Not a native son

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remi Kapo
Keyword(s):  
Boarding School ◽  
First Year ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
Nature Study ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Core Subjects ◽  
Speech Therapist

In the summer of 1953, aged 7, I arrived with my father at the port of Southampton from the colony of Nigeria. We were making for Ledsham Court School, a boarding school in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. It was a stately building sitting among many green acres. After about an hour with the headmistress, Mrs Redfarn, my father said goodbye, turned and returned to Nigeria. I did not know then that I would not see or hear from him for 10 years, by which time I had forgotten what he looked like. Ledsham’s only black pupil began his academic life speaking no English. I was duly placed in the kindergarten with daily lessons in the native tongue. After catching up with my age group, in addition to the core subjects I was thereafter given instruction in Latin, ancient Greek, poetry, and nature study. To eradicate ‘that funny African accent’ I was solely accorded a daily class of elocution for a year—one hour a day with a speech therapist, held in a long, oak-panelled gallery with a book on my head to improve my deportment. Although in receipt of the beginnings of a good classical education, I was also given what I came to understand was a prototypical quantity of punishment for a ‘darkie’—for most of that first year I was caned daily and frequently ‘sent to Coventry’ for the slightest indiscretion, usually for not understanding the customs and traditions of an alien white culture. Thus, for refusing to eat salad on my first day, I received ‘three of the best’. The staff were undoubtedly ignorant of the eggs that parasites can lay on raw vegetables in a tropical climate like Nigeria, where all vegetables were cooked and salad was unheard of. Perhaps, I thought with a child’s naivety, that with all the mosquitoes and eating of salad, no wonder West Africa was called the white man’s grave in my books and comics. I woke up—for I had clearly landed in the mother country in the wrong skin colour. It hurt. I had arrived knowing myself to be Yoruba. Suddenly, I was called ‘coloured’ and ‘darkie’.

ANALYSIS OF THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF VERBAL FUNCTIONS FOR THE FIRST YEAR AFTER ISCHEMIC STROKE

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-23
Keyword(s):  
Ischemic Stroke ◽  
Speech Therapy ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Speech Disorders ◽  
First Year ◽  
Structure And Dynamics ◽  
Speech Therapist ◽  
Late Recovery ◽  
Verbal Functions ◽  
Stationary Period

The results of psycho-correction speech therapy are analyzed in dynamics in 78 patients with varying severity and various forms of speech disorders in the early and late recovery periods of ischemic stroke. The effectiveness of conducting classes during the stay of patients in a neurological hospital and the positive impact of these exercises in the inpatient period (outpatient classes, classes at home with a speech therapist and trained relatives) are shown. Patients who did not conduct speech recovery classes during the inter-stationary period showed a decrease in speech activity, in some even a negative dynamic.

scholarly journals Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Raw Material ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek World

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

A Mock-up for the Development of a Digital Edition for Ancient Greek Fragmentary Poetry

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Alberto Eugenio Stefanini ◽  
Anika Nicolosi ◽  
Monica Monachini
Keyword(s):  
User Interface ◽  
University Students ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
User Evaluation ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Digital Edition ◽  
Study Support

Ancient Greek poetry is an essential part of the western cultural heritage; thus, it is important that people have access to its texts and whatever relates to their understanding in a reliable and easy way. Whenever user evaluation is concerned, mock-ups are used by designers to acquire feedback from users. A mock-up is defined as a model of the final product, and may be used for demonstration, evaluation and other purposes. The authors prototyped a mock-up for focusing on the requirements of a scholarly digital edition of Archilochus. This was put under evaluation to assess its usability: it was submitted to extensive use and testing by a sample of prospective users, to better focus on the requirements from a product's perspective. Experimentation involved a group of university students, attending a Greek Philology course at Parma University. More than half of the respondents considered the mock-up a useful study support. The evaluation also pointed out that the mock-up had to be revised, so as to guarantee better cognitive simplicity of the user interface.

The Incidence of Homesickness in a Third World University

1992 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 21-23
Author(s):  
Albert Mellam
Keyword(s):  
Culture Shock ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
First Year ◽  
School Students ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Sociocultural Environment ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
Cognitive Failures ◽  
Language Difficulties ◽  
Poor Concentration

Geographical relocation is often associated with problems adjusting to the new physical and sociocultural environment (Totman, 1979) and with the stress of disruption to lifestyle routines (Cochrane, 1983; Cochrane & Stopes-Roe, 1980). Relocation commonly entails culture shock, financial difficulties, separation from family, racial discrimination, and language difficulties (Murphy, 1977; Oberg, 1960); frequent relocation is also associated with illness (Stokols, Shumaker, & Martinez, 1983).One group of people who tend to relocate relatively frequently consists of students, many of whom do report difficulties attributed to relocation (Anderson & Fleming, 1985; Fulmer, Medalie, & Lord, 1982; Simmonds, 1987). Their problems appear to be common to those of migrants in general (Cochrane, 1983; Cochrane & Stopes-Roe, 1980). One very frequent complaint is the familiar one of homesickness.Homesickness is commonly used to describe any condition of unhappiness or malaise which follows a transition to a new environment (Fisher, 1988). Denoted as “pining for home” (Chambers Dictionary, 1972) or “depressed by absence from home” (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964), students reportedly agree that homesickness has four main elements: missing home, missing family, longing to see friends, and wanting to go home (Brewin, Furnham, & Howes, 1989).Recent studies conducted in Scotland found that homesickness affected 60 to 70 percent of native first-year students (Fisher, Fraser, & Murray, 1984; Fisher, Fraser, & Murray, 1985), a figure which approximates that found for boarding school students (Fisher, Fraser, & Murray, 1986). Homesickness was associated with cognitive failures, poor concentration, handing in work late, and decrement of work quality (Fisher et al., 1985; Fisher & Hood, 1987). In other words, there was some evidence that homesickness may affect academic performance.

scholarly journals Unapprehended relations

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127
Author(s):  
Tom Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Moral Imagination ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article addresses P.B. Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Mercury’ and allusions to classical literature in ‘Ode to Liberty’. Congruities emerge between Shelley’s poetic practice, his conception of poetry’s social role, and his understanding of the relationship between antiquity and the present. When translating and reshaping ancient Greek poetry, he brings to the surface morally significant features of that poetry which only emerge in the dialogues that his writing creates. In doing so, he enacts literary history as a process that both reflects and enables expansions of the moral imagination.

scholarly journals SUNG POEMS AND POETIC SONGS: HELLENISTIC DEFINITIONS OF POETRY, MUSIC AND THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-615
Author(s):  
Spencer A. Klavan
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
English Speaker ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Cosmic Order ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

Simply by formulating a question about the nature of ancient Greek poetry or music, any modern English speaker is already risking anachronism. In recent years especially, scholars have reminded one another that the words ‘music’ and ‘poetry’ denote concepts with no easy counterpart in Greek. μουσική in its broadest sense evokes not only innumerable kinds of structured movement and sound but also the political, psychological and cosmic order of which song, verse and dance are supposed to be perceptible manifestations. Likewise, ποίησις and the ποιητικὴ τέχνη can encompass all kinds of ‘making’, from the assembly of a table to the construction of a rhetorical argument. Of course, there were specifically artistic usages of these terms—according to Plato, ‘musical and metrical production’ was the default meaning of ποίησις in everyday speech. But even in discussions which restrict themselves to the sphere of human art, we find nothing like the neat compartmentalization of harmonized rhythmic melody on the one hand, and stylized verbal composition on the other, which is often casually implied or expressly formulated in modern comparisons of ‘music’ with ‘poetry’. For many ancient theorists the City Dionysia, a dithyrambic festival and a recitation of Homer all featured different versions of one and the same form of composition, a μουσική or ποιητική to which λόγοι, γράμματα and συλλαβαί were just as essential as ἁρμονία, φθόγγοι, ῥυθμός and χρόνοι.

scholarly journals Images of Sculptures in the Poetry of Giorgis Manousakis

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Michał Bzinkowski ◽  
Rita Winiarska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Nobel Prize Winner ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Modern Greek

The imagery of fragmentary sculptures, statues and stones appears often in Modern Greek Poetry in connection with the question of Modern Greeks’ relation to ancient Greek past and legacy. Many famous poets such as the first Nobel Prize winner in literature, George Seferis (1900-1971), as well as Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) frequently use sculptural imagery in order to allude to, among other things, though in different approaches, the classical past and its existence in modern conscience as a part of cultural identity. In the present paper we focus on some selected poems by a well-known Cretan poet Giorgis Manousakis (1933-2008) from his collection “Broken Sculptures and Bitter Plants” (Σπασμένα αγάλματα και πικροβότανα, 2005), trying to shed some light on his very peculiar usage of sculpture imagery in comparison with the earlier Greek poets. We attempt to categorize Manousakis’ metaphors and allusions regarding the symbolism of sculptures in correlation with existential motives of his poetry and the poet’s attitude to the classical legacy.

scholarly journals My biochemical journey from a Cambridge undergraduate to the discovery of phosphotyrosine

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 74-77
Author(s):  
Tony Hunter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Cancer ◽  
Tca Cycle ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
First Year ◽  
World War ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The Tca Cycle ◽  
Natural Choice ◽  
The University

The most notable moment in my career as a biochemist was the discovery of phosphotyrosine, a somewhat serendipitous finding that turned out to have some very important consequences, notably, in human cancer. My career as a biochemist which has spanned nearly 60 years, began when I was 16. At the time, I was in the sixth form at Felsted School, a boarding school in Essex England, and my biology master, David Sturdy, elected to teach me some extracurricular biochemistry, giving me one-on-one tutorials on glycolysis and the TCA cycle. These early biochemistry lessons turned out to be invaluable because I was able to regurgitate them to answer a question in the University of Cambridge scholarship exam in the autumn of 1960. As a result, I was lucky enough to be awarded an Exhibition at Gonville and Caius College, the college where my father had studied for a medical degree during World War II. When I arrived in Cambridge in October 1962 to read natural sciences (see Figure 1), it was a natural choice to take biochemistry as one of my three required first-year courses. The Part I biochemistry course was taught by a series of excellent lecturers, including Philip Randle (a prominent diabetes researcher who described the Randle Cycle), Brian Chappell (who discovered mitochondrial transporters) and Asher Korner (a pioneer of cell free systems to study protein synthesis). It quickly became clear that biochemistry was an exciting subject, and Brian Chappell, my biochemistry supervisor at Caius, made supervisions a lot of fun. I also took Part I courses in invertebrate zoology and, importantly, organic chemistry, which gave me insights into how the metabolites we were learning about in biochemistry worked as chemicals.

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