George Derwent Thomson
George Derwent Thomson (Irish Seóirse Mac Tomáis, * Dulwich, London 1903; † 3 February 1987 in Birmingham ) was an English classical scholar, Marxist literary critic and Keltologe.
Classical studies
Thomson studied the classical languages at King 's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a degree first class honors in Classical tripos, and then won a scholarship at Trinity College, Dublin. There he worked on his first book Greek Lyric Metre and began in the early 1920s, the Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí ) to visit. He was a lecturer and then professor of Greek at the National University of Ireland, Galway ( NUI Galway).
In 1934 he moved back to England, where he returned to the King's College to teach Greek. He became in 1936 a professor at the University of Birmingham and joined in the same year, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Thomson provided the first Marxist interpretation of Greek drama. His works Aeschylus and Athens and Marxism and Poetry also attracted international attention. In the latter he defended the thesis of a link from work songs and poetry; the pre-industrial songs are, however, associated with rituals.
Thomson exercised an important influence on Alfred Sohn -Rethel and his thesis of the emergence of Western thought in ancient Greece by the introduction of coinage.
Connections to Blasket
The first time he visited the Na Blascaodaí off the Irish west coast in 1923. " Mac Tomáis ", under which name he quickly became known for the islanders, only rudimentary Irish -hour had received na Gaeilge in London with a branch association of Conradh before he had gone to Cambridge. When he arrived on the island, he plunged all the language. After six weeks of going around and talking with Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and other Mac Tomáis could speak the language almost completely liquid.
He spent several years among the inhabitants of islands to explore their language, history and culture. He carried out a special study to nowadays extinct community in Ireland, where he still perceived elements of surviving cultural resonances of a society as it had existed prior to the development of private property as a means of production. Meanwhile he came to a masterful command of the Irish language.
He was involved in the publication of the memoirs of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, Fiche Bliain Ag Fás in 1933. The introduction to Ó Súilleabháin 's autobiography by EM Forster can also be attributed to Thomson.
When in 1931 he applied for the newly created post of lecturer of Greek at NUI Galway, he was able to apply Commission, in the words of Richard Roche by his flowing Blasketer impress Irish ( " astonished the interview board with a flow of Blasket Irish ").
Party politics
1951 agreed Thomson is the only member of the board of the British Communist Party against the Party program " The British Road to Socialism " ( "The British Road to Socialism " ) because he is " the dictatorship of the proletariat missed " ( "the dictatorship of the proletariat which missing " ).
The Chinese revolution of 1949 exerted a strong impression on him, and led to differences with the British Communist Party, of which he eventually removed. He dedicated himself to workers' education, in which he held, among other lectures for factory workers in the Birmingham factory of Austin Motor Company. Until the age he preferred and support the daily The Morning Star.
Thomson has also written two popular introductions to Marxism, which were published in the early seventies by the China Policy Study Group.
Thomson was married to Katherine Thomson. Both their daughter is the Neogräzistin and comparative literature Margaret Alexiou.
Works
- Greek Lyric Metre
- The first philosophers
- Early History of Greece and the Aegean
- Aeschylus and Athens ( Aeschylus and Athens)
- Marxism and Poetry, 1945
- From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: a study in revolutionary dialectics, China Policy Study Group, 1971
- Capitalism and After: the rise and fall of commodity production, China Policy Study Group, 1973