in an effort to expose supposed communist infiltration of the U.S. government. McCarthyism reached its peak and began its decline during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954.

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Fahrenheit 451 still resonates. Books censorship has never gone away, after all. But, as many people in the Reading Group have pointed out, it's also a book that clearly reflects its time.

Everythingsperfect, in particular, noted that s/he "would be very interested in looking into how it reflects its time and place, America in the early 1950s. Would it be possible to provide some background, to place it in context? I was just wondering whether the total cultural pessimism of F451 is something that is reflected elsewhere in society, or if it is just Bradbury who is a miserable so-and-so?"

So here we go. In this thread, any and all reflections on the 1950s are welcome. To get the ball rolling, here are a few loose thoughts of my own:

Ray Bradbury says that one of the main inspirations for Fahrenheit 451 came when he was out walking with a writer friend, and "a police car pulled up and the policeman got out and asked us 'What are you doing?'" Bradbury explained that they were out walking ("putting one foot in front of the other" was his first "smartaleck" response.) The policeman didn't like it. "Don't do it again!" he told Bradbury - which sent the writer into such a rage that he went home and wrote the short story The Pedestrian [PDF], imagining a time in which everyone who walked was considered a criminal. Later, he took his "midnight criminal stroller" for another walk around the future city - and Fahrenheit 451 was born.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that the original encounter took place in pedestrian-hating Los Angeles. Even so, it doesn't take too much of a imaginative leap to see it happening in plenty of other places in the US in the 1950s; the decade of the drive-in and the pink Cadillac. Most people were delighted by the automobile frenzy and the advances it brought, but there must have been alarm too. Especially for those such as Bradbury. He may be an SF author, but he writes with the same passion about nature as he does about technology, and the changes in the 1950s must have unsettled as much as they enthused him. Or at least, that's my hypothesis.

It's also impossible to talk about the 1950s without discussion of the Bomb. The book was written less than a decade after Nagasaki and Hiroshima (think about 9/11 to see how raw they must have seemed) and during an ever-escalating arms race. The future, in many ways, looked desperate.

Concomitant to the Bomb was, of course, the cold war - and clearly that, too, influenced the book. The Soviets were sending writers to gulags and banning questionable books, while in the US McCarthy was persecuting writers and the HUAC was in full swing. And then, of course, the memory of the Nazis still burned all too bright.

So, in (brief) answer to Everythingsperfect's question, it is possible to see plenty of pessimism in the 1950s and to take the view that it must have had an influence on Bradbury's writing. But I'm hoping that we can also provide a more nuanced vision. My notes create a very one-sided picture - and one that could easily be reversed. Yes, there were troubles in the 1950s, but in the US in particular, it's more often remembered as a happy, optimistic time. It would be interesting to hear more about that - and also about how that may be reflected in Fahrenheit 451 in the way most citizens are perfectly content to go along with the destruction of world literature provided they have TV, a few creature comforts, some good drugs and aren't troubled too much ...

Over to you.
Topics

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Fahrenheit 451 still resonates. Books censorship has never gone away, after all. But, as many people in the Reading Group have pointed out, it's also a book that clearly reflects its time. Everythingsperfect, in particular, noted that s/he "would be very interested in looking into how it reflects its time and place, America in the early 1950s.

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Do you agree?

Can love ever create violence?

Can friendship make people take dangerous decisions?

Collect ideas and introduce the extract.

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3-Minute Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet | Animated Shakespeare Summaries

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The Hunger Games (2012 Movie) - Official Theatrical Trailer - Jennifer Lawrence & Liam Hemsworth