Samuel Beckett

Vladimir is one of the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The "optimist" of Godot, he represents the intellectual side of the two main characters . One explanation of this intellectualism is that he was once a philosopher. This would explain his constant references and... his attempts to engage Estragon in philosophical/religious debate. Vladimir is deeply concerned with appearances, and goes to great lengths to make sure Estragon behaves so that his own dignity is preserved. He is something of a pack rat: he carries all the food the tramps have , and has other "miscellaneous" junk in various pockets. Another important prop is his bowler hat. He claims that it "hurts" him, and is eventually driven to appropriate Lucky's. After long periods of thought he fiddles with it and plays with the brim.
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Estragon is one of the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. His name is the French word for tarragon. Estragon represents the impulsive, simplistic side of the two main characters, much in contrast to his companion Vladimir's careful intellectualism and verbosity. He cares... little for appearances, and is mostly concerned with eating and sleeping . Due to his pessimistic outlook on life, he has abandoned all hope of any alleviation from their suffering, and regards "Godot" suspiciously. This is perhaps because Estragon has far more to worry about. Of the two, Estragon suffers the most physically. He is kicked by Lucky, takes numerous pratfalls, and is beaten by a gang of thugs every night. He also has great difficulty with his boots. In the first act, they do not fit and cause him pain. At the end of the act, he leaves them on the side of the road in disgust. In the second act, he finds them in the same place, now mysteriously fitting him.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832 was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His... Faust has been called one of the greatest dramatic works of modern European literature. His other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sentimentalism , Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, his influential ideas on plant and animal morphology and homology were extended and developed by 19th century naturalists including Charles Darwin. He also served at length as the Privy Councilor of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar. In politics Goethe was conservative.
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Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu . It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. Proust was born in Auteuil at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the... Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
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Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, the founder of analytical psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and... symbolization. While he was a fully involved and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung considered individuation, a psychological process of integrating the opposites including the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining their relative autonomy, necessary for a person to become whole. Individuation is the central concept of analytical psychology. Many psychological concepts were first proposed by Jung, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. Popular psychometric instruments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator , have been principally developed from Jung's theories.
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Giovanni Battista Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is Scienza Nuova , often published in English as New Science. Vico is a precursor of systemic and... complexity thinking, as opposed to Cartesian analysis and other kinds of reductionism. He is also well known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum , a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the term is not found in his text . While Vico was not, strictly speaking, a historicist, interest in him has often been driven by historicists . Born to a bookseller and the daughter of a carriage maker in Naples, Italy, Vico attended a series of grammar schools, but ill-health and dissatisfaction with Jesuit scholasticism led to home schooling.
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