Summer Brief

For the summer brief, we were asked to choose three authors from a list to do some initial research, which then we will choose one to go further with.

Franz Kafka

• He was born in Prague 3rd July 1883.
• He wrote novels in German
• Most of his works, such as 'Die Verwanlung" ('The Metamorphosis"), "Der Process" ("The Trial") and "Das Schloss" ("The Castle"), are filled with the archetypes and themes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent-child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy and mystical transformations.
• He trained as a lawyer
• He was employed in an insurance company
• He had a complicated relationship with his father, which influenced his writing.
• He finished none of his full length novels and burned around 90% of his work
• His works inspired the term "Kafkaesque" i.e. instances in which bureaucracies overpower people.

William Burroughs

• He was born on Febuary 5th 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri
• He was a novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter and spoken word performer.
• He was a major modernist author
• He was considered as "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th Century".
• He wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
• 1932 - he left home to study English at Harvard and then anthropology in Vienna.
• After he was turned down by the office of strategic services and the Navy in 1942 to serve in WWII, he picked up a drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life.
• Most of his works are semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict.
• He accidentally killed his wife Joan Vollmer and was convicted of manslaughter
• 1983 - elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.
• "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius" - Norman Mailer.

Oliver Sacks

• He was a physician
• He was a professor of neurology at NYU school of medicine
• He was best known for:"The man who mistook his wife for a hat", "Musicophilia:Tales of music and the brain", "An anthropologist on Mars" and "Awakenings"
• Awakenings, a book about patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century. Inspired the 1990 Academy Award nominated film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
• He was born in 1933 in London
• He was from a family of physicians and scientists
• His mother was a surgeon and his father a GP
• He got his degree at Oxford
• Residences and fellowship work at Mt. Zion hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA
• In 1965, he moved to New York, where he was a practicing neurologist and author until his death in 2015.
• From 2007 to 2012, he served as a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Centre and he was also designated the University's first Columbia University Artist.
• In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx
• He encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of which had spent many years, even decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues. he recognised these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that swept the world from 1916-1927 and treated them with L-Dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. - 'Awakenings"
• Best known for "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" and "An Anthropologist on Mars" in which he describes real patients struggling to live with conditions from tourettes, autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy,phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation and alzeimas disease.
• He investigated the world of deaf people and sign language in "Seeing Voices"
• Also a rare community of colourblind people in "The Island of the Colourblind"
• He wrote about his experiences as a doctor in "Migraine"
• He Worte of his experiences as a patient in "A leg to stand on"
• He wrote about music and music therapy in his best-seller "Musicophillia:Tales of music and the brain"
• He chronicled his own experience with ocular melanoma and examined the visual brain in his books "The Mind's Eye" and "Hallucinations"
• His works have been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.
• He regularly appears in the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books
• Referred as "the poet laureate of medicine" by the New York Times.
• In 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockerfeller Universty, which recognises the scientist as a poet.
• He was an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• He held honory degrees from many universities including, Oxford, The Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts and the Catholic University of Peru.

"If a man lost a leg or an eye, he knows he's lost a leg or an eye, but if he has lost a self - himself- he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it" 

- Oliver Sacks ("The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat")

"My religion is nature, Thats what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me"

 - Oliver Sacks

"In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life." 

- Oliver Sacks

"At 11, i could say "I am Sodium" (element 11), and now I'm 79, I am gold." 

- Oliver Sacks

Motifs

1. Music/music notes/ instruments
2. brain/left hemisphere/ right hemisphere
3. levels (spirit levels)
4. hats
5. patients
6. doctors
7. medicine
8. drugs
9. mirrors
10. body parts/anatomy/limbs
11. science/periodic tables

Characters

1. Dr. P
2. Jimmie G
3. Christina
4. Madeleine J
5. Mr. Macgregor

Out of the three authors i chose to do some initial research on, i have decided to look further into Oliver Sacks and his works. Although i found both Franz Kafka and William Burroughs interesting, i really enjoy Oliver Sacks' style of writing and his case studies are very weird and intriguing, and spark a lot of ideas when I'm reading it. I have also heard about him before from people I know, and have been advised to read his books.