JANE AUSTEN'S CLASSIC NOVELS vs FILM DIRECTORS, JANE JACOBS vs PETER TAYLOR AND JULIA CHILD vs JULIE POWELL

Department of Geography, Loughborough University is sharing a same Martin Hall Building with English and Drama Department. Once in awhile I could listened their students training in acting class or classic movie review. 3 weeks before Christmas, English and Drama Department organised their open day. I read their postgraduate research on English Classic Novels such as Romeo and Juliet, Castle Rackrent,Nightmare Abbey, The Last of the Mohicans etc. I wondered how these novel authors have a such brilliant ideas to write an amazing story that can be shared and heritage to British young generation.

In my 3 months attachment with Loughborough University, Prof Dr Peter Taylor has taught me how to appreciate and understand the British famous writers and their established publication. Prof Dr Peter Taylor mentioned that their publications may be indirectly or directly generate the ideas to us how to deeper our research or may be we become their followers or believers. Later I was discovered that a few greatest writers in the world has changed people daily live or how their thinking about the world today. Here are what did I discover, how famous veteran authors can influence the famous people in world or may be we as normal human being.

JANE AUSTEN'S CLASSIC NOVELS vs FAMOUS FILM DIRECTORS

Last week I watched a movie 'Becoming Jane' directed by Julian Jarrold at Astro channel 411. A story is about an English novelist Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) whose works of romantic fiction set among the gentry have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature. The movie so interesting and the cinema photography is so beautiful. Amongst scholars and critics, Austen's realism and biting social commentary have cemented her historical importance as a writer. The classics of Jane Austen, and adapt them to the big screen as such Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion,Northanger Abbey,Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice.

The films offer spectacular views into the lives of her greatest heroines--punctuated by the vibrance of costume and the eloquence of music and language. The best film directors in world such Simon Langton (Pride and Prejudice),Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park), Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility),Roger Michell (Persuasion) and Douglas McGrath (Emma) have successfully adapted the Austen's book to movie.. By the 1940s, Austen had become widely accepted in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored many aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical. In popular culture, a Janeite fan culture has developed, centered on Austen's life, her works, and the various film and television adaptations of them.

JANE JACOBS vs PETER TAYLOR

When I was in Loughborough University, Prof Dr Peter Taylor has introduced me to Janes Jacobs (1916-2006). He asked me to read and review on her book - The Economy of Cities. Prof Dr Peter Taylor said that her book is related to my research. I found that Jacobs try to explain how capitalists strive for efficiency to beat the competition and make high profits. Well yes and no. It depends what kind of work is being discussed. With production work, what Jacobs calls ‘old work’, the work can be done by any firm willing to invest in the necessary human and physical capital. Here efficiency will mark out the winners. But much important for economic life, and for Jacobs it is the defining feature of cities, is new work.

Janes Jacobs was an extraordinarily insightful writer who anticipated many of the themes that have become foundations for contemporary social analysis – complex adaptive systems, emergence, social capital and social networks, just to name a few. Her Death and Life of Great American Cities is regarded as one of the most influential books published in the 20th century. It was the first of several books in which she developed a vision of the economy as a complex, adaptive system, driven by the cumulative efforts of mostly ordinary people whose creativity flourishes in the free air of cities. (Other books include The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1985), and The Nature of Economies (2000), as well as an article in the prestigious American Economic Review (September 1969).) For Jacobs, population density plus diversity in skills and tastes generates, without too much fuss, dynamic economic development and entrepreneurial discovery. With that vision came a withering critique of intervention by all levels of government and in nearly all its forms—from urban renewal and zoning to price controls and monetary policy. She argued that these undermine the civic basis of economic and cultural creativity.

Systems of Survival is Taylor's favourite book and within it the chapter on ‘Trading, taking and monstrous hybrids’ was the particular eye-opener for him. A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (Jacobs 1992) is considered by Jacobs (1997, 161) to be her ‘most serious book’. She argues that there are just two basic ways of making a living: ‘taking’ from environment and society (hunting, raiding, governing, protecting) and ‘making’ using environment and society (trading, producing). These are reproduced through two contrary moral syndromes: the guardian (heroic virtues such as shunning trading) and commercial (bourgeois traits such as shunning force) respectively. Although seemingly a departure from past work, in fact it is her way of understanding the necessary conditions for both reproduction of city economies, and the planners and national government economic regulators that put the former at risk.Not widely appreciated, it has been used in public policy and in corruption studies. He has found it indispensable for exploring the relations between cities and states.Now I understand why Prof Dr Peter Taylor's book or articles so influenced by Jane Jacobs ideas.

JULIA CHILD vs JULIE POWELL

My flight back to Malaysia (MH003) on 1 Jan 2010, I watched a movie Julie & Julia is a 2009 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Nora Ephron. I found that the movies is so interesting and Meryl Streep played Julia Child character so wonderful. No wonder she been nominated for 15 times in Academy Awards. She is the best actress in the world and my forever idol. The film depicts events in the life of chef Julia Child (August 15, 1912 - August 13, 2004) in the early years in her culinary career, contrasting her life with Julie Powell, who aspires to cook all 524 recipes from Child's cookbook during a single year, a challenge she described on her popular blog that would make her a published author.Julia Child was an American chef, author, and television personality. She introduced French cuisine and cooking techniques to the American mainstream through her many cookbooks and television programs, notably The French Chef which premiered in 1963. Her best-known cookbook is Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961.

Meanwhile, Julie Powell (born 20 April 1973) is an American author known for the book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, Tiny Apartment Kitchen.While working for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in August 2002, Powell began the Julie/Julia Project, a web log (blog) chronicling her attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The blog quickly gained a large following, and Powell signed a book deal with Little, Brown and Company. The resulting book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, Tiny Apartment Kitchen, was published in 2005. The paperback edition was retitled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.Powell's second book, Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, which details an affair she had after the first book's publication, as well as her experiences learning the butcher trade, was published November 30, 2009.

For me, from the above this will motivate me to keep continue complete my PhD research because I have only 1 year to finish m writing. Wish me luck.