Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Born in Yangzhou, near Shanghai, Jiang was educated as an engineer. He was sent to train in Moscow during the same period as hard-line Premier Li Peng. Unusually cosmopolitan for a Chinese leader, Jiang speaks Russian and English and reads several other languages. He advanced steadily in the machine and electronics industries until the Cultural Revolution temporarily derailed his career. Rehabilitated, he used his back-room skills in carrying out post-Mao economic policy to earn him election in 1982 to the Central Committee...
Naipaul's success story is similar to those of other gifted outsiders who have become part of the tradition of English letters. Coming from backgrounds they found provincial and embarrassing, they offered themselves to high culture, only to discover that they had shut the door on their best material. "I was a man who had no idea of what to write about," says Naipaul of his early literary efforts in London. Turning his imagination back to Trinidad released his gift and led to his first successes, lighthearted novels and stories about his island society...
...says with some surprise, "I don't think that way. People turn things around. I'm for individual rights and for law." It is a long view that includes his fascination with ancient Rome ("I can barely express my admiration for it") and the imperial record of the English. Their achievement calls forth some of his best bis: "Pretty terrific. It would be churlish to say otherwise. It would be foolish to say otherwise. It would be unhistorical to say otherwise...
Naipaul is English not so much by an accident of history as by personal acts ^ of intelligence and will. Thirty-eight years in Britain have given him a proper accent, a direct way with service staff and an impatience with romantic abstraction. He has a British wife, Patricia, with whom he shares a house in Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge and a military training area from which distracting gunfire can frequently be heard...
Kenan Professor of English and American Literature and Language Helen Vendler, who teaches the introductory English course, has edited several poetry anthologies and writes about modern American poetry for The New Yorker. And Robert Brustein, who teaches some undergraduate drama courses, is the founder and director of the American Repertory Theater, one of the nation's most successful regional theatres. Brustein, who came to Harvard from the Yale Repertory Theater, is also a noted drama critic and writes a bi-weekly theater column for The New Republic...