Showing posts with label English Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English Literature. Show all posts

Friday 2 April 2021

India in the Twentieth Century European Literature

 India in the Twentieth Century European Literature

a. Rudyard Kipling: Kim (1901)

b. E M Forster: A Passage to India (1924)

c. T S Eliot: The Waste Land (1918-22)

d. Herman Hesse: Siddhartha (1922)

e. Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)

f. H.G. Wells: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872-73)


Rudyard Kipling: Kim (1901)

Kipling’s ideal  of imperialism in India was that of a paternalistic, quasi-feudal imperial one. As “legitimate” and benevolent rulers, the British took a privileged position at the top of the social chain with a systematic mode of government . Kipling could have easily been influenced by the spreading ideal of social Darwinism, a societal spin on Darwin’s order of the natural world. For Kipling, hierarchy was natural and was determined by survival of the fittest. Imperialism could not be corrupt to Kipling, because social order is fated, therefore moral.

In Kim, it is obvious that Kipling did not see imperialism as any type of disruption, exploitation, or subjugation, but as economic development and moral enlightenment for India. In the novel, working as a spy for the British Empire and looking for spiritual harmony work side-by-side. British rule is never challenged; instead Kipling uses several minor characters strictly for the purpose of advocating British rule. Although Kipling shows a knowledge of a number of Indian languages and the capability of using many voices, there is no variety of viewpoint. All voices hold one style and one dominant point of view in favor of British imperialism. Kipling’s use of Indian words and phrases lacks any attempt to represent the their cultural specificity. 

(Gopen, Shina. 'Rudyard Kipling'. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/11/kipling-rudyard/)


E M Forster: A Passage to India (1924)
The story of A Passage to India hinges on a rape that never was. A white young woman accuses a charming Indian Muslim doctor of having assaulted her in a dark cave during a picnic, but at the trial of the accused a few weeks later, she goes to the witness box and says she cannot be sure and is withdrawing all charges.
Forster here boldly reverses many Raj stereotypes. The race-and-rape narrative had been common in English novels about India ever since the “Mutiny” of 1857 when several such incidents were believed to have happened. The trope of an oppressed ill-treated native raping a woman of the master race in a token act of revenge for the greater crime of the coloniser having raped his country had been inaugurated in English literature by Shakespeare in The Tempest (1611). (Trivedi, Harish. The rape that never was: Forster and ‘A Passage to India’)

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)

Herman Hesse: Siddhartha (1922)









H.G. Wells: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872-73)


Monday 22 June 2020

Is there a Technology in the English Literature Classroom?

Is there a Technology in the English Literature Classroom?

A Webinar talk:


Part 1: Presentation by Dilip Barad



Part 2: Question and Answer Session

Wednesday 6 May 2020

To His Coy Mistress - Implied Culture vs Historical Fact

Reading Epidemics in Literature

Introduction:

One of the ways of reading 'epidemics' in literature is also to read the 'absence' of epidemics in literature. It can be interesting to read the literature written during and aftermath of epidemics or pandemics. If there is literature which deals with death and yet does not use the metaphor of epidemic to represent death in the literature, it can be something worth questioning.

Questioning the Artistic Sensibility

It is true that the creative writers are not supposed to write the way we want to read. It is their freedom of choice. It is every artist's liberty to deal with subject matter in the way it suits their artistic sensibility. We do not question the poetic liberty or artistic sensibility when we raise this question. What we can try to see is that: who is that poet? That means, not an individual person but a voice of the cultural group or identity that is represented by the artistic voice. It is also to question how different people, in a given culture, at a given moment of time, in a given calamity or epidemic, react to the hardships. How do the people react to the very notion of 'death'?

Example

Here in a very suitable study of Andrew Marvell's poem 'To His Coy Mistress'. The poem is known for it expression of beautiful love-sentiments by a lover to his beloved.

The speaker of the poem starts by addressing a woman who has been slow to respond to his romantic advances. In the first stanza he describes how he would pay court to her if he were to be unencumbered by the constraints of a normal lifespan. He could spend centuries admiring each part of her body and her resistance to his advances (i.e., coyness) would not discourage him. In the second stanza, he laments how short human life is. Once life is over, the speaker contends, the opportunity to enjoy one another is gone, as no one embraces in death. In the last stanza, the speaker urges the woman to requite his efforts, and argues that in loving one another with passion they will both make the most of the brief time they have to live. (Wikipedia)

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.


       

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
       Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.  

Critical Reading of the Poem: Implied Culture vs Historical Fact

Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" tells the reader a good deal about the speaker of the poem, much of which is already clear from earlier comments in this volume, using traditional approaches. We know that the speaker is knowledgeable about poems and conventions of classic Greek and Roman literature, about other conventions of love poetry, such as the courtly love conventions of medieval Europe, and about Biblical passages. 

Indeed, if one accepts the close reading of Jules Brody, the speaker shows possible awareness of the Provencal amor de Iohn, neo-Petrarchan "complaints," Aquinas's concept of the
triple-leveled soul, Biblical echoes, a "Platonico-Christian corporeal economy" (59), and the convention of the blazon. The first stanza, says Brody, shows "its insistent, exaggerated literariness" (60). In the second stanza, Brody sees not only the conventional carpe diem theme from Horace but also echoes from Ovid, joined by other echoes from the Book of Common Prayer, from the Greek Anthology, and from "Renaissance vernacular and neo-Latin poets" (61,-64). Brody posits the "implied 1s3dg1//-3s distinct from the fictive lady-who would "be able to summon up a certain number of earlier or contemporaneous examples of this kind of love poem and who [could] be counted on, in short, to supply the models which Marvell may variously have been evoking, imitating, distorting, subverting or transcending" (64). (The concept of the "implied reader," we may note, bulks large in reader response criticism; see, for example, the work of Wolfgang Iser.) The speaker knows all of these things well enough to parody or at least to echo them, for in making his proposition to the coy lady, he hardly expects to be taken seriously in his detailing. He knows that he is echoing the conventions only in order to satirize them and to make light of the real proposal at hand. He knows that she knows, for she comes from the same cultural milieu that he does. In other words, the speaker-like Marvell-is a highly educated person, one who is well read, one whose natural flow of associated images moves lightly over details and allusions that reflect who he is, and he expects his hearer or reader to respond in a kind of harmonic vibration. He thinks in terms of precious stones, of exotic and distant places, of a milieu where eating, drinking, and making merry seem to be an achievable way of life. Beyond what we know of the speaker from his own words, we are justified in speculating that his coy lady is like the implied reader, equally well educated, and therefore knowledgeable of the conventions he uses in parody. He seems to assume that she understands the parodic nature of his comments, for by taking her in on the jests he appeals to her intellect, thus trying to throw her off guard against his very physical requests. After all, if the two of them can be on the same plane in their thoughts and allusions, their smiles and jests,
then perhaps they can shortly be together on a different-and literal-plane: literally bedded. Thus might appear to be the culture and the era of the speaker, his lady-and his implied reader. But what does he not show? As he selects these rich and multifarious allusions, what does he ignore from his culture? He clearly does not think of poverty, the demographics and socioeconomic details of which would show how fortunate his circumstances are. For example, it has been estimated that during this era at least one quarter of the European population was below the poverty line. Nor does the speaker think of disease as a daily reality that he might face. To be sure, in the second and especially in the third stanza he alludes to future death and dissolution. But wealth and leisure and sexual activity are his currency, his coin for present bliss. Worms and marble vaults and ashes are not present, hence not yet real. Now consider historical reality, a dimension that the poem ignores. Consider disease-real and present disease-what has been called the "chronic morbidity" of the population. Although the speaker thrusts disease and death into the future, we know that syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases were just as real a phenomenon in Marvell's day as in our era. What was the reality that the speaker chooses not to think about, as he pushes off death and the "vault" to some distant time? Similarly, one might turn to a different disease that was in some ways even more ominous, more wrenching, in its grasp of the mind and body of the general population. Move ahead a few years, beyond the probable time of composition of the poem in the early 1650s: move to 1.664-65. That was when the London populace was faced with an old horror, one that had ravaged Europe as early as A.D. 542.It did it again in its most thoroughgoing way in the middle of the fourteenth century (especially 1348), killing millions, perhaps 25 million in Europe alone. It was ready to strike again. It was, of course, a recurrence of the Black Death, in the Great Plague of London. From July to October, it killed some 68,000 persons/ and a total of 75,000 in the course of the epidemic. Had we world enough and time, we could present the details of the plague here, its physical manifestations, its rapid spread, the quickness of death: but the gruesome horrors are available elsewhere. For example, the curious can get a sense of the lived experience by reading Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an imaginative creation of what it was like. So disease was real in the middle of the seventeenth century. There needed no ghost to come from the world of the dead to tell Marvell's speaker about the real world. Perhaps the speaker and his lady-knew it after all. Maybe too well. Maybe that is why that real world is so thoroughly absent from the poem.

Want to make a similar critique of the literature of epidemic?

Well, here is a very recent poem written by UK Poet Laureate  Simon Armitage. Would you like to give it a try? Would you like to make a critiqu of this poem with reference to 'implied culture vs historical fact'?

Lockdown by Simon Armitage

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas
in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth
in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see
the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,
thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.
Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,
star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line
whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.
But slept again,
and dreamt this time
of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,
a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,
streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,
embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,
bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,
the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,
the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,
the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so.
References:
Brody, Jules. "The Resurrection of the Body: A New Reading of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress."' ELH 56, no. L (1,986): 53-80.
Guirin, Wilfred. et all. The Handbook of Critical Approached to Literature.
Marvell, Andrew. To His Coy Mistress

Wednesday 10 August 2016

Online Test: Renaissance Literature

Online Open Internet / Open Book Test on the Age of Renaissance




Read study material on this page to appear in this online test:




  • Points to Ponder:
    • Write comparative analysis of Chaucer, Spencer and Shakespeare as Poets
    • If you have seen any film on Elizabethan time / Shakespearean era, write a blog on the review of the film. You can have a look at the list of films worth watching:
    • Can you differentiate general characteristics of Renaissance literature with that of Reformation or Restoration or Neo-classical or Romantic or Victorian or Modern literature?
    • Write a blog on the review of any Hindi film adaptation of Shakespearean plays or Elizabethan era.

Saturday 12 March 2016

Literature: What, Why and How

What, Why and How of Studying Literature


1. 


As a part of student-reflection on learning, they are asked to add a page on their Digital Portfolio about:
  • What is Literature?
  • Why study Literature?
  • How does it make any difference?
To help students in this process of reflective learning, some useful blogs, videos, web-articles are shared here. As it is necessary to give line of thought or some starting points, so that students can realize what is expected, here are some resources:

  • What Literature is for?




Dilip Barad - an Online Session with Sem 4 Students on 'How to Write How Literature Shaped me?'


 

How to write 'Learning Outcome of Studying Literature'?: Dilip Barad


 

 Literature in the Digital Era (Scott Hartley's The Techie and the Fuzzy: Why the Liberal Arts will rule to Digital Era)

We can also ponder on the characters in literary texts in syllabus

Here are some noteworthy links:

     Websites:

You Tube Videos:

1.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neRyi3i3K20&feature=related (Importance of Literature)
2.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRvav7oyjTY (what is literature)
3.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-wv6DUKInE&NR=1 (Prof. Ron Wheeler)
4.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8UOMGQfuLk&feature=related (a day in the life of English literature student)

Books:

1.      Eagleton, Terry.  Literary Theory: An Introduction.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996.
2.      Hernadi, Paul. Ed.  What is Literature?  Bloomington & London, Indiana University Press, 1978.
3.      Wellek, René and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature.  Mitcham, Victoria: Penguin, 1963.
4.      Rees, R J. English Literature: An Introduction to the foreign readers. Macmillan. 1973.
5.      Scott James R.A. The Making Of Literature (1946).
6.      Hudson, William Henry. An Introduction to the study of Literature (1913)



Tuesday 6 October 2015

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria: Chapter 14


In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, S.T. Coleridge thrown his philosophical-critical insights on following issues. These issues are discussed in the below given presentation.
  • Two Cardinal Points of Poetry
  • Coleridge’s views towards Wordsworth’s poetic creed


  • Difference between Poem and Prose
  • Definition of Liegitimate Poem & Function of Poem
  • Difference between Poem and Poetry

After viewing this presentation, to check your understanding of Coleridge's views in Ch 14 of Biographia Literaria, take this online quiz.



Samuel Coleridge- Biographia Literaria Ch 14 from Dilip Barad


Online Quiz

Tasks

  • Write in your words the difference between poem and prose.
  • Write in your words the difference between poem and poetry.
  • Give illustrations to support your answer.




Wednesday 16 September 2015

Dryden's Essay: Of Dramatic Poesie: Short Video Lectures and Quiz

Short Video Lectures on 

Dryden's Essay Of Dramatick Poesie, 

Quiz and Tasks to 'Think and Write'

















1) Short Video Lecture on Dryden as Father of English Criticism, Neo-Classical Critic and definition of Play:


2) Short Video Lecture on Dryden as Critic & Title of the Essay:


3) SVL on Dryden's Definition of Play:


4) SVL on the comparative criticism of the Ancients, the Moderns and the French Playwrights:


5) SVL on the debate regarding appropriateness of rhyme and blank verse:


6) SVL on the controversy regarding the Rhymes lines vs the Blank Verse:


Presentations:

1) Sir Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetrie:

After viewing these videos and presentation, check your understanding about Dryden's Essay. 

Quiz: Dryden's Essay and Sidney's Apology

Tasks:

Please give your response as a COMMENT below this post:

1) Do you any difference between Aristotle's definition of Tragedy and Dryden's definition of Play?
2) If you are supposed to give your personal predilection, would you be on the side of the Ancient or the Modern? Please give reasons.
3) Do you think that the arguments presented in favour of the French plays and against English plays are appropriate? (Say for example, Death should not be performed as it is neither 'just' not 'liely' image, displaying duel fight with blunted swords, thousands of soldiers marching represented as five on stage, mingling of mirth and serious, multiple plots etc.)
4) What would be your preference so far as poetic or prosaic dialogues are concerned in the play? 

Sunday 23 August 2015

Worksheet: Dr. Faustus: A Play by Christopher Marlowe

(Draft of the post)
Doctor Faustus: Christopher Marlowe

Thinking activity :

1) The play directed by Matthew Dunster for Globe theatre ends with this scene (see the image of Lucifer). What does it signify?
Last Scene: Lucifer with wide wings
2) Is God present in the play? If yes, where and how? If No, why?
3) What reading and interpretation can be given to this image (see the image of Daedalus and Icarus) with reference to central theme of the play Dr. Faustus?
Father Daedalus and Son Icarus
4) How do you interpret this painting?

5) Read this article by Bhagat Singh. In light of the arguments made by Bhagat Singh in this article, can you re-write last monologue of Doctor Faustus?

6) Summarise articles discussed in the class:

You can take help of below given reading resources.


1) View presentation on contribution of Christopher Marlowe to English Drama:










Sunday 9 August 2015

Universal Human Laws in 'The Waste Land'

Universal Human Laws in the modern epic 'The Waste Land' by T.S. Eliot.

The connection between epic and myth is that of an egg and the chicken. Just as the famous riddle by Sphinx ("What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?"), whether the egg came first or the chicken is the riddle which puzzled many for centuries. Is myth the product of an epic or does epic sprout from the myth? The sphinx riddle was answered by Oedipus ("Human Being") and the 'egg-chicken' one by scientists ("Researchers found that the formation of egg shells relies on a protein found only in a chicken's ovaries. Therefore, an egg can exist only if it has been inside a chicken"). Similarly, we can say that myth pre-exist the epic. In fact, epic poet legitimizes myth as history or truth. The epic is the daughter of the mother, Myth/s. Thus, an epic can be studied as myth. The tools and theories to study myth can easily be applied to epic.  
Are myths / epic subtle codes that contain some universal truth? Are they a window on the deep recesses of a particular culture? Or are they just entertaining stories that people like to tell over and over? Functionalism explains human society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions, and institutions. A functionalist reading of myths/epic might extract the universal human laws.
Have a look at this presentation with various Universal Human Laws in 'The Waste Land'.


Universal Human Laws in The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot) from Dilip Barad

Task:
After studying these Universal Human Laws, would you like to give priority to the UHLs which you find more Universal than the other? Click this link to open an online form and give your priority: