It wasn't a Nightmare
1st Edition
Published on 20. January 2023
Book
100 pages
978-3-7369-7722-8 (ISBN)
Description
After 'Pleasures on the Periphery' (2022: Cuvillier), 'It wasn't a Nightmare' is the second collection of authentic and at times surreal observations of life and work in the provinces and also some of the capitals of Poland, Hungary, Finland, England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain and the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Following the snapshot-technique of Jack London, Laurie Lee and Christopher Isherwood, the vignette-like stories aim to reflect on the harshness and then again rare sudden beauty of life to be encountered in every corner of the world where human beings come together in very different contexts. In the background, the narrator keeps asking the question of what is the "truth" regarding the sociological mechanisms and driving forces in the fabric of these contexts.
As in the first volume, this book includes a number of original photographs from the narrator's own private collections.
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Dr. John Coates, geb. 1937, hat sein berufliches Leben der akademischen Lehre sowie dem Schreiben gewidmet, wobei er nebenberuflich auch als Jazzmusiker sehr aktiv war. Als Stipendiat hat er das Eton-College und das Trinity College, Cambridge, durchlaufen, wo er einen Abschluss in Klassischer Philologie und Jura erwarb. Anschließend arbeitete er mehrere Jahre als Anwalt in London. Nach längeren Aufenthalten in Polen entschied er sich für einen Berufswechsel und studierte Linguistik an der Universität Reading. Danach arbeitete er im Bereich Englisch als Fremdsprache im europäischen Ausland wie z.B. in Finnland (Universität Jyväskylä) und Ungarn (Universität Debrecen) sowie im Mittelmeerraum. Anfang der 1970er übernahm er eine Stelle an der Universität Göttingen, wo er in der Anglistik zum Thema "Pronunciation and Personality" promoviert wurde. Bis zu seinem schweren Schlaganfall im November 2021 dozierte er durchgängig am Seminar für Englische Philologie sowie seit 2010 am Juristischen Seminar. Er hat während seiner beruflichen Laufbahn v.a. Lehrbücher zur englischen Sprache und Artikel zu seinem Spezialgebiet Phonetik und Phonologie veröffentlicht.
Dr. John Coates, born in 1937, has devoted his life to teaching and writing and also largely to being a semi-professional jazz musician. After winning scholarships to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he worked as a lawyer in London for several years. Following extensive visits to Poland he decided to change careers and become a lecturer of English as a foreign language. He studied Linguistics at Reading and later on worked in several different European countries such as Finland (Jyväskylä University) and Hungary (Debrecen University) and the Mediterraneans. In the early 1970s he started working in Germany at Göttingen University, where he wrote a doctorate on "Pronunciation and Personality". He stayed in Göttingen for the rest of his working life teaching English and British Law until November 2021, when he suffered a severe stroke. He has published a series of books on Phonetics and English Language Teaching as well as several articles on his specialised fields of Phonetics and Phonology.