Showing posts with label Monet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monet. Show all posts

Sunday, July 5, 2015

French thinking -isms

Jean-Paul Sartre and 
Simone de Beauvoir
Richard and Philippe discuss French abstract thinking…

Richard: We French appreciate thinkers.

Philippe: Look at all the –isms we’ve invented.

Richard: Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism.

Claude Levi-Strauss
Philippe: Claude Levi-Strauss and structuralism.

Richard: Jacques Derrida and deconstructionism.

Philippe: Not to mention Simone de Beauvoir and feminism.

Jacques Derrida
Richard: But would you include a painter? Like Claude Monet and impressionism?

Philippe: Hmm, is painting on the same level as abstract verbal concepts?
___________
Voice-over
Two philosophers, an anthropologist and a sociologist revered by the French. Perhaps in other countries great thinkers are not always valued as highly.

Match the –ism with the definition…

For example…
1. impressionism         a. style of painting in which color captures light
                                           and expresses feeling
1a is correct
______________________________________________________
2. existentialism           b. women should be treated as 
                                            intellectual equals to men

3. structuralism             c. writing does not have just one meaning, 
                                            it depends on the reader

4. deconstructionism    d. people are free but responsible
                                             for their actions

5. feminism                    e. elements are understood in relation 
                                             to a larger system
...

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Monet dines with friends

Giverny. A restaurant. Late 1891.

Money: And then he told me, “Waterlily has two “l”s, not three."

Gustav: Spelling isn’t everything. The best speller in my class at school never became anything worthwhile, remained inconsequential until he died.

Pierre: Shakespeare spelled his name half a dozen different ways.

Waiter: If I could add, in a hundred years from now, there will be a man called Berners-Lee who invents something greater than Gutenberg, and he will be a bad speller.

Money: Ah, relief. Spelling isn’t everything in life.

________

Voiceover

There may be a day coming when SMSers shatter language consistency by insisting on their ideolectal spelling variants and we are suddenly back in the Elizabethan age. Could the claim that good spellers are the bean counters of language be on the money?

...