Literature | Boomers Daily

ABOUT THE MOTION: This House Prefers Reading Oscar Wilde to George Orwell Do we prefer satire or comedy? Do we take refuge in the serious or the frivolous? Do we understand the importance of being earnest or would we rather be in room 101? These two authors demonstrate well two powerful traditions in British literature, the comic and the satirical. They both of course share in each other’s art. Some would argue that during our present global crises we should look to Orwell more than ever, others would reach for the escapism of Oscar Wilde. In a new enterprise for the Cambridge Union, we are beginning our cultural debates – and this is our first. At least for a while.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER (Closing for the Proposition) Will Self is the author of 25 books, some of which have been translated into 25 languages. His Dorian: An Imitation is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray set during the AIDS crisis. He holds the Chair in Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, and lives in South London.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER (Closing for the Abstention) Professor Angie Hobbs graduated in Classics and then a Ph.D. in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. After a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, she moved to the Philosophy Department at the University of Warwick. She was a judge of the Man Booker International Prize 2019 and is on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council 2018-9 for Values, Ethics and Innovation

Albert Camus’ lyrical essay… where he found In the midst of winter, there was, within himself, an invincible summer.

Excerpt from “Return To Tipasa” by Alber Camus

You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and you now inhabit a foreign land.

–Medea

For five days rain had been falling ceaselessly on Algiers and had finally wet the sea itself. From an apparently inexhaustible sky, constant downpours, viscous in their density, streamed down upon the gulf. Gray and soft as a huge sponge, the sea rose slowly in the ill-defined bay. But the surface of the water seemed almost motionless under the steady rain. Only now and then a barely perceptible swelling motion would raise above the sea’s surface a vague puff of smoke that would come to dock in the harbor, under an arc of wet boulevards. The city itself, all its white walls dripping, gave off a different steam that went out to meet the first steam. Whichever way you turned, you seemed to be breathing water, to be drinking the air.